Overcoming Distractions by David A. Greenwood

Author:David A. Greenwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling

THE MAYOR’S RIGHT-HAND MAN

Daniel Arrigg Koh has two degrees from Harvard University, worked for Mayor Thomas Menino in Boston, interned for Senator Edward Kennedy, and now serves as the chief of staff for the current mayor of Boston. And he’s ADHD.

At fourteen years old, Daniel was not very worried about what a typical kid of that age was going through, such as getting a girlfriend, what high school would look like, and other age-appropriate concerns. He was concerned about how he could discipline himself to read a book. For his entire childhood he had trouble sitting still and reading. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t read,” says Daniel, “it was that I could not get myself to sit down and read.”

He often wondered whether he was just a procrastinator or if there was more to his inability to sit down and actually get through a book. When he was young, his parents always knew he was a bit hyperactive, but when Daniel was fourteen his mother, a doctor herself, read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about ADHD and put the pieces together. Daniel exhibited many of the symptoms or characteristics that were specified in the article. His mother asked him if he wanted to get tested for ADHD, and he agreed.

“It was a struggle, because once you are diagnosed, you have a rationale or reason for why some of these things are happening to you,” says Daniel. He points out that it’s not as easy as just beginning to take medication and expecting the rest of your life to fall into place. “You have to compensate for the penchant your brain has to want to hop to the next thing.” As a kid, this diagnosis required him to get up at the same time every day, as well as plan out his schedule methodically, and it also required having people around him who helped him stick to his routines and his schedule. His life after the diagnosis was very regimented, and to this day, David sticks to a regimen to keep on track.

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