Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am an ADHD and product management coach, helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
Belief: More drive is always better.
Reality: Drive is neutral capacity, not a virtue score.
Action: Know when to stop, and let someone else carry it too.
Welcome back to The Gifts of Neurodivergence.
This week’s gift is drive: having more capacity to do than most people, without an easy off switch. It’s different from the energy of anxiety I wrote about last week. Anxiety is energy spent predicting what could go wrong. Drive is the broader tank it draws from, the raw amount of output and momentum I carry through a day.
For me, I’ve learned to accept I have a higher drive than most people. It’s a gift. It has helped me achieve and strive more in my life than others. And it’s the same gift that has made me sick and burned out.
We treat drive as a purely positive trait, and its absence as a moral failing. Someone doing a lot looks admirable. Someone doing less looks lazy, careless, unmotivated. That scoreboard feels obvious. It’s also wrong, and I know because I lived on the wrong side of it.
For years, people told me I needed to spell-check my work more carefully. They read my mistakes as carelessness, as not caring enough to slow down and do it right. What was actually happening was dyslexia. I wasn’t short on drive. I was fighting a barrier nobody could see, and the visible evidence, the misspelled words, got read as a character flaw instead.
That’s the trap in treating drive as a virtue score: you start grading people’s worth by their visible output, and visible output tells you almost nothing about what’s actually going on underneath it. Someone doing less might be carrying a barrier you can’t see. Someone doing more might be running on empty.
Drive isn’t good or bad. It’s capacity, and capacity cuts both ways. Mine lets me put in a ten-hour workday, go to the gym, come home, cook dinner, spend time with my kid, and still write a newsletter or work on the coaching business. I can do a lot. I can also fail to notice when I should stop.
I’ve burned out before. I kept going without checking in on what my body needed, until I got sick or simply collapsed and had to take real time off. These days I take medication to help me sleep, because my brain doesn’t shut off at night on its own. If you have ADHD and you struggle with sleep too, you are far from alone. It’s one of the most common threads I hear from clients.
So the same drive that lets me do everything is also the thing that convinces me I should be doing everything, even when I know, somewhere underneath it, that I might not be able to keep it up. That’s the part I’m still learning to hold: capacity isn’t permission. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should.
Two practices are teaching me to carry this gift without it carrying me into the ground.
Let others in.
I had a project I’d been running solo, and when someone else was added to help, my first reaction was insecurity. I should have been able to handle this myself, I thought.
Then I remembered something true about my job. Product and program managers rarely build anything alone. Our job is to connect the people who do, not to do it all ourselves. Reaching for help wasn’t a failure of drive. It was literally the job.
Once I let the insecurity pass through instead of running the show, I learned more from the people who joined me, and the project got better for it.
Let comebacks count as much as output.
Drive isn’t only about the work you do without stopping. It’s also the resilience to take a hit and come back. One of my old bosses told me my biggest strength wasn’t how much I produced. It was that I took feedback and kept coming back.
When someone gives you hard feedback, come back and tell them what you did with it, even if the outcome wasn’t what either of you expected. People remember that you tried and returned far more than they remember the first misstep.
That’s a gift too: not just the drive to keep going, but the resilience to keep showing up after you’ve been knocked down.
I used to think my worth was tied to how much I could carry in a day or accomplish. I’m learning it’s tied to something else: connection. Knowing when to let people in, and when to trust myself, and when to stop and go.
Drive gave me a full life. It also nearly ran me into the ground more than once. Neither of those facts makes me more or less than anyone doing less than I do, for reasons I probably can’t see. That’s the whole reframe. Drive was never the measure. It was just the tank, and I’m still learning how much of it to spend, and when to let someone else help me carry it.
I say that as I finish writing this at 9:50 pm on a Sunday. Can’t stop, won’t stop. But I think it was the right call.
I think I’ll sleep well tonight.
The gift of generational trauma.
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