YourHuckleberry

Designate a place in every room as, "the place I put things." Use positive reinforcement to train yourself to put things down in that space. Every time you use a drop zone, give yourself an attaboy/girl. It needs to be big enough that it can hold a few things, keys wallet, cell phone, but not so large that things can get lost in it. You don't want too many drop zones, but you need to have one always handy. Keep them uncluttered when possible so that they're always available. Dissuade the people in your life from "cleaning up" these spaces. Now, when you lose something, you've got a good chance of finding it by checking all your drop zones.

They hired a new hotshot engineering manager (the kind that makes physical things). He hates the engineering software we run. I don't blame him, it's crap software. He constantly complains about how slow it its. He's right again. Crap Software Vendor says it's my platform that makes their software slow and buggy. I'm willing to make any changes they recommend, but they've got nothing. They're like, "it runs fine in our test env." So hotshot goes rogue and signs contracts to move engineering to a cloud platform that he used at his old job. I wasn't brought in until after the ink dried.

New vendor sends me a link, login, and password via email. I go to the link. It's fucking remote desktop gateway. Open to the internet. The password isn't a temp, that's my permanent unchangeable password. This is how they handle user access control. No MFA. Nothing between the screaming void and our data but IIS and an AD password.

So I start pissing in the tent. I tell everyone this is unacceptable security for our IP. Vendor acknowledges that their security is insufficient and lays out their roadmap to fix it, hopefully by the end of year(I'm holding my breath). I ask if we can just run the software ourselves.

I have a convo with our CEO who usually listens to my advice. He asks if we can just host the new software on our platform (the one that already has MFA and a whole lot of other security measures). I say, "That's exactly what I was thinking." So, CEO email in hand I go back to the group and tell them to make preparations to move the implementation to our platform.

Hotshot starts bitching and moaning about how he doesn't want another slow app. A data analyst chimes in with her two cents out of fucking nowhere. I'm not even sure why she's on the email chain. I'm about two seconds away from going Joe Pesci on these goombas.

What the fuck guys? Who cares if the app is slower on our platform (not that it necessarily will be)? What good is a fast app that's insecure? How fast is it gonna be when it's ransomwared to hell? It'll be nice that the app is fast when BianLian is downloading all our designs so they can extort us.

"Well they're a big company and they haven't gotten hacked yet?" Thanks for that Captain Smith, but I know a fucking iceberg when I see one.

When I was a kid they told me, "If you care about something and work hard you'll succeed." I failed, a lot, and so I figured, "I must be lazy and apathetic."

Eventually I found my ikigai and success. I thought, "now I care and now I'm working hard, I'm a different person, this is why I'm successful now."

I always knew I had ADHD, but strangely nobody seemed to acknowledge it outright. My parents just laughed when the neighbor called me space-cadet. I was diagnosed with dysgraphia, which was all my mom wanted to talk about.

Recently I've been reading about ADHD and I came to a realization. I was never lazy or apathetic. I'm not a different person now, I just found something where the bulk of my work provides me the dopamine I need to stay engaged. I've also got some masking strategies, which took me 30 years to develop because I had to do it on my own.

Nobody looks at a paraplegic and says, "boy are you lazy."

Please don't let other people define you. Don't mistake your ADHD for a character flaw. Find your ikigai. It won't fix your ADHD, but it will make you a whole lot happier.

Ikigai:

A motivating force; something or someone that gives a person a sense of purpose or a reason for living. The feeling of accomplishment and fulfillment that follows when people pursue their passions. Activities that generate the feeling of ikigai are not forced on an individual; they are perceived as being spontaneous and undertaken willingly, and thus are personal and depend on a person's inner self.

Wallet, leatherman, flashlight, knife, battery.

If I'm not carrying a bag, I usually don't bring both knives or the battery.