TLDR: diagnosed with ADHD at 51, after decades of suspecting it myself. This is the story of what that's actually like day to day, why it pushed me toward being a generalist instead of a specialist, and why I've stopped treating that as a failure. If you just want the professional payoff, it's in the last section.
I was diagnosed with ADHD two years ago, at 51. I’m writing this at 53, which should tell you something about how long it took me to actually sit down and write it.
I didn’t get diagnosed because I finally noticed something was wrong; I suspected ever since ADHD started being discussed openly that I had it. I got diagnosed because at some point I decided that noticing wasn’t the same as knowing, and if I was going to build my working life around this trait, I wanted a qualified psychiatrist to actually confirm it rather than me diagnosing myself off the back of an online screening questionnaire.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Self-recognition is usually right, in my experience and from what I hear from other adults who go through this. The pattern-matching part of noticing “this describes me” is not the hard part. The hard part, and the useful part, is what a formal assessment gives you that self-diagnosis can’t: certainty you can actually build on, and access to medication if you decide you want it as one tool among several. I do, sometimes. Not daily, not as a personality transplant, but situationally, month-end bookkeeping being the reliable example I always reach for. There is no earthly reason my brain finds reconciling invoices harder than untangling a genuinely difficult problem, which is basically my raison d’être, and yet here we are. Medication helps on the days that particular mismatch needs help.
What the trait actually looks like, thirty-plus years in
I’m not going to pretend this is all upside dressed up as a personality quirk, because that does a disservice to anyone reading this who’s tired of ADHD being marketed as a secret superpower with none of the difficult bits mentioned.
The difficult bits are real. Tasks that are boring but important, the invoicing, the admin, the licence renewal that’s been sitting in an email for three weeks, get avoided in a way that has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with a brain that treats “important but uninteresting” as barely worth the fuel. Multi-step tasks with no obvious payoff until the very end are hard to start and harder to finish. And there’s a particular flavour of shame that comes from knowing exactly what you should be doing, wanting to do it, and still not doing it, that took me a long time to stop internalising as a character flaw.
The coping mechanisms accumulate over decades whether you’ve got a name for what you’re coping with or not. External structure where my own doesn’t hold: calendars, reminders, breaking big vague tasks into small concrete ones I can actually start. Knowing which of my own moods are “just get started and it’ll click” versus “genuinely not today, don’t fight it.” None of that came from a diagnosis. The diagnosis just explained why I’d needed to build all of it in the first place.
And then there’s the other side, which is where this stops being a list of coping strategies and starts being relevant to why you’re reading this on an IT professional’s website rather than a mental health blog. I chase the next interesting thing, constantly. I see the big picture before I see the detail. I generate ideas at a rate that occasionally outpaces my ability to execute on all of them. And when something is either genuinely fascinating or the deadline is real and close, I can hyperfocus in a way that gets a disproportionate amount done in a short window, the flip side of the same trait that makes me useless at starting the boring thing three weeks before it’s due.
Why that produces a generalist, not a specialist
Twenty-five years in IT, and I’ve never wanted to go deep and narrow in any one direction. Plenty of very good, very successful IT people build a career on exactly that, ten years becoming the best in the world at one specific thing. I looked at that path more than once and knew, with total certainty, that it would slowly kill something in me. Not because depth is bad. Because staying interested in one narrow thing for a decade is exactly the kind of task my brain treats as “important but uninteresting” once the initial novelty wears off, and I’d have been fighting my own wiring the entire way.
My wife of thirty years is a specialist. She’s excellent at one thing, and she’s the best in her game at it. My brother-in-law is the same, top of his field. I could never be either of those people, but the world is built to expect specialists, or at least that’s how it felt for years, and against that expectation (real or imagined) I spent a long time quietly filing myself under F for failure. Twenty-five-plus years into a career, and where had it got me? Not the best in a field. Not a six-figure salary at the top of a large company. Just someone working for himself in a niche, doing interesting things, keeping his clients happy, trusting he’d always give them the best advice, no BS, and fantastic value for money. It took me a long time to see that as the actual result rather than the consolation prize. I spent 25 years measuring myself against a definition of success I now think was wrong for me, and it hurt.
I’ve made peace with it now. I’ll never specialise, and I’ll always be good at a lot of different things instead. My wife still rolls her eyes at me sometimes: “well, of course you’re excellent at that thing you just started.”
Generalising isn’t a consolation prize for not being able to specialise. It’s the actual shape of how this brain works well. New problem, new domain, new interesting puzzle, every single week, sometimes every single day. A bespoke Power Automate flow one morning, an ISO 27001 control gap the next afternoon, a stalled cloud app deployment that’s sat there waiting for someone to actually make it go live, the day after that. That’s not scattered. That’s the exact operating conditions this trait actually thrives under.
How this actually helps the people I work for
I’ll keep this part short, because the story above is the evidence, not a preamble to it.
Pattern recognition across domains that specialists often don’t cross is a direct product of never staying in one lane long enough to forget what the other lanes look like. Spotting that a client’s problem doesn’t need the expensive enterprise platform, it needs a small, right-sized thing built from parts most consultants wouldn’t think to combine, that’s the generalist’s move, not the specialist’s. Hyperfocus, the same trait that makes me useless at starting my own admin early, means that when I’m in the middle of solving something genuinely knotty for a client, I don’t want to stop until it’s actually solved. And a lower tolerance for boring, bloated process than most people have is, frankly, why “the smallest thing that solves it” isn’t just a pricing philosophy on this site. It’s the only way I’ve ever been able to work.
I’m not telling you this so you’ll feel sorry for me, or so you’ll be impressed. I’m telling you because if you’re going to trust someone with your systems, you might as well know what’s actually driving how they think.