Professor Michael Fitzgerald of Trinity College, Dublin, says that in some cases ADHD can have an upside. The risk-taking behavior that often goes with ADHD can lead to self-destruction--or to massive breakthroughs in science, the arts, or exploration.
In an address at Keele University, he said, "People with ADHD have symptoms of inattentiveness but they often also have a capacity to hyper-focus on a narrow area if that is of particular interest to them. Clearly ADHD is not a guarantee of genius, but the focused work rate that it produces may enable creative genius to flourish."
He cited Thomas Edison, Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, and Mark Twain as examples of people who had ADHD and were helped by it.
For the record, I'm skeptical of such after-the-fact diagnoses but it's an interesting idea. What may be useful about is that if you have ADHD it could be useful to reframe it and try to take advantage of any potential benefits by organizing your schedule to use focused periods to work on what's really important to you.
