It was been painful to watch, to be honest, because the impact on our team had been so acute, and it simply never got better after so much effort on the part of management, other engineers, etc.

Where I diverge with base assumptions however is that I suspect these particular people had been misdiagnosed with ADHD, were given medication, and it was the medication that led them to drop the ball. Why? Basic physiological needs were never being met, again and again. They were constantly reporting insomnia, missing meals, fatigue and all of the things you associate with stimulants being either misused or abused. Having _been there_, it was easy to spot. And I think this sort of thing is tragically common in our field, and is rarely confronted because of identity issues associated with medical labels.

couldn't the same be said about adhd? or looking at it from the other side by the author's terms wouldn't a sub-100-iq machine learning enthusiast be also entitled to special treatment so s/he can work with it? isn't it fair to say that adhd relates to non-adhd like sub-100-iq to plus-100-iq? again, just taking the author at face value.

I wrote a book about my coping strategies— which invert most of the common productivity-fetish advice. For instance, I value procrastination. It has important benefits.

A key move for me was to stop thinking of my mind as if it were a power boat and start thinking of it as a sailboat. Hence my book on professional self-education: Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar.

Another key move was to recognize that discipline is not my road to getting things done. Rather, my motivator is helping people.

I am also usually very careful about what I promise. Most of my promises are to do things that I have already completed, or as near as.

small disclaimer: You probably can't choose to only gain focus / concentration if you embark on this path. Other stuff is going to come along with it, since technically speaking, you'll be unveiling the nature of consciousness in the process.

Sort of a sieve of things that weren't worth doing anyways.

Of cause everybody prefers the new and shiny but not executing on what's important is simply lazyness and lack of will.

The cherry on top is the comparison of the impossibly of teaching advanced machine learning to someone of average IQ -- clearly indicating that they assume to be of higher IQ since they have grasped that topic.

OP seems to be a low performer thinking of himself as high performer held back by circumstances and not themselves