ADHD Ahas from a Combat Pilot, a $250 Million Founder, and a Professor
The Anxious Achiever
Morra Aarons-Mele
4.7 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 22 January 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Imagine that a combat pilot, an entrepreneur who sold his company for $250 million and a world-renowned |
| 0:10.9 | academic walk into a bar. And they talk about ADHD. I'm Maura Erin Smealy, and this is |
| 0:19.2 | The Anxious Achiever, the show that looks at the intersection |
| 0:22.1 | of mental health and work and asks, how can we do it all better? |
| 0:26.9 | We're revisiting one of my favorite episodes, which features three men, all of whom manage |
| 0:32.6 | ADHD and all of whom live really different lives. |
| 0:36.7 | The common thread is that they have hyper focus. |
| 0:41.1 | And their hyperfocus has brought them to incredible places. |
| 0:45.6 | I'll never forget the interview with the combat pilot, Nate Swan. |
| 0:50.5 | You know, you wouldn't think that being a pilot in high-stress war zones would suit |
| 0:58.7 | someone who has basically trouble filtering out which attention to prioritize and not. |
| 1:06.1 | But on the contrary, high-stress combat situations are where Nate thrives. |
| 1:12.6 | And he manages the time in between with great skill. |
| 1:18.6 | Anyway, it's such a cool conversation. |
| 1:20.6 | I am always hoping to peel back the layers and the different ways that ADD and ADHD show up in really successful people. |
| 1:30.0 | And this one is a gem. |
| 1:34.7 | I've been lucky to be able to kind of run my career the way that I wanted to. |
| 1:38.5 | I actually started life as an airplane pilot for the Army doing a mission that was one takeoff, one landing,, six hours later up in the sky, and it was very, very boring. That was really not the best environment for me. I could get through it and I could operate in it because the interesting parts were like, when you're dealing with, you know, takeoffs and landings, the first and last, you're dealing with any flight, takeoffs and landings, the first 30 minutes and the last 30 minutes of any flight are really the busy times when you're trying to do all your takeoff and landing stuff. And so those times would kind of get you excited and get you going. There's enough happening to some extent. But if you're just going up and doing idiot circles over the same place and coming back down, it can definitely be very taxing. And I learned that that really wasn't the best environment for me. |
| 2:18.9 | As a young officer looking for opportunities to excel in other communities, |
| 2:23.8 | I actually asked to leave the airplane community and come back and fly helicopters, |
| 2:26.9 | which is blasphemy to probably the majority of folks that were doing the business. |
| 2:32.0 | And so I came back and I was actually selected to be an Apache pilot. |
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