Creativity & ADD

During my radio interview today with Laura West of Joyful Business, we were discussing the similarities in positive traits for creative entrepreneurs and people with ADD. I think I love working so much with ADD people because ADDers tend to have the same natural tendencies as creative people and may in fact BE creative people.

Some of the traits are:
highly enthusiastic
energetic
goal oriented
good at trouble-shooting
thrive on experiencing a greater variety of what life has to offer
good when directions aren't included
intuitive
exceptional with computers because computers don't come with instructions and the results are immediate.
They are creative and they are explorers.
(From borntoexplore.com)

With all these positive traits, how did ADD come to be called a disorder?
It should be a benefit, right??

Creative people and ADDers both know that for all the positive, there are also some traits that make it difficult to march to the beat of everyone else's drummer.

impulsiveness
restlessness
daydreaming
losing things
talking excessively
often interrupting others
often shifting activity from one uncompleted activity to another

There is and has been some research around ADD as an evolutionary phenomenon.
"Modern theories of evolution embrace the concept of selective pressures on populations rather than individuals. A trait that may be bad for an individual might be good for the population overall. For example, some individuals who are ADD will become criminals, but if a few brilliant ADD inventors change the course of history and increase the fitness of the population, the ADD genes will be favored."
-- From Borntoexplore.com

- So are we producing a population with more ADDers so that our population can be more innovative in the long run?

Whether this is true or not, i like to think of creatives and ADDers as super-abled like a superhero who has special powers to think and link and explore, to do "other stuff' than the rest of the average population. What stuff may come is to be seen.

Read more about the evolutionary theory and more about the positive side of ADD at http://www.borntoexplore.com