Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If using the SSQ, Wellness and Fun threads interchangably is a crime, then it's straight to jail for me. You hardly get any eyeballs after a few days, so I'd rather have my posts read by more people.
I've taken @screye 's advice to heart and enrolled in the MIT OCW Intro to Python, and grinded it for about 4 hours while on Ritalin, till my head stopped working. Most of it seems simple enough, especially since I know the analogous concepts from Java, but I'm still getting tripped up by syntactic details where my expectations from the latter don't apply. Python is certainly far less verbose, and that's very refreshing! (Not that I'm ignoring the other excellent suggestions people have made, but I only have so much time to pursue them)
Still baby's first steps, but the way my brain works, as long as I can overcome my utter laziness and ennui, and start, I've massively increased my odds of sticking through with it. Please name and shame if I desist, I want to at least finish this course of around 6 or 7 units and have done 2 of them so far.
Having video transcripts available is a big boon, since instead of just watching them at 1.5x speed, I can skim through the text as necessary.
GPT-4 is also a massive help, my god how did I ever learn anything without it? My biggest problem is simply not giving in and having it do all my homework for me, which would be defeating the point to say the least haha
Just out of curiosity: do you have trouble focusing on every “work-like” activity, or only certain ones?
There was that discussion recently about people who have to force themselves to write vs people who just can’t stop themselves from writing. It seems that people have largely hardwired affinities for certain activities.
I’m very fortunate that coding was naturally fun for me and I had no trouble motivating myself. But this was just an accident of fate, not any achievement on my part. It could have easily gone the other way, and then coding would have been a lot harder for me!
I spent the majority of my childhood and adolescence completely unaware of having ADHD, and neither did my parents suspect.
I'm an intelligent person. Not a genius, but about 130 IQ. That can subsidize a lot of inadequacies by sheer brute force. I never used to study for exams before med school, at best I'd hit the books two or three days before an exam and usually do very well. It was only when the difficulty of exams rose steeply, around 11th grade, that I began to struggle, at least in Maths. I still was pretty good at everything else.
Attending private coaching and having personal tutors is also very common, and it had the nice side effect of chaining me in front of a book or forcing me to practise.
Then I was severely depressed and also realized I had ADHD right before the entrance exams for med school. I begged my parents to take me to a shrink, and they refused, unwilling to entertain the idea that the son they had proudly thought was gifted all his life was a deeply broken individual. The stigma around mental health was too thick for even doctors to see through. I no longer hate them for it, but it's close. Most of my life, they thought it was just boys being boys, especially since my brother was even worse. Could you guess he's got ADHD too, and even worse than mine?
So my biggest issue is with reading textbooks on my own. Without extreme stress or Ritalin, I can't sit down and read something I'm not intrinsically interested in for more than 15 minutes. How did I even think that was normal?
That is by far the most obvious manifestation, I have minor issues that I can handle fine, but a doctor who is unable to hit the books is a bad doctor, at least until they get started on meds.
I am also not very conscientious, prone to procrastination and laziness, and it's a testament to how fucking terrified I am that I am doing something like teaching myself to code. Surprisingly enough, I don't mind it, it works out my brain in a manner that medicine doesn't, at least not at my current level of responsibility as a junior doctor.
Writing is something I enjoy, so like playing video games or reading a fun novel or essay, I can do it for hours on end and not care in the least.
Keep in mind that as best as I can tell, my ADHD is quite mild. There are people who are absolutely fucked, and I'm lucky not to be one of them.
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I think almost everyone uses them interchangeably, but the prompts/themes serve as discussion points if you’re not sure what to post (better than just calling it a ‘community thread’ or something), so I think they should stay.
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