In this episode of Translating ADHD, Asher and Dusty explore the complex relationship between ADHD, perfectionism, and the pursuit of mastery. They discuss how perfectionism often blocks people with ADHD from starting new tasks or hobbies because of unrealistic expectations of immediate perfection. The hosts emphasize the challenge of appreciating incremental progress, noting that the ADHD brain craves instant results, which can lead to frustration and loss of interest before meaningful skill development occurs. They highlight the importance of intentionally practicing skills in small, manageable increments, using strategies like gamification, setting deadlines, and breaking tasks into smaller chunks to maintain motivation and follow-through.
Asher shares his personal journey of learning to cook by shifting his mindset from seeing cooking as a chore to treating it as a skill to be developed deliberately. Dusty adds that mastering the skill of practicing itself is crucial for people with ADHD, especially when juggling multiple interests. They also discuss the value of recognizing when to let go of the pressure to excel and instead accept being “good enough” at some skills, which can be liberating. Both hosts agree that understanding how to build skills and knowing when to release expectations can help people with ADHD engage more meaningfully with their passions and daily activities.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:02:09] Asher: Hi I’m Ash.
[00:03:25] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[00:04:19] Asher: And this is Translating ADHD. Listeners, this will be our last episode for this season. Dusty and I will be taking the months of July and August off, but we will have some favorite episodes replaying for you in those months. So if you still want to tune in, we will hand-pick some episodes for you to listen to for the month of July and August, and we will see you back here in September.
So, Dusty.
[00:31:01] Dusty: So, Ash.
[00:31:13] Asher: You want to tell our listeners what it is we’re talking about today?
[00:35:09] Dusty: Today we’re talking about ADHD and mastery.
[00:39:14] Asher: Oh, say more about that.
[00:41:23] Dusty: Yeah. I think we have an interesting relationship to the concept of mastery because so many people with ADHD are perfectionists. But I feel like as much as perfectionism can be a strength and a boon as far as mastery, more often it probably shows up as a block, because unless you can do it perfectly, you won’t start.
And who can do anything perfectly at the beginning? So I feel like sometimes that high standard, that perfectionistic standard actually gets in the way more than it helps.
[01:14:26] Asher: Absolutely Dusty. I think one of the other things, alongside perfectionism that can be a challenge for us is appreciating incremental progress over time. Our ADHD wants an answer now. We want to be able to do it right now. So, getting better at something slowly can be a really frustrating process and could be something that causes us to lose interest or drop it because we’re just not appreciating or even remembering to kind of tap in and check in on the process.
It can feel like we’re not making progress at all and it kind of falls out of our purview without us realizing that’s what’s happening.
[01:52:16] Dusty: Yeah, exactly. It’s hard, I think, with the different aspects of ADHD that clash.
I heard a saying once that people with ADHD have interests an inch deep, but a mile long. So there’s that piece. And certainly that’s true for me where you have a passing interest in something, you get just good enough at it to get the satisfaction, and then you’re sort of on to the next hobby.
Because getting really good at anything, no matter what it is, whether it’s a hobby or getting strong, like getting fit or building even a work related skill, it usually involves some grinding, some practice over time. There’s that thing where they say you have to do 10,000 hours to be an expert at something. And practice is boring and repetition is boring.
I see this with my kids where they take to things quickly but then when it comes to the part where they have to do it over and over, that’s where they usually drop off and then kind of lose interest in the thing. And that was true for me growing up as well.
I’ve really struggled as an adult to feel like I’m good enough at things because I didn’t put the time in to really get to the skill level I wanted to be at. But at the time, I wouldn’t have been able to write because I didn’t understand how to get myself to follow through on something that felt boring.
I see there being two issues, Ash. One is the perfectionism that stops us from getting started, or that causes us to not be able to see incremental progress and give up too quickly because we get disheartened.
The other issue is not realizing that we’re not building skills and that we’re not working towards mastery when we keep skipping around or avoid the skill building part of it due to boredom.
I think there’s sort of two different causes, but they lead to the same outcome because there are going to be times in our lives where we want to be really good at something.
[03:45:17] Asher: Dusty. I’ve had some recent experience with that second one, actually. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with cooking. When I was married, I did not do most of the cooking in my household and was fortunate to have that need taken care of by someone else. But now I’m the only adult in the household, so if I don’t cook, we don’t eat.
For quite a while, that was just a frustrating loop that I was stuck in where I hated to cook. I found it boring. I didn’t like the process at all. And so, as you just said, what I wasn’t realizing was I wasn’t building any skill there. So my frustration level remained really high, but over the last several months, what is different is I’ve started putting some real intention into it.
I think this is the way around that thing you’re talking about. When we don’t realize we’re not building skill, we have to start to put some actual intention into skill building. That’s exactly what I did. I flipped my perspective from cooking being a life necessity to cooking being a skill, and started putting intention into building different types of skills in the realms of cooking.
I had this amazing experience last weekend where a friend came over for dinner at the very last minute, so this was not an opportunity to go grocery shopping and have a plan. This was a I already have the stuff in the fridge because this is what I was going to make for myself, and I was able to throw together a delicious meal for the two of us with no stress, no effort, because it’s something that I’ve made multiple times and that I’m now very comfortable with making.
I’ve also honed the recipe to a point where I felt good about serving it to someone else, and I was just appreciating how far I’ve come, skill wise to be able to have that experience. Because six months to a year ago, if I was having someone over for dinner, that would require a lot of advance planning, a trip to the grocery store, etc. I would need to be prepared for that in advance, because I would never, ever be the type of person that’s prepared to serve someone a dinner on a whim. Like, hey, we’re not done hanging out. We both need to eat. You want to come over for dinner? That would not have ever been a thing in my world before, because I would not have been prepared to serve someone else a meal based on what was already in my house.
[06:18:23] Dusty: Yeah. Okay. First of all, amazing. Congratulations.
[06:23:07] Asher: Well, thanks.
[06:24:20] Dusty: Secondly, I think you’re hitting the nail on the head. I think there has to be sort of this conscious intention around the idea of practice and skill building, and then figuring out how to get yourself to engage with it, right? Lord knows we’re going to avoid anything that’s boring, hard and not urgent.
So practice of any kind, whether it’s cooking or doing your makeup or playing the guitar or going to the gym and trying to build a certain muscle, even, you know, getting better at folding your clothes whatever it is, it’s going to fall to the bottom of the list.
And so I think then that’s where we can add in – how do you gamify this? How do you make this something that’s tolerable? How do you add some layer of non-negotiable or urgency to actually get yourself to follow through? If I tell myself, I’m going to practice and I want to get better at writing haikus. I’m going to practice writing haikus for 15 minutes a day. I’m never going to sit down and go, okay, it’s haiku writing time!
But maybe if I join a class that I have to pay for and I’ve got some skin in the game, or it happens at a set time, or I set up a body double with my pal Asher right at 10:00 every morning. By creating some urgency, some deadlines, some non-negotiableness, that will work for me.
What will also work is creating some level of challenge or gamification. It might not work for me to do this forever, but if I tell myself I’m going to do a 30-day haiku challenge where I’m going to write ten haikus a day for 30 days, well, now that kind of feels fun.
Now I want to see if I can do it and the skill building becomes secondary, the practice is in the background, it’s more about the challenge. But through the challenge, I’ll get myself to do it.
I improved my cooking in a similar way because I really don’t like cooking that much either. One of the things I did during Covid was to pick theme months or theme weeks.
I’d be like, this is going to be soup week. I’m going to look up all these kinds of soups that I’ve never made. I’m just going to try to make soups. Or sometimes I would pick a certain ingredient. I’m going to try to cook with lemon for the whole week or basil or something.
So I know for me, a combination of gamified things, adding some level of urgency and then usually breaking them down really small. I can get myself to practice something for 10-15 minutes maybe. But I’m never going to be the kind of person who can spend a long time doing something.
It’s better for me to break it up and do shorter but more frequent sessions. But I usually have to kind of find some way to trick myself to follow through.
[08:49:08] Asher: So Dusty, what worked for me is actually a little bit different than what worked for you, because trying to pick a theme would be overwhelming for me. So I’ve been doing one of two things. Number one, choosing something that I’m really looking forward to. Eating is always a winner for me, and that also gives me the opportunity to repeat and refine a recipe to the point where it does become second nature to make it.
That also shortcuts the cooking barrier. For me, if I’m making something I’m familiar with, where I don’t have to stop at every stage and reread the recipe and think about it too hard, if I can just sort of go through the motions because I’ve made this enough times that I know how to do it without being glued to the recipe, I don’t have to think about it so hard. That can be really helpful for me, and it gives me the opportunity to get better at certain skills along the way.
So one of the things that I have been making, the thing I made for my friend, actually is a ground beef stroganoff. And each time I made it, I was really trying to attend to getting a good sear on the meat before I put the rest of the ingredients in, because that makes the whole dish taste so much better. Previously, when I would brown ground beef, I would sort of do the ADHD thing where I’m not paying that much attention and I would just constantly be fiddling with it. No sear. Just sad gray meat. And so really putting intention behind getting that good sear is now a skill that transfers to other dishes that I make with that same meat. Alongside that, that dish in particular is now something that I can make on a whim. No big deal, so long as I have the ingredients in the house because I know how to make it.
The other thing I’ve been doing is experimenting with different ways to make the same thing. So for me, experimentation can be really fun. I’ve been on this mission to make a chicken breast that I like, as well as a restaurant chicken breast.
When I go out to eat, restaurant chicken is delicious. When I make chicken at home, it’s always bland and boring, and that’s frustrating to me. And so I have tried. We have chicken breasts, like once a week in my house, and over the last several weeks I have set this intention to make the chicken breast differently every time I make it. So I’ve grilled it, I’ve pan seared it, I’ve baked it, I’ve made it in the Instant Pot, and I’ve taken the time to really pay attention to how do I like this?
What if I try this method again? What might I try differently? And I think again, with ADHD, that’s where we can get into trouble with incremental progress, as we don’t take the time to pause and reflect and think about what the next step might be. You make the chicken breast. You don’t like it. We’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater and be like, well, that didn’t work.
Throw that whole thing out. Just just forget it. I can’t make chicken breast versus making it, not loving it and being like, okay, is this method worth trying again? And if so, what could I do differently here? And again, this is increased skills in multiple ways. The most tasty chicken breast is the pan seared one. It’s also by far the biggest pain because it makes the biggest mess. And it requires the most hands on attention in order to get it to come out well without overdoing it.
Whereas the Instant Pot is absolutely the easiest method, you just chuck it in and then the Instant Pot does all of the work and it’s pretty hard to mess it up. And now that I know that, I kind of rotate between those two methods for chicken breasts. If I’m really trying to get the tastiest chicken breast, I’m going to pan sear it. If it’s a weeknight and we just need to eat food and there are a couple of chicken breasts in the fridge, then marinating them first and chucking them into the Instant Pot is good enough for a weeknight meal and worth the trade off in terms of effort, when I don’t have the time to put forth more effort. And had I not tried that, had I not tried multiple ways, I wouldn’t know that I wouldn’t have that choice before me, if that makes sense.
[13:03:29] Dusty: Yeah. I mean, just listening to your journey, you know, talking about it, this is the thing about practice, right? Our brain sort of collapses. I think when we think about doing a thing, we just think about being good at it. I use this example a lot. I say people with ADHD tend to have really high perfectionism but really low frustration tolerance.
So if I say to myself, I’d really like to be able to play the solo in “Stairway to Heaven”, I’m just sort of picturing myself doing it. I want to be good at it now. I don’t want to sit there and practice scales over and over and over. That’s boring. Either I’m good at it now or I’m not doing it.
The process of remembering that our brain compresses time and that there’s going to be several instances between me buying a guitar and looking up the tutorial of “Stairway to Heaven” and actually being able to play it. There’s sort of this time that exists where I’m gonna have to do this repetitious thing.
That’s the first step. We have to remember that that’s a thing, and then how do we get ourselves to do it, like you’re saying, deciding what you want to make a study of almost. I think playing guitar is an apt metaphor as I do see this happening a lot with guitar players.
This is something that I think happens more commonly with musicians, because what will happen is a lot of guitarists, when they’re “practicing”, they’re just playing songs or playing songs that they like or they’re doing what they like. If you look up guitar skill building tutorials, that’s the first thing they’ll tell you is sitting there playing whatever isn’t practice. Practice is actually doing the scales, doing the basics over and over and over. That will support the playing. And so many people just skip that and they learn from doing it in the context, but they don’t isolate out the specific things, like learning how to sear a piece of meat that will add to the whole.
And so I think, as you say, remembering that focusing on one skill will have greater applications. But I would even expand on that and say focusing on the skill of building skills or focusing on the skill of practice in and of itself is a thing.
So going back to my kids – when I see them want to try this, they want to do that, they want to do karate, they want to do tap dance, they want to do ballet, they want to do whatever. I’m happy to put them in whatever. But as soon as it gets hard and they stop wanting to do it, that’s where what I would like for them is to be able to build the skill of sticking with a thing long enough to help them see themselves improve. Because if we never stick with the thing long enough to see ourselves improve, we won’t know how to improve.
Second, we might start to think that improvement is impossible, or thirdly, we might think that the boring hard part in the middle is just going to go on forever and it’s going to be intolerable.
When someone starts playing a guitar, it’s really hard on your fingers, right? It hurts your fingers. If you’re trying to make chords, usually the chords don’t sound good. They sound like plank, long plank. So if you’re practicing guitar, it’s very unsatisfying at first. If you think that it’s going to continue to be like that forever because you have no mental map for improvement, of course you’re going to give up.
It’s painful. It sucks. It doesn’t sound good if you don’t have a belief that at some point this is going to get easier because I’ve done it before and I’ve seen it happen. So for my kids, I want them to stick with whatever they’re doing long enough to see improvement, just so that they understand the concept of the practice to improvement pipeline. That way when they do find something that they’re truly passionate about or really want to do, they’ll understand how to get where they’re trying to go.
I feel like I had to teach myself that as an adult. I’m still not great at it. It’s something I wish I learned how to practice, as a skill, as a younger Dusty.
[16:49:03] Asher: I really like that as a concept – learning how to practice, learning how to skill build as an intention itself. I think that’s really apt for people with ADHD because, as people with ADHD, we’re always going to chase some amount of novelty in our lives. We’re always going to be people who have multiple hobbies, multiple interests, were into this month and were into that next month.
And I think that that can be okay. I think that fighting too hard against our nature there is honestly not serving us. But I think this adds an interesting distinction that it’s okay to let something go. You still need to see it through to the point where you’ve seen some improvement before you let it go, in service of learning how to build skills, learning how to develop a practice.
A little perspective shift there that it’s not necessarily about getting good at cross-stitching or stained glass or whatever the heck your hobby of the month is this month, but it is about having a new experience as an ADHD person in terms of seeing some amount of improvement and growth. Even if this isn’t a hobby that is going to be with you for the long term.
[18:09:20] Dusty: Absolutely. It’s not exactly the same. But in a similar vein, I feel like that’s what I did with exercise. For years, you know, I wanted to get in shape or lose weight or whatever, but I could never stick with anything long enough to actually see the physical changes. And so to a certain point, I shifted my focus from my goal is X number of pounds or X amount of strength to my goal is consistency. I want my goal to be able to figure out how to become consistent with body movement.
And when I shifted that goal, everything really changed because it no longer became about well, I have to do this kind of exercise. If all I’m trying to do is consistently be active, I could do different things and I could play to my ADHD need for differentiation.
So I started mixing it up, doing different things in a week with the goal of being able to say, do body movement three times a week and giving myself that permission to do a big walk on a Monday, do yoga on Wednesday, go to the gym on Friday.
That was the level of differentiation and change that I needed to actually follow through. Whereas I can never get there because I thought, I will go to the gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday. But the gym is boring so I can only get myself to do it once a week.
[19:20:04] Asher: Dusty. In a similar vein, I’ve had a number of clients for whom the the topic at hand is I want to engage more with my hobbies plural, rather than defaulting to things like social media scrolling or binge watching TV, or sort of doing those things that don’t feel like they serve us right. And so something that has worked really well for a number of my clients is, again, that element of choice.
Rather than locking down and saying it has to be this hobby, it could be any one of my hobbies, right? The different experience I want to have is rather than scrolling social media, I want to engage in any one of my hobbies. It doesn’t necessarily matter which one, because the different experience I want to have is not having this time sink that doesn’t feel good.
I want to be using my time towards something that does feel better for me. And so that element of choice can actually, for some of my clients, be really helpful, right? It doesn’t necessarily have to be practicing my trumpet. It can be practicing my trumpet or journaling or this or that, and alongside that, something that really helps for these clients when we’re developing a practice like this, is having everything ready to go so that it’s easy to pick up any one of those things.
So having the materials out, having the things set up, having the journal out in the place where you might choose to journal, whatever it is, so there isn’t this setup barrier when you have this time. You have this intention to engage with some hobby, and you could theoretically grab any one of your four hobbies at that moment because they’re already set up and ready to go for you.
So there’s not the barrier of, oh, I have to gather the things, or oh, I have to set myself up for it. It’s already set up for you. You just have to choose what you want to engage with.
[21:18:02] Dusty: Yeah, that set up piece is a really big piece for sure. The last piece here, I think, and I know we don’t have a lot of time, but I am curious what you would say if you were a person with ADHD and you had a lot of different things you wanted to get good at, whether they’re hobbies or just life skills or whatever, how can a person tell, in your opinion?
Or maybe just for you? How do you tell the difference between a passing fancy and something that you have genuine interest in? Because this is something that clients bring to me all the time, they don’t know if they’re actually interested in something, or it’s just the novelty.
[21:49:03] Asher: Dusty, for myself, I’m just really careful about going all in on anything. I think the typical ADHD experience is to go all in – we buy all the supplies, we do all the things which, by the way, can mess with our dopamine. Buying the supplies for a hobby gives us the dopamine hit as if we have done the hobby. And so that alone messes with your ADHD.
I take the opposite tack. What is the most low stakes way that I can check this out and see if it’s something that I want to continue to engage with or not? What is the bare minimum of supplies that I might need in order to try this out and see if it’s something that I want to invest more time, money, resources, energy into or not? And that generally works pretty well for me.
[22:56:11] Dusty: Yeah, I’d agree. And then I’d add to that. I’d say that for me, sometimes there’s an element of coping with loss or coping with being okay with not being able to optimize everything. There are certain skills that I could have put time and effort into and built that very likely could have been like lifelong passions, or I could have been really good at them.
But I only have so much time, and I’ve already got things that I’m sort of far down the road I am with. So I have to make a choice. For example, when I was a kid, I was really, really good at drawing and I never really pursued that into adulthood. But I’m still good. Like, if you asked me to draw something, you know, people are always like, oh, you’re really good at drawing.
And so I could, you know, start investing a bunch of time into increasing my drawing skill. But I don’t have a life built around that. I already have enough hobbies. I’m already trying to progress with the hobbies I have. So I’m just going to be okay with letting that go. Maybe there will be a season for it, you know, down the road.
But even if not, like, it’s okay not to be good at all the things that you hypothetically could be good at. For me, again, it’s important to go to the gym and be in shape for my long term health and for my strength. But I’m not necessarily going to get strong in this one particular way or get more flexible by going to yoga a lot. There’s aspects of physicality that I could pursue, but I only have so much time.
And so sometimes I think it is just an arbitrary choice, which the hard part for me, for my ADHD, is letting go, like expectation and outcome management, because I think we do have that feeling of wanting to do everything and coping with that reality of not getting to do everything. That part is hard for me.
[24:34:14] Asher: That’s a really app point, Dusty. So if I’m hearing you correctly, sometimes the answer is to let go of the idea of building skill to be okay with where you’re at with that particular skill, and make your peace with that.
I agree with you that that can be really challenging for people with ADHD, but can also be really freeing when you learn to sort of let go. I’m good enough at this and I don’t have to be better at it, I can be as good as I am at it and know better for myself.
Like you with fitness, listeners of the show know that my fitness is going to my kickboxing gym. I don’t ever intend to compete. And while I do like the skill building aspect in terms of a way to measure improvement, I’m never practicing at home. I am never working on skills outside of the gym. I am okay with that because my primary goal is just the movement. I like the physicality of it. I like that it sort of covers both strength and cardio in one workout that I find fun.
So it bypasses the boring thing for me, but I don’t need to work on skills outside of the gym. If I wanted to compete, if I wanted to fight, then I might need to work on skills outside of the gym and put some more intention behind it. But for what I’m trying to get out of that experience, it is okay for me to just show up for class and for me to often be the least skilled person in the room. And I’m perfectly comfortable with that, because my primary goal is not to be a skilled kickboxer. My primary goal is to get a good workout that I also find fun.
The skill building is nice to see, but it’s not my primary motivation. And so I don’t have to invest more time or energy into it than I have to invest into it.
[26:31:24] Dusty: Exactly. You hit the nail on the head.
[26:34:06] Asher: And Dusty, I think this is actually a good place for us to wrap for today. So interestingly, the moral of this episode is that one path is to start to put intention behind skill building in one of the many ways that we listed out in this episode. But the other is to maybe recognize areas where that doesn’t need to be the goal, where you can let go of the idea of needing to get better, of needing to be able to do it perfectly.
[27:04:02] Dusty: Yes, sometimes it’s intention, and sometimes it’s intention to not have intention.
[27:09:09] Asher: I love that! Sometimes it’s intention to not have intention. Well said. So until next week, listeners. I’m Ash.
[27:16:03] Dusty: And I’m Dusty.
[27:17:06] Asher: And this was the Translating ADHD podcast. Thanks for listening.
