I'm Maura Ayrnsmeli, and this is The Anxious Achiever.

We look at stories from business leaders who've dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down, how they pick themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change.

Today, we're not talking about depression or anxiety, but another mental struggle that so many people face, a kind of neurodiversity, one that often creates anxiety in those who have the disability, but can also impart tremendous gifts and skills in your work

life, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Now, most of you probably know a bit about ADD and ADHD, that a lot of kids are

diagnosed from a young age, that it disproportionately affects men, and that it can make succeeding

in school and work difficult, at least in traditional workplaces. If you follow entrepreneurship, you may have heard

stories from legends of business. Richard Branson, JetBlue founder David Nealman, the founders of

IKEA, Kinkos, and Charles Schwab talk about what ADHD gave them as business leaders. And we'll

discuss that later in the show with Johann Wickland, a professor at Syracuse,

who has looked at the ways people with ADHD have succeeded in entrepreneurship.

Our first two stories are from achievers who also have ADHD and who figured it out at a relatively late stage in life.

Music and who figured it out at a relatively late stage in life. First, a story of ADHD from a place you might not expect.

Nate Swan hasn't started a company you've heard of, but he's had an impressive career as a military pilot.

I've been lucky to be able to kind of run my career the way that I wanted to.

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, takeoff 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.

As a young officer, looking for opportunities to excel in other communities,

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