In the space of just a few decades, ADHD has gone from being an occasional and little-understood diagnosis to one that is widely talked about in society. There is still a lot we don’t know about the condition, but understanding has improved to a point where the layperson can generally speak about it with a certain amount of confidence. The reasons for this are many and diverse, but among them is a level of awareness that has been gained through household-name celebrities revealing their own diagnoses.
ADHD is a condition that presents challenges for those who experience it. The existence of famous, successful people with a diagnosis does not mean this is not the case. However, where once we might have considered ADHD to be a bar to high achievement, the names we are going to talk about here prove that this needn’t be the case. It’s entirely possible to live with ADHD and thrive, reaching the top of your field regardless of the difficulties it can cause. In some cases, it may even work in your favor.
Famous Business People with ADHD
ADHD has always been with us but has only truly been recognized much more recently than many people realize. It is only since the beginning of the 1980s that the term “Attention Deficit Disorder” has been used, and the hyperactivity element was recognized with the change from ADD to ADHD in 1987. Therefore, there are almost certainly a lot of well-known names who lived their lives with the condition without being diagnosed – but there are definitely some huge names in the business world who have ADHD and have thrived.
Sir Richard Branson
The founder of Virgin, who has achieved an exceptional level through his businesses in the worlds of music, telecommunications, and travel to name just a few, was diagnosed as dyslexic early on. It is only much more recently that he has spoken about his experiences with ADHD, which he has identified as the driver behind his innate resourcefulness, insight, and originality.
Branson was told by his high school principal that he would either end up in prison or as a millionaire. In the end, the principal ended up only being wrong in the sense that he underestimated the budding entrepreneur. His net worth at the time of writing stands at around $ 3 billion, and he was knighted in 2020 for his services to business and humanitarian causes.
Bill Gates
As the co-founder of Microsoft, Gates has a personal fortune which is estimated at $ 92 billion and a long history of charitable good works. That’s not bad for someone who states that he has always had difficulty learning and concentrating. While he has not made public an ADHD diagnosis, he has acknowledged having the condition and dropped out of Harvard because of the symptoms he experienced. It ended well enough for him, though, as he was then in a position to start Microsoft.
Even before his time at Harvard, though, Gates was showing signs of the impulsiveness that characterizes the condition, contacting computer companies to explain that he was working on software using their platforms. This was a lie, as he did not own and could not afford the hardware, but he did understand it innately and his obvious intelligence gained him a foot in the door. Since then, his ambition has only grown in scale, and in 2020 he stepped back from front-line duty at Microsoft to focus on initiatives to fight climate change and world hunger.
Ingvar Kamprad
Even if you don’t know the name, the chances are that Ingvar Kamprad has a place in your home. If you’re drawing a blank, here are some further clues. His business gained its name from his initials, along with Elmtaryd, the farm where he grew up, and his local village of Agunnaryd. If we then tell you that those locations are in Sweden, you’ve probably already clocked that Ingvar Kamprad was the father of IKEA, the world’s largest furniture retailer.
If you’ve ever been inside a branch of IKEA or assembled one of their famous Billy bookcases, you’ll know that sequence and structure are a huge part of the IKEA story. That’s not a coincidence. Kamprad recognized the challenges of an inattentive mind and worked on creating a world where such a structure was built. If there hadn’t been ADHD, there would never have been IKEA, which is pretty amazing when you think about it.
People with ADHD need to have a creative approach to problem-solving because the world wasn’t built to fit us. Often, this leads to ingenious innovation as the results of this problem-solving work just as well for neurotypical people, too.
Famous Scientists and Innovators with ADHD
Dr. Edward Hallowell
Edward Hallowell is on this list because it would be hard to talk in any depth about ADHD without talking about him. Not only has he been treating the condition in patients since 1981, but Dr. Hallowell, himself, is someone who lives with the condition. With the hyperfocus that is familiar to anyone who has experience with ADHD, his study has looked at how the condition can affect those who have it, particularly those who live undiagnosed and without treatment.
Dr. Hallowell in fact is not a fan of the term “ADHD”, as he argues that people with the condition do not have a deficit of attention, but conversely have too much of it. He famously once compared the ADHD brain to a vehicle with “the engine of a Ferrari but the brakes of a bicycle”. His writings on the subject, as well as broader psychological matters, have been influential on the way the human mind is understood, and he has also written and spoken widely on the experiences of spouses and family members of people with ADHD.
Thomas Edison
Given its heritability and effects on human focus, ADHD has been referred to as “the Edison gene”. There is no way of saying for sure that Thomas Edison had the condition – he died in 1931, long before the first diagnoses took place. However, Edison’s endless resourcefulness and hunger to find simple solutions to ever-present problems – to which we owe the modern lightbulb and moving picture cameras, among other things – is widely understood to have sprung from his own struggles with attentiveness.
Indeed, it is a matter of record that Samuel Ogden Edison, Thomas’ father, was a skilled artisan who worked his way through a number of jobs, struggling to ever settle in one. His tendency in this regard was (in all likelihood, as we cannot ask the people themselves) passed down to his son, and the “Edison gene” has played its part in the advancement of applied science ever since.
Other Famous People with ADHD
ADHD can drive success in the boardroom and the laboratory. That’s not a hard argument to make, knowing what we know about the names above. However, if we know one thing about ADHD, it is that trying to force an ADHD mind into a field where the person doesn’t feel comfortable is usually futile. The hyperfocus that has made Edison and Gates such an influence on the world isn’t just an extreme level of attention; it’s a laser-focused degree of attention that burns brightly when turned on something that really interests the ADHD person’s brain.
Ryan Gosling
At school, Ryan Gosling struggled immensely with a poor attention span and struggled even to read. As a result, he experienced bullying from fellow pupils which led his mother to withdraw him from the education system and homeschool him. Additionally, she encouraged him to embrace his passions, among which acting was one of the strongest. In recent years, Gosling has talked at length about how his ADHD has influenced the roles he chooses, which tend to access the emotions raised in him by the condition.
Suga (BTS)
Known to his parents as Min Yoongi, Suga is the creative heart behind the immensely popular Korean pop group BTS. As well as singing, rapping, and dancing alongside his six bandmates, Yoongi is also a principal songwriter and producer both for BTS and more broadly, having worked with other stars such as Psy and IU. While speaking about mental health is often difficult in what is considered to be a quite reserved society, the star has talked openly of his experience of ADHD and depression, which has influenced his writing and performance both within BTS and in his solo work as Agust D.
Simone Biles
Viewed by many as the best gymnast ever to take to the floor – or a number of other apparatus – Simone Biles is perhaps the perfect example of how hyperfocus can be harnessed for a positive outcome. Winner of all-around gold at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Biles has honed her craft to the point where there are five separate skills on various platforms that are named for her. To any fan of gymnastics, that’s a telling statistic; they only name skills after elite, innovative performers, and to even get one bearing your name is incredible. To achieve five is to achieve immortality in the sport.
Entrepreneurs and ADHD: A Unique Advantage
Let’s clarify one thing before we move on because this is important: Having ADHD does not make you superhuman and it’s not a sign of any kind of failure if you don’t achieve the level that the people named above have managed. ADHD does present a range of challenges and it can interfere demonstrably with one’s quality of life. This is important to bear in mind because while it can deliver advantages, it is vital to recognize that it’s not a shortcut to excellence. It should be treated by a specialist because the benefits of hyperfocus will only be enhanced by managing the impacts in other areas of your life.
However, it is true that some elements of ADHD can be harnessed for positive purposes, particularly in relation to innovation and creativity. The following examples are worth considering if you want to make the most of what ADHD has given you:
Hyperfocus
As we have noted, the ADHD tendency to focus closely on a specific problem or task can be hugely beneficial to innovation. While someone who is not wired the same way you are will think about a task from a conventional point of view, you’ll devote a level of mental energy to it that allows you to see potential solutions they never would have imagined. This is why ADHD brains are often best left to do their thing with minimal input from outside. Why try to tell Bill Gates how to program software? There’s no point messing with perfection.
Risk-Taking
Both a blessing and a curse, the readiness to do something off-script is common to people with ADHD. This is a side of the condition that is best harnessed with supervision or within certain parameters. Creative risk-taking has delivered some of the most remarkable achievements in the history of mankind, but it shouldn’t be absolutely unmonitored. The pairing of a brilliant, risk-taking brain with someone willing to pull things back when they threaten to go off the rails can ensure remarkable results.
Multitasking
People find it difficult to move from one task to another, but when you have ADHD, it’s hard not to leap between things. A core element of ADHD is a dislike of loose ends, so if you have been diagnosed with the condition then it is often useful to put that tendency to good use. Again, there should be some element of supervision involved; it’s not great if you go off on tangents for hours on end. But an ADHD brain left to tick off a lot of tasks will often complete that list and then come back for more.
A diagnosis of ADHD should not be taken lightly; it can be maddening at times, and even some of the great achievers who have experienced the symptoms of it can attest to this. But what the list of names above does show is that, when managed and harnessed, an ADHD brain can do wonders.
