When “You’re Smart, But…” Becomes Your Whole Life
A personal field note on attention, executive dysfunction, and refusing to downscale your dreams.
I am speaking this essay into my phone.
Partly because that’s the easiest way for me to smuggle ideas out of my head these days. Partly because, if I sit at a desk and charge myself “Joel, write an Important Essay About ADHD,” my brain will politely delete the request from RAM1 and open X (formerly Twitter) instead.
So: voice notes. Transcripts. Edits. This is already the story.
I have ADHD2.
That sentence is simple. The road to it wasn’t.
Before the name
For most of my life, I didn’t think of myself as “someone with a condition.” I thought of myself as that kid adults like to describe with long, slightly exasperated sentences.
“Joel is very bright, but…”
“Joel has so much potential, if only…”
“Joel could be doing even better, he just needs to focus.”
If you grew up in Nigeria, you probably know how the sentence ends. We bring out the greatest hits: laziness, unseriousness, lack of discipline. Sprinkle in some spirituality when needed: maybe you’re under attack; maybe the devil is using distraction; maybe you just haven’t prayed hard enough.
I heard these lines from teachers. From report cards. From family. From people who genuinely loved me and wanted the best for me. I even believed them, most days. Because I could see the evidence: missed deadlines, careless mistakes, that particular shame of knowing you’re underperforming relative to what you could do.
And, to be fair, I could also see the other side.
I wasn’t a bad student. The opposite, in fact. When the stars aligned, I could lock in and do borderline ridiculous things:
essays written in one 12–13 hour sitting3
full-semester revisions squeezed into a single week
complex tasks handled in a kind of desperate, last-minute, everything-all-at-once sprint
The problem was not necessarily a capacity-issue, but one of access.
I didn’t have a name for that. I just had vibes, guilt, and a rotating cast of adults telling me to “just be more serious.”
What it actually feels like (from the inside)
If you’re reading this hoping for a clinical definition of ADHD, this is not that essay. I’m more interested in how it feels from the inside — especially if you grew up like me, in an environment where these things are rarely named and almost never explained.
Here’s my best attempt.
ADHD, for me, feels like:
operating with very limited RAM
holding five to ten “open tabs” in my mind at once
and, every few minutes, one or two of those tabs just…disappearing
Not minimized. Not delayed. Just gone.
I don’t forget tasks because I don’t care. I forget them because, somewhere in the handoff between “I need to reply that email” and “let me open my laptop,” the thought falls through a gap.
Sometimes, a whole class falls through that gap.
Other times, the opposite happens. Instead of everything evaporating, everything remains: I can’t stop thinking about the essay, the idea, the story, the problem set. I lock in. I sit with it for ten, fifteen hours. I forget to eat. I forget to drink water. I forget to reply messages. People check in to ask if I’m okay. I’m more than okay: I’m in flow.
Those are the days people point at me and say, “Look, see? When Joel wants to, he can do it.”
They’re not wrong. They’re just not seeing the cost.
ADHD isn’t a simple “I get distracted.” It’s dysregulation. It’s swinging between too much focus and too little, without always knowing how to steer yourself into the useful middle.
Sometimes I describe it as: knowing exactly what you need to do, feeling the urgency of it in your chest…and still not being able to start.
If you’ve ever sat in front of a simple task for hours — a form, an email, the “open” button on a document you’ve been avoiding — and felt strangely paralyzed, you might know what I mean.
Now imagine moralizing that.
When struggle is a moral issue
A lot of us grew up with struggle explained in spiritual or moral terms.
If you’re not performing in school, maybe you’re not working hard enough; maybe you’re being unserious; maybe it’s a character issue.
If you’re late, you “don’t respect people’s time.”
If you’re scattered, you “don’t have discipline.”
If you can’t stay on top of your work, maybe you “don’t want it enough.”
It’s not that these explanations are always false. Sometimes you really are being unserious. Sometimes you really aren’t trying.
But when those are the only explanations available, they swallow everything else.
Looking back, a lot of the self-ascriptions I thought were “virtues” were actually conditions.
I thought I was punctual because I “valued punctuality.” I thought I was kind because I “valued kindness.” Nice tidy story.
In reality, many of my good behaviors were scaffolded by two invisible supports: structure and relationships.
If the environment had clear routines, visible deadlines, immediate feedback — I seemed disciplined. If there were people I cared about on the other end of a commitment — a teacher I loved, a team relying on me, a friend on the same journey — I showed up.
Take those away, and I struggled. Not because my values suddenly changed, but because the way my brain allocates attention was always somewhat dependent on external scaffolding.
Without the language, though, all I had was a nagging suspicion that maybe I was not as virtuous as I thought. Maybe, under everything, I was just lazy.
That’s a terrible thing to believe about yourself for long.
A gap year, a breakdown, and a word
Fast forward.
My admission to university gets rescinded. I watch months of work collapse because of an error and a bureaucracy that refused to correct itself. I go on a gap year I didn’t exactly plan for. I start writing publicly. I begin noticing patterns in my own story: the way my best performances came in highly structured environments. How boarding school, for example, quietly met a lot of my baseline needs:
food on a schedule
sleep on a schedule (at least in theory)
clear, externally imposed constraints
constant proximity to peers chasing similar goals
In that context, my so-called virtue looked strong. The moment things became more open, self-directed, and asynchronous, the cracks widened. The same traits that made me an intense sprinter became liabilities in a marathon-based world.
I started speaking with therapists. I read. I journaled. I listened. And at some point, ADHD entered the chat.
The diagnosis was not a thunder-clap moment. It was more like someone quietly sliding a missing paragraph into a story I’d been stuck in for years.
Things didn’t magically improve. I didn’t suddenly become organized. But I did get something I hadn’t had before:
Language4.
Enough language to disentangle “I did not do this work” from “I am a failure.”Enough language to see patterns where I had previously only seen personality. Enough language to stop asking “What is wrong with me?” and start asking “What kind of support do I need?”
On executive dysfunction
There’s a phrase that captures a lot of this: executive dysfunction.
If you’re not familiar with it, think of it like this. Most people’s brains can more or less do the following:
notice a task
decide to do it
break it into steps
start
keep going
finish
If you have ADHD, some of these steps are glitchy. You might:
notice too many tasks, all at once
struggle to start, even when the task is simple
get stuck in the middle and forget why you began
or hyperfocus, burn through the thing, then crash
It’s not that you’re not capable of doing the work. It’s that your task manager — the part that organizes, prioritizes, and shifts attention — behaves like a stubborn, half-broken computer.
Sometimes a restart helps. Sometimes you need a new operating system entirely.
Attention in an age designed to destroy it
Now add 2025 to the mix.
Our phones are built to slice attention into confetti. Every app is competing for your time, your scroll, your click. Videos are shorter. Feeds are infinite. Notifications are engineered to feel urgent.
One psychiatrist and ADHD expert, Dr Edward Hallowell, in his book ADHD 2.0, suggests the term VAST — Variable Attention Stimulus Trait — to describe a kind of acquired inattentiveness that comes from growing up in this environment, even if you don’t meet the full criteria for ADHD.
You don’t need a diagnosis to feel what this does to you.
You open your phone to check one message. Thirty minutes disappear. You drag yourself back to your laptop, open the reading for class, and suddenly your mind is pinging in five directions:
someone just posted a new thread
there’s a football video you meant to watch
that random idea for a startup pings you
your friend just sent audio
the essay deadline is tomorrow
It’s not that previous generations had infinite focus and we are uniquely doomed. But the amount of friction you now have to fight before getting into deep work is higher. And nobody tells you this explicitly. Formal education, in some sense, is still built like all of us live in the 1980s: same expectations, fewer constraints.
If, like me, your brain was already operating with fragile executive function, this environment distracts and, more potently, quietly convinces you that you’re incapable.
Where self-help often fails
This is usually where someone links you a self-help book.
“Read Deep Work.”
“Try digital minimalism.”
“Quit all social media.”
“Just build better habits.”
I don’t hate these ideas. Some of them are genuinely helpful. But there’s a specific gap I kept noticing whenever I read this style of writing.
The gap between: (1) knowing what to do and (2) being able to do it regularly
Most writers who talk about focus and attention write from the top of the mountain. They’re looking down. They narrate the view. They prescribe a route.
What’s often missing is the messy footage of them climbing there — the experiments, the failures, the weeks they crashed and burned, the days they hated themselves, the relational-scaffolding other people provided.
For someone like me, stuck in the in-between, reading those books can actually amplify the gap. You walk away with more knowledge and the same stuckness. Now, you’re not just “unserious.” You’re “unserious, despite having read all the good books.”
It’s crippling.
I don’t want to write from that place. I don’t want this essay to be another voice telling you to simply “do better.”
I want it to be field notes from someone who is very much mid-experiment5.
Systems I’m learning to build
So, what do you do when willpower isn’t enough?
For me, the answer has been: systems.
Just enough structure to lessen the distance between “I want to do this” and “I’m actually doing it.”
Some things that have genuinely helped:
Relational work
I draft many of my long essays while on calls with friends. They’re often doing their own work. Sometimes we’re silent for an hour. But the mere fact that someone else is present, also trying, lowers the activation energy for me to start.
Tighter feedback loops
Publishing online (on CapedCorners, BallerzBantz, X) gives me a kind of external accountability that pure private writing doesn’t. Knowing that something will go out, be read, maybe be argued with, pulls me through the fog faster than just write for myself.
Detours that count as progress
I’ve stopped insisting that real-work must look like one specific thing (like drafting in Google Docs). Often, my first real step is a voice note, a messy brain dump, a cluster of half-sentences in Obsidian, a walk with my phone recording, or a rant to a friend6. Those are now legitimate first steps in my system, not failures.
Deliberate environment design
I’ve had to admit that I do much better when certain constraints are outsourced. Cafés, libraries, study rooms, Residence Hall common rooms — these become my miniature boardings school. I go there to work because my brain has learned this is where Work Happens.
None of this makes the ADHD vanish. I still forget things. I still procrastinate on absurdly small tasks. I still misjudge how long something will take. I still get swallowed by my phone.
But it gives me levers. It reduces how often I interpret a bad day as a character flaw.
Why I’m writing this (and why now)
This essay isn’t really about ADHD.
It’s about the quiet ways we abandon our ambitions when we can’t explain our struggle.
If you’ve spent years hearing “you’re smart, but…” you eventually internalize the “but” more than the “smart.” You start to downscale your goals to match your current performance. You convince yourself that some dreams are for “more serious people,” “more disciplined people,” “people who have their life together.”
And if your context rarely names or normalizes mental health, if nobody around you feels safe enough to say “hey, I struggled with this too,” then your suffering is private. You either swallow it or spiritualize it. Both are lonely.
I’m 22 as I write this. I don’t have everything figured out. In fact, I suspect I’m only just beginning to understand what kind of work fits my brain, my history, and my values.
What I do know is this:
I love long-form thinking.
I love observing people build things that matter.
I love thinking and writing about the future.
And I care deeply about how technology, education, and attention interact — especially for people from contexts like mine.
So I’m treating this essay as a kind of mission statement and a base document.
Something I can point people to when they ask why I write the way I do, why I hop between Substack, student politics, football analysis, AI experiments, and fashion. Something I can build from when I make videos or write series about ADHD, learning, and technology.
But, more importantly, something you can point to when you need proof you’re not alone.
If you see yourself in this
If you recognize yourself anywhere in this essay, I’m not going to end with a prescription.
I’m not going to say “go and get evaluated” (though you might want to, if you can). I’m not going to say “delete all your apps.” I’m not going to give you a miracle morning routine.
Instead, I’ll offer three gentler questions:
In what conditions have you historically done your best work?
What kinds of structure and relationships can you recreate or seek out now?
What would change if you stopped reading your struggle as a moral failure and started reading it as a design problem?
Because that’s really what this is: design.
We do not choose the brains we are born with. We do not choose the countries, schools, or families that first narrate our failures back to us. But, little by little, we can choose how we respond. We can find language. We can build systems. We can search for people who get it.
Maybe, one day, we can make it easier for the next wave of kids coming after us — so they don’t spend a decade thinking they’re broken before realizing they might just be differently wired.
Until then, this is me, placing a small flag on the internet.
I have ADHD.
I’m still figuring it out7.
I’m not done yet. And neither are you.
Random Access Memory is an electronic memory used to store working data.
The essays I consider to be my most enduring have all been written under these conditions. A Catharsis was written across a 30 hour sprint. The eight hours were spent on calls with friends who offered feedback.
I’ve been circling around this idea of language or lens for a while now. In another essay about dissolving my writer’s block, I wrote:
“Today, I am thinking about small deeds that scale. One is language. Language is a tool, a way of thinking, a means of piecing the world together. Here, I engage with language as a means of interrogation, not just a specific language.
When we acquire languages, we broaden our horizon and create fresh channels and connections in our understanding of life, and reduce friction. The friction here is access. Identifying our language to X improves our response time whenever X arises.”
It has been interesting to review my earlier essays through the paradigm explained in this essay. In one sense, my publications, taken sequentially, have slowly unraveled towards this piece. In another sense, I now have alternative and, perhaps, sharper conclusions to earlier vignettes. Good problem?
Whenever I go on these rants (really, flow) during calls with friends, I have them text me summaries, so I remember what was said and can reflect on it later.
I spent 5-6 hours on this essay in the past 18 hours despite having essays to do for my classes.
One of my most radical views is that everyone deeply wants to work hard and enjoy deep work. There is no inherent laziness, laziness as a description is just simplifying the issue. Someone under the right circumstances will always enjoy and look for work. Idk how we set up society this way but my 20s so far has been spent on making this work for me. Glad to see u wrestling with it as well
Thank you Joel.