I am not good with learning.

I have ADHD, and was diagnosed as a small child. The focus of said diagnosis has been the reason I fail classes, the reason I lose interest in projects, and the reason I can’t keep up good relationships: Executive Functioning.

If you struggle with this specific flavor of ADHD, you know how hard it is to do anything worthwhile when it provides no direct reward. You also know how hard it is to force yourself to learn. Both of these make anything that requires a learning curve extremely difficult to work on, much less start. I haven’t found a way to get rid of this, nor a way to make it easier to get past the initial roadblock. However, I can give some tips and advice on how to make the journey more bearable!

step 1. Don’t overthink.

I know how hard this is to do, and I will say, I had to practice this ad nauseum, but think of it like getting a shot. You shouldn’t wait thirty minutes to do it, needle in hand, overthinking the feeling of it going in. That’s how you scare yourself. No, you get it done. You find the injection point, stab it in, and push the plunger until you’re done. If you ask questions at the start, you’ll never get to the end. Some projects are like that. You have the money? You have the time? go ahead and start. That’s how I ended up installing Arch right before college finals, and finishing my BT-7472 AI the night before a calculus final. Both of which I succeeded in, and used as motivators to get the work done.

Just don’t ask for my grades on those finals.

step 2. give yourself small goals.

I remember a point made by one of the many “how to do ___ with ADHD” books given to me by my parents: “To clean a room, start by sectioning it off into small parts. A messy side of the desk, a windowsill with dust and plants, the floor under your desk, just give yourself a place to start and work from there.” use a clean area as a “sorting” pile, and understand that to keep stuff, you must get rid of other items to make way for the stuff you want to keep. Just move slow, and remember to step away if it’s overwhelming.

Step 3. Create simple comparisons.

Understanding a wide range of concepts is hard for the ADHD brain. To help combat this, I started creating comparisons of topics I was learning to topics I knew by heart. I found out that doing this also increases the likelihood of said topic being adhered to the snowball of knowledge in my mind. To give a example, I found it easy to compare