Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…And the nice part is with the web and all that, you can always pop up something and say, “Hey, things have gone very, very wrong or unable to recover.” You can give them a nice message and then log it off so you can see it, and then measure how often are you doing it. I understand that there’s a bit of interestingness to a web project like do you want to always crash a server? There’s a bit of a gamble if you release a bad version and you crash all your servers constantly. That’s a pain you’re going to have to accept. I think this is more applicable for single systems like robots and so on. You have struggled with ADHD. I think a lot of people are really inspired by the fact that you’re able to be productive and flourish while having ADHD. How’d you overcome it? Well, there’s a lot of things that ADHD affects and so I’ll start with some of the easiest things, because there’s directly applicable, then these kind of collateral damage applicable things that happen. So one thing that has really helped me with ADHD is maturity. I think that’s just a thing that everyone needs more of. Meaning that I found myself getting so wiggly and so out of control when I would try to sit down and read, and I just couldn’t handle it. I just felt like I’d read a page and didn’t read anything. The part of me that just went, “Oh man, gosh, I just can’t even do this.” I had to just simply quit listening to it and said, “Nope, I’m rereading this page.” I remember reading some pages in college like 18 times in a row, just like I’m going to force myself to just do this the correct way. And so there’s an aspect of maturity that really helps, no matter what, I will do the thing I’m going to do and I’m going to do it well and maybe it takes me a lot longer and that’s okay. That’s not the point of it. It’s that I’m doing it and that’s the point. And so that’s one thing that I think just generally helps. And ADHD, no ADHD, the resilience, emotional resilience is just a really important aspect that just helps. And so I think that has been a large part that really helps me. There’s things that I still obviously struggle with. It’s clear where I’m really bad at stuff, and just trying to think through all the different things that I’m bad at. There’s more things I’m bad at than I’m good at. And so programming obviously has something that just allows me to remain focused and it’s like a strength of mine. And so I started off where I could just do it for a little bit and then just through kind of that emotional resilience, I was able to start doing it more and more. And so now I can just do it for like 10, 12, 15 hours at a time and I absolutely love it. And so it’s become kind of like a joy. It’s like playing a musical instrument. I’m really into it. But then if it came down to, “Hey, you need to go schedule your own dentistry and go do all these other things or make sure the kids have this type of stuff ready for the meals you need to pack throughout the week.” I’m historically very bad at that and will probably continue to be very bad at that. And so I must say that one of the reasons why I excel so much is because I also have a wife who is so good to me and she helps clear out a lot of the things in my life that cause a lot of me kind of getting snowballed into a weird spot where I’m just distracted getting nothing done. And so she’s really helped me. So it would be foolish of me to claim that I’ve defeated the ADHD by myself, but instead I find that the places that I can really control I’ve done a very good job at, and the things that I obviously need to do much better at, my wife has helped me a whole bunch. And so I’ve kind of cheated. Maybe I found a cheat code, a loving wife. But that has been the thing that has really helped.…

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