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A comment on Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance. Parent comment

Re:Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest leve... by zozbot234 on Thursday January 22, 2026 @10:46PM (#46728163)
Hyperfocus is not about "focusing intensely on your job until you perform it at world-class level". The hyperfocus of ADHD is essentially random and driven by the very same inattentive "monkey mind" that's the defining feature of ADHD itself: it's not necessarily targeted to a productive task.

Those who face this issue can of course try to "gamify" their upcoming tasks to themselves in a way that will hopefully steer that focus in desirable directions, but that's not always easy. The monkey mind also resists ongoing habit formation, which is the tool most non-ADHD folks would generally resort to in order to effectively manage their overall schedule and just be more on-task.

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Re:Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest leve... by mjanx123 on Friday January 23, 2026 @12:55AM (#46728909)
Its not random. The neurodivergent brain lacks the ability to perceive (some aspects of) the virtual social reality as something real and to focus on that. In a startup, where the problems at hand are objectively real, the ADHD hyperfocus can excel. In a typical corporation, where the situation is the opposite, it struggles.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9541695/

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Re:Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest leve... by zozbot234 on Friday January 23, 2026 @03:18AM (#46729899)
It's obviously true that making outcomes more immediately tangible helps make them more appealing to the ADHD brain (that's a very clear kind of "gamification") but I'm not sure how that disagrees with what I said.
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Re:Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest leve... by Aurornis on Friday January 23, 2026 @01:52AM (#46729315)
> Hyperfocus is not about "focusing intensely on your job until you perform it at world-class level"

I was responding to the comment that compared the high performing people in this article to a case of ADHD.

I agree that the features of ADHD are not consistent with intense, directed focus on specific goals as discussed in the article.

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