What ADHD and AD&D Taught Me About Advertising
About creativity, mental health & working class guilt.
AD&D = The role playing game, not the insurance claim.
The pandemic made the world think differently about health.
For a lot of us, it meant mental health as well.
At the very first post-pandemic party I went to, people didn’t ask: “How are you doing?”
They asked:
“How was your Lockdown Breakdown?”
Mine wasn’t too bad.
In fact, it was quite life-changing.
But I was surprised to discover that the thing I had always called my “superpower” was actually a disorder.
Mostly because I knew f*ck all about ADHD.
What even is focus?
I really thought that ADHD just meant you couldn’t focus.
My superpower had always been the opposite — hyperfocus.
If I could find the right entry into a subject, I could lose myself in the stories, open a freeway into my brain and remember information on an emotional level.
When you can do that, the only thing you have to learn is to make anything interesting.
Sure, I would forget the world around me and lose myself in something so completely that I didn’t get off the bus, eat for a full day, or remembered to be a good boyfriend.
But those are just the sacrifices for being passionate about your work… Right?
Turns out that hyperfocus and hyperfixation are classic symptoms of ADHD.
Who knew?
Superpowers & Kryptonite — or Why I Should Have Known
I was a scrawny little nerd child.
I collected butterflies, loved detective stories, and was 8 when I let Dungeons & Dragons into my heart.
High IQ ADHD kids often become nerds simply because they fit the stereotype.
Now, when I say “high IQ” it can sound like I’m trying to brag.
But I promise you, I’m one of the dumbest smart people I know.
High IQ is simply good pattern recognition.
ADHD is a constant sensual overload that makes it hard for the brain to prioritise the information it receives.
It can make you a hypersensitive little professor.
I like to think of ADHD as being too curious. Everything is interesting — but sometimes it’s the wrong thing.
If your brain is letting in too much stuff, pattern recognition can be a way to sort it out in post.
For me, it was through fables and fairytales.
The structures of storytelling made it easier to know where to look.
And I could focus on boring things if I could understand the stories behind them.
In kindergarten, we played “Radio”.
I listened to my mom read from The Three Musketeers in the evening and the next day I would sit under a table with a box on it (unsurprisingly painted like a radio) and re-tell Dumas’ classic to the other little dumb-asses.
It was kind of a superpower.
Unfortunately, no one tells you why your superpower is kryptonite in the wrong situations.
And if you can’t turn off the radio once playtime is over?
Then you’re just a short weirdo raving about D’artagnan and Milady to a bunch of five-year-olds.
Alchemy in the Cauldron
I’m pretty sure that’s why I fell in love with Dungeons & Dragons.
In gaming, I got to tell stories with other misfits and outsiders who saw the world in ways that didn’t always fit IRL — but made magic happen where intricate rules, chance, and calculation sparked unlimited imagination.
Maybe it was the alienation from social rules that made us find community in the rules of gaming and storytelling.
In the moist basement of the gaming club — ours was called “Cauldron” — there was a group of people who found life equally overwhelming and offered access to fantasy worlds that made my imagination go nuts.
What’s not to love?
I think ADHD kids like Dungeons & Dragons for three reasons especially:
There are dungeons and dragons! Claws, fangs, and evolutionary danger signals all over! Scary stuff to wake you up, adrenaline and dopamine to activate hyperfocus. You don’t know it yet but those are your favorite drugs!
You get agency to fight the scary stuff. I was weirdly afraid of werewolves — but now I could be a 3rd level wizard and learn a magical rhyme to turn my words into lightning bolts and defeat my fears. I still think that’s awesome!
You get rules and structures that allow you to think and imagine as fast as you can without getting lost.
The last bit might also be why you find more people with ADHD in music, comedy, and advertising than in any other industry.
You get the creative, narrative, and social rules to both understand and challenge — so you can create something no one saw coming.
It might be why the best creatives are nerds at heart.
Be Best
The lulz of this slogan is a whole different essay.
If you grow up in a low resource tribe — let’s say a working-class town in Jutland, Denmark — and you’re both a little smart, somewhat creative, and pretty weird… It’s definitely better to be smart!
Because your parents knew someone who was weird but smart. Now he works at the bank or as a scientist. Not sure what kind, but it seems important.
And maybe they knew someone creative who succeeded — but she moved to the city and does something no one understands.
The curious eccentrics who stayed behind were people like my mom’s first boyfriend — a painter who drank himself to death before he was 50. Creative, wild, and too curious.
Creativity is unpredictable and if you’re unpredictable you’re a liability to the low-resource community.
There’s plenty of systemic reason to just be smart.
A Tale of Two Tribes
If you’re poor it’s better to be the other kind of “little professor”.
The ones Dr. Asperger called his little professors in the camps during WWII — who are now diagnosed with ASD.
Maybe there were some of those in the basement back in Cauldron as well.
There were certainly two tribes.
The one that loved the rules, charts, and mechanics of the games.
And my group who loved the stories they allowed us to tell.
None of us knew why, but we couldn’t quite get along.
I didn’t think about it until much later when I read Steve Silberman’s book “Neurotribes”.
In a way, it was like asking the Drama Club and the Physics Club to play nice among each other with no adults around.
In the privacy of my own mind, I call my old gaming group the ADHD clan.
We grew our hair long, listened to noisy music, and started smoking cigarettes.
Celebrated our otherness and thought we were rebels.
Coincidently nicotine releases dopamine to help the wandering mind focus.
A couple grew up to be creatives, one is an actual professor, and some are probably dead.
Members of the other clan became engineers, programmers, and chemists.
I can understand why worried parents and teachers can subconsciously nudge you towards the group with no “probably dead” in it.
Safer to be smart than creative.
Blessed Are the Meek
Back then I didn’t know why I couldn’t fit in the box.
It was the 1990s and you were either normal, crazy, or something you shouldn’t talk about.
But it was probably ADHD that made me leave the gaming club and join a punk band.
It was likely what made me run away from home at 17 to write poetry.
And almost certainly what made me half-ass university and suffer from depression because I couldn’t be the right kind of clever.
When I say I’m one of the dumbest smart people I know, I’m not kidding.
Neither so when I say that my Lockdown Breakdown was life-changing.
Because it was a breakthrough to realize I had spent 40 years on this planet systemically and subconsciously trying to live up to an autistic stereotype — not even knowing what ADHD was.
It was a gift to realize that I was not an analytical brain with a creative component — but a creative brain with an analytical component.
I already knew that I’m a human delusion controlled by monkey desires.
In the world after Kahneman, I have little pretense of free will.
I’m dumb, not stupid.
It felt like a breakthrough nonetheless.
If I’d been raised on American optimism I might say it was a blessing.
I am, however, a European pessimist.
And from Jutland.
I’ll unclench my fists and say the curse was lifted.
The Dark Side of Neurodiversity
I always called it my superpower and learned to move around the obstacles.
I thought my clever hacks to boring life tasks were just how anyone learns to be an adult.
You design the systems around you so you can work unhindered.
I don’t have one pair of nice eyeglasses.
I have 10 pairs of cheap glasses strategically placed around the house so I never have to waste a second finding them.
What? Do I need to wear them in a string around my neck? Like I have some sort of disability?
Yes.
That’s exactly what I need.
They usually end up in the same coat pocket anyway.
I always thought deadlines were brilliant because they stop you from aiming for perfection.
Two weeks to do one month of work?
A delightful challenge and instant hyperfocus!
But with no deadline, perfection is a horizon you can walk towards forever.
It’s poison to the ADHD mind and can turn hyperfocus into hyperfixation.
It’s probably why I’ve produced around 6,000,000 words for others — but never finished a manuscript of my own.
It’s probably why I like writing short-form over novels.
Or just this blog.
If you read last week’s post and thought: “Troels, starting a blog with a 3,800-word essay about music, advertising, and conceptual creativity — and announcing it a weekly occurrence — sets an insane bar (or is simply insane)” — then you were partly right.
Of course, there’ll be shorter posts.
But it gives me a perverse challenge.
And I get off on outside pressure to produce.
I wasted a lot of my life thinking that I lacked the discipline to be a real writer — or simply had nothing of substance to say.
Both might still be true.
But understanding my own mind helped me break out of negative work and life habits and get sh*t done.
No matter how you look at it, that’s pretty good.
Even if it came from a lockdown-breakdown-breakthrough at the ripe old age of 40.
The Fortunate & The Fatigued
Because I was one of the lucky ones.
Most of my friends from back home were outsiders and probably neurodiverse in one way or another.
Low resource communities build systemically from reductive laws of averages because inclusion is costly and risky.
Are you different? Go figure it out with the other weirdos.
Some of us joined bands, painted graffiti, or found similar creative outlets — where the outsider archetype was a strength, not a weakness.
It was an outlet — but not all of us made it out.
I have a childhood friend — let’s call him Dan — who only in his late 30s discovered that he has both ADHD and ASD.
He inspired me to figure out my own sh*t.
Dan is one of the best musicians I know and has a truly unique, creative mind.
We grew up in the same town — but he in a rougher part where too much curiosity was best beaten out of you.
Of course, it didn’t work.
He did two decades of drinking and drugs before someone told him why his neurology makes him a genius at certain things — but bad at following social norms born from expectations of averages.
His brother faced similar challenges and didn’t live past 30.
I often think about how their lives would’ve turned out if they had been born into the creative class. Maybe in Brooklyn or somewhere posh.
If someone had recognized talent over trouble and nurtured it.
Put them in a studio instead of detention.
Outsiders in Advertising
When I named this blog “An Outsider in Advertising” it was to tell the story of someone who took the long way around the sea before they realized where their talents could make a difference.
And the neurological outsider who took even longer to face their own eccentricities.
Because I hope I can always give voice to healthy outsider perspectives and call bullsh*t when it’s there.
Even if it took me a while to call my own.
If nothing else, I hope I can keep being too curious.
He’s a nerd too.
Rory Sutherland, advertising legend and self-professed missionary of behavioral science, reminds us that designing for disabilities benefits everyone — because we’re all less abled in most real-life situations.
When your two capable arms are full of groceries, you need the door handle more than the doorknob.
IKEA found much success in adopting this way of thinking.
And it should resonate with anyone whose neurological or physical shape doesn’t always fit with systemic expectations or average norms of ideal consumers.
Some of the best UX designers I know have ADHD.
Because all the little details — that most people find too unimportant to notice — can disrupt a million distracted consumers’ journey to the product and through the experience.
Much like some of the best Art Directors I know have dyslexia.
You probably know someone too.
And if you’ve read more than 2,000 words in this essay — and skipped some parts and lost your mind and let it wander — maybe you’re that someone.
Get Help
I’d like to end on a high note, talk about superpowers and give you an emotional payoff to close.
Something about good advertising always being the most beautiful truth and the willingness to stand by it — so here’s mine.
Or maybe just an old Apple ad. Here’s to the Outsiders!
There’s your payoff.
But I can’t leave you like that.
Undiagnosed neurodiversity is a serious subject and I’m just some dude on the internet.
I say I was lucky.
But I did soooo many dumb things.
Some of them taught me something and now I’m writing a blog about it.
Not everyone from back home got to do so:
To live and learn.
Undiagnosed disorders can be seriously disruptive.
Life expectancy is significantly lower if left undiagnosed.
Figuring out your sh*t won’t make you any less you.
Stop reading this blog and start with these resources:
