The Art of Getting Away With It

All right, welcome back. So there's a line by the artist J. Cole that goes, But not germane, my aim too sick, I bang sucker, I came to bring the pain, my brain too quick. And. Captured in that line is a really interesting idea that we're gonna be unpacking tonight. There's something almost theatrical about being a high performing adult with ADD. You develop, what's going on, Cole? Great to see you back, man. Dad, my dad's in the house, everybody. You develop a reputation for solving problems, building things, seeing possibilities, and accomplishing what other people thought couldn't be done, or what I like to call blowing minds and breaking paradigms.

And the funny thing is, you really can do those things. But behind the scenes, there's often an entirely different production underway. A collection of unusual habits, elaborate systems, sudden bursts of inspiration, extraordinary concentration, and the occasional deadline that gets a little more exciting than anyone ever thought. m. on the couch, boom, jamming coding away, and he'd leave for work. Sun would go up, sun would go down, He gets back from work at the end of the day. m. He comes in. Oh look, statue of Davis hasn't moved.

Somewhere along the way, you become remarkably good at making it all work. And that brings us to something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about. The difference between being good at what you do and being good at the way you're expected to do it. Because those aren't necessarily the same thing. Tonight I want to talk about ADD, ambition, intelligence, executive dysfunction, and the peculiar art of accomplishing extraordinary things through sometimes extraordinarily unconventional means. I call it the art of getting away with it.

And there's more to that title than you might think. So I want to take us back to 2018. And at that time, I was a senior analyst in the operations analytics and strategy team at the largest residential solar company installer called Sunrun. And I'd spent the last two years essentially building custom data products for different teams throughout the business from scratch because our Oracle BI system at that time had just failed so miserably to actually support the analytical needs and the visibility that the business needed to run the actual business.

And I hear through the vine, whatever the expression is, that the BI team is going to be introducing and rolling out a brand new BI system. and that they've already chosen what it's going to be, that it's going to be Google Cloud Platform with Looker built on top of it. And I was outraged. That's another quality of mine. I've often joked I have a particularly refined sense of outrage that drives a lot of what I do. And I was outraged. I was like, okay, well, look at the Oracle BI system. What happened with that?

And nobody ever comes and asks one of the leading analysts what capabilities they might need in the system. And so I did what they say you got to do. If you can't beat them, join them. And so I called up a mentor of mine who I had met early on in my career at Sunrun. And I basically tell him the situation and he helps facilitate the conversation with the VP of IT that would have me brought over from the operations team over to the business intelligence team. And at that point, I basically took over the implementation and rollout and design and development of the entire enterprise-wide new central intelligence system.

We were using a product called Looker at the time, and over the next say year, year and a half, we would build out the Looker implementation for all the different teams, everybody from sales and ops to FP&A and finance. And at the end of this, got my boss right up there on a billboard in Times Square. And at the end of this, my boss wanted to see did Davis follow best practices? Like, what is this? Can we rely on this system? We don't. 6 billion. And we did a three-day deep dive into all of the different working dynamics of this system.

And they came away from this saying, and I quote, This is the most flexible BI system that we've seen in the field. Sunrun has an analytics asset unmatched by any of Looker's customers, and they didn't understand how I'd actually achieved that. And at that point, I would begin having conversations, possible opportunities for working with them directly outside of the Sunrun kind of scope, and exploring what it would take for me to found my own business. But if we roll that back a bit and we look at how that actually unfolded, what I had to do to get it there, it's a very different picture than what you might expect.

I didn't just wake up one day, and that's where I think what's interesting is for us to explore this relationship between intelligence, competence, reliability, attention, interest. And in this sense, I had been, when I came into this, I was driven. I was like, I am going, I wanted to win. I wanted to win. I wanted to build the greatest system there could be. And I would work out of my bedroom in San Francisco. As part of the transfer over to the BI team, I had baked into my compensation that I was allowed to work from home.

The reality is I lived 20 minutes, a 20 minute walk from the office. And this was pre-pandemic, right? And so why would I have to work from home? I can't make it to the office on time. I can't. But when I was in that mode, I was consumed. Every day I'd wake up and I would read the documentation end to end. I'd skim it at the very least and every single day I'd find I could skim I could skim even more of the documentation because it had just gotten that sort of implanted in my brain. And I would read it again and I'd read it again.

And I read it until I had discovered every last possible intricacy of how to shape this system. When I went into the opening meeting with the Looker team, the Looker developer relations team, and we started talking about how this implementation is going to go, all these things, I told them, I go, look, I'm hungry. Like, I am gonna bend your system to its limits. And I said that, I said that right to them. And from that point on, I was locked in. I would come home to the Twin Cities here to visit my family for Christmas, for whatever, and I would be working on this thing 24-7.

I would be thinking about it. I'd be thinking through how I'm going to model this aspect or that aspect. If you were to look through my room at the time, you'd probably see coffee cups just all over the place, right? And so how is it that I'm able to do these complex, extraordinary things? But at the same time, if we rewind back a little bit before that, when I was back on that operations analytics and strategy team, and I was building all these custom data products, I would get a rental car because I'd have to go travel down to San Luis Obispo, slow is what we called it, to visit my team.

Half my team was there, half of my team was in San Francisco. And so I'd get a rental car and I'd drive it back and I'd get back, you know, I'd go in, I'd unpack and I was exhausted. So I go to bed. Well, I gotta be at the office the next morning. How do I get it over to the rental car place? Oh, okay, I'm gonna do it after work. I go to work, I'd finish the day, I go back home. fuck, the place is closed. Next day, okay, I'm gonna do it tomorrow, next day. And that would go on, and that would go on.

And before I knew it, I had a rental car, company paid, for a week and a half that I hadn't used once. And if you think that I learned my lesson the first time, I didn't. That might have happened two or three, four times where someone was getting hit with a rental car bill of several $1000. And I remember when my boss, Kat Love, who I love with all my heart, I owe her my entire career. And I remember she called me one afternoon and was like, Davis, look, I get it. I know you, but we got to get these cars returned.

And I'm like, absolutely. And so the question becomes, how is it that I'm able to do these things over here and not these other things over here? These other things that often might just take a couple minutes of focus of getting it done and it's out of the way. And so I want to take a little detour here for a second to unpack this idea of intelligence and competency and And we live in a world where, like we said, that values things like punctuality, consistency, dependability. I could take 24 credits in a given semester, double major, double minor, ace my tests, but I would almost invariably lose 10 to 15% of my grade, my final grade on time and attendance.

And. So we live in this world that expects you to do these things in these certain ways or to, and naturally, right? We all have to work together. We have to be able to rely on each other. We have to be able to depend on each other. But just making you intelligent doesn't necessarily mean you can regulate your activity. And so that's where executive functions come in. So I wanna unpack for a moment five key executive functions that I think that are useful for us to be considering as we go through these conversations.

And then I want to talk about two of our core neurotransmitters, dopamine and norepinephrine. And the first of these executive functions, so what does it mean to be impaired, to have executive dysfunction? And so the core, five of the common executive functions that we talk about are things like task initiation, getting started on something. And for that person with ADD, ADHD, someone like myself, the big question in your life becomes, why can't I simply begin? Another one, kind of the flip side of that is this idea of inhibitory control, inhibition.

preventing yourself from doing something that you want to do, controlling that. And for that person like myself, that big question is, why is it so difficult to resist the interesting detour, say? If I'm grinding away as, my name is Davis, I'm the CTO of Cadre. If I'm grinding away on the Cadre system, there might be these things, these three or four things that are very, that are key priorities to the company and that are gaps currently missing from the app that I'm being expected to deliver on.

And. Having done this for 15 years, I can deliver on that. I know I've learned these skills on how to get myself, make sure I'm getting those things done. But in the course of that, I might take a one to two hour detour and based on just suddenly an idea I have in that moment, and I might suddenly drop an additional feature on top of that, say the time-stamped comments that you can watch as you're replaying a live stream and see the comments in the context of the actual person who's engaging and speaking over the stream.

And so these are those sorts of things that, so that's the second of the five. The third is working memory. What are you holding in your head at the same time? And for someone like myself, why did I lose track of what I was doing? Where's my phone? I can't find my phone anywhere. Wait, it's in the fridge? How did it get in the fridge? Then you have things like time management. I can get lost and it will feel like 15 hours have just flown by if I'm in this deep mode of hyperfocus. At the same time, I'm late to almost everything.

I don't think I have made it on time to a single wedding in my life. The last of them then is context switching or cognitive flexibility. So if I'm there grinding away, if I'm focused, if I'm honing in on this problem in the system and I'm trying to solve it and I'm this close to solving it, and Luke messages me and he's looking for an update, why can't I just switch over and send him a real quick fucking update? Why is it that I sit here and it's as though I can't move out of this box and I just have to get this done until it's done?

And so these are the five things that someone like myself really struggles with. And so there's a big difference between wanting to do something, intending to do something, knowing how to do something, and getting yourself to do it. The other two things I want to just introduce, the ideas I want to introduce is they'll become themes that are recurring as we explore these ideas, is the neurotransmitters of dopamine and norepinephrine. And so dopamine, as many of you I'm sure are aware, is the neurotransmitter that essentially rewards you for having taken an action and gotten something done.

It's that good, yes, that hit, that like you just achieved something. It's the same thing that the casinos use with slot machines when they get you to pull that lever and they deliver inconsistent and sometimes outsized outcomes that play on your dopamine, taking that action, possibly getting filthy rich in order to drive your behaviors and get you to pull and pull and pull. It's the same thing we do with the news feed on Facebook, except that instead of a financial or monetary return, you're getting social knowledge, social insight.

Oh, she's getting married. Oh, another puppy photo from this dude. So dopamine is huge in terms of regulating our interest and our attention. And so there's a common misconception with ADD that it's that you're just super distracted, you can't focus. And that's not entirely the case. It's more that you can't regulate what your brain decides it finds interesting and important enough to actually drive your behaviors in that moment. The other one is that idea of norepinephrine. And norepinephrine is big in executive function.

It's big in keeping us alert in stress. It introduces the stress that gets us to actually take action. And so with ADD, you have an imbalance of dopamine and norepinephrine. And so often it becomes a inconsistent, essentially, ability to be able to keep on that same thing again and again. And so what that looks like then for someone like myself is using certain things, relying on certain phenomenon like urgency, like novelty, like interest in order to drive the attention that we need to be productive and to actually perform in the workplace.

In my case, I was able to find early on that, and a lot of this was, so the way, some of the, so I'll share another story. And this story is from when I first moved out to the Bay Area. And at that time, I had started a company called Status. We were trying to essentially make all of the, we were trying to index all the public data sources online and then give an intuitive interface that would let the average citizen explore the facts of the world. And. I was fascinated by this all. This was my introduction to startups, and it was like the first time I read a book on ADD, I was like, this is me.

This is where I belong. And so I was building this thing, but I knew I needed to get a job. I just graduated from college. This was back in 2012. And I just graduated from college. I knew I needed a job. And I move out to the Bay Area, and it was intimidating. It was intimidating being out there to figure out where do I go? I mean, where are the companies? Who do I apply to? It was just easier and more interesting for me to continue plugging away on and building status. Well, a couple months into my time at the Bay, the girl that I was dating at the time, who grew up in the East Bay Area, And then I was staying with her family for a few months, having just moved out there.

Her sister dies in front of her eyes. And it was like, it was shocking. Naturally, it was traumatic. It was deeply tragic. And I go into hyper-focus mode on just trying to take care of my partner, be there for her, and help with funeral arrangements, help create the slideshow for the funeral. And a week after that, her parents come in one day, suddenly. on a Saturday and they kick us out. Get out, call in the cops. You guys are, get out. You're not doing anything. And I'm like, what? Okay, we're staying at different family friends of the girl I'm dating at the time.

And, you know, or staying out of her Tahoe. And I'm like, okay, I don't have a month and a half to go through a interview cycle. I have to get a job now. And so I remember back to a blog post I had read by Steve Blaine. He's a professor at Stanford, teaches in their startup school or their school of entrepreneurship, and he was the one who invented the business canvas template. And there's one page where you go through, you document all your dependencies. And he had created this like, essentially a guide, a visitor's guide to the Bay Area.

And in that guide, he, takes you down. He's like, go over to this place in the South Bay. Go, this is where Hewlett and Packard founded the, whatever. And go to South Park in San Francisco. This is the heart of San Francisco startup scene. You can find in these buildings, 100 of the startups you all know, Strava's there, Apartment List is there, Twitter had been there, and Wired Magazine is there. And then he ends the thing with, if you want the ultimate experience to the Bay Area, talk yourself into a startup.

So I'm like, okay, I gotta get a job now. I think about that. I'm like, why don't I just go print off a bunch of resumes, go down to South Park in San Francisco, start going door to door handing out resumes. And I do. I go down the first day. In fact, wild, I walk into the coffee shop that's sitting right there and I'm in line. I turn around and I go, no way. That's Steve Blank. And he's sitting there at the table, drinking a cup of coffee. So I walk up to him and I just go, hey, I just had to introduce myself.

My name is Davis. I love your work. I read your thing. Guess what I'm doing right now? I'm about to try to talk myself into a startup. And so I go and I start going door to door at these places, as some of you may be able to relate, where you're just dropping in cold. And I'm like, just moved out here from the Bay or from Minneapolis. I study finance and international business. Do you guys need any help? And people would be so receptive. They just thought it was so cool that I stopped by. They'd be like, nobody does that.

Da da da. And. It took two days. And by the end of the second day, I walk into a startup called Future Advisor and I do the same thing. I just look them up right before I walk in. So I recognize the CEO and he basically interviews me on the spot. He's like, you're just going door to door asking for a job? And I'm like, yeah, pretty much. He's like, wow, nobody has ever just walked in here and asked for a job before. That's incredible. Come on into my office. And he gives me a task, he says, go home, I want you to study up and read up on wealth management and just give yourself a refresher, come back in a week and we're gonna give you, and they give me an all day interview and I end up getting hired.

And that's what started off, kicked off my career out in the Bay Area. And so what's remarkable about all this is that it's like I can do the things that I need to do if there is enough urgency. I will eventually make it to the meeting, but it's often not until I have this feeling, this feeling inside of, oh no, if I don't leave now, I'm late. I'm going to miss it. get out. And then the question becomes, is it just that I can't do it? I don't think so. I think that it has something more to do with the fact that there's something else that I'm doing that has me captured.

And for me to break out of that and context switch over to doing this other thing takes an impulse, takes some sort of that's going to rise above that. And so I want to turn this into and move into now this, explore another idea. And that's the idea and the difference between Adaptation or invention, compensation, and masking. And the three are not interchangeable. You can, and all three can be relevant at the same time. But what we talk about when we talk about adaptation or invention is essentially discovering or finding an unconventional or a new and better way of doing something.

Compensation is that idea of working extra hard or intentionally developing systems to overcome a struggle or an obstacle or to shore up a weakness of yours. While masking is the idea of trying to hide or conceal the difficulties that you have. I think this is a really interesting idea, partly because in my case, masking has always been difficult. The reason that's difficult is because it's difficult for me to appear normal. It's difficult for me to adopt and to play by the same rules that everybody plays by.

If I'm being judged by me having been timely every single day, me having shown up every single day, me being communicative and responsive within a one hour response time, I'm gonna fail every time. Even if I can do that, if that becomes my sole focus in life and I'm doing nothing else, I'm just gonna get bored as hell. And so the question becomes, in my experience, it's how is it? What are the different ways? What are the different ways that I ultimately compensate for essentially what it is I have to deal with, my weaknesses when it comes to executive function?

And something I just discovered, this was something, some insights I just had discovered recently. It was actually one of the things that sort of led me to wanting to do these streams is for much of my career, I've talked a lot about context. And I've always told any boss I have, look, I'm the sort of person that the more context I have, the better job I can do. And if I don't have context, like I don't even, I can't even get started. And I never understood why that was. I just thought, you know, I just like to understand why.

it was recently that I had the discovery that when I ask for context, I'm essentially manufacturing motivation. By building up the importance behind the task, by building up the reason that I'm doing this thing, I'm actually, my brain is actually able to sort of compose itself and actually drive toward the outcome that I'm looking for. I think that before I kind of get into just sort of some of the ways that you could say I redesigned my own machine in order to ultimately become functional, having dealt with a dysfunction, I want to talk a little bit about sort of the, again, that gap between what others see on the outside and what is really going on internally and how it is I actually get things done, how it is I get away with it.

And so I remember, I remember again when I was at Sunrun, I had at this point made, it was again before, this was before that BI implementation I talked about, but I had already made a sort of reputation for myself as essentially being, you know, building these radical, mind-blowing data products. And so I would get lent out to different teams, and I've worked with the different teams because they didn't have an analyst, a dedicated analyst, and so I'd build them a whole system, you know? And. And we had a Christmas party.

We were down and we were having the holiday party. And a girl who had been on one of the other teams had just recently joined as a new member of ours on the Ops Analytics and Strategy. And we're at the Christmas party and I see her, I go up, I give her a hug. I'm like, hey, how's it going? And she says to me, I'll always remember this. She says, I just want you to know how honored I am and how humbled I feel to be working with you. You're a genius. And I would talk about this with my doctor and it's, you know, but in that moment, I had never felt more lonely.

I had never felt more sort of reduced to, or put on a pedestal, reduced to a sort of a perception, a perspective on who I am. And while you might think, why wouldn't you want to be called a genius? And I think the reason is that I didn't feel like a genius. I felt like an idiot half the time. I felt like, how is it I cannot get these things done? Why is it I struggle so miserably with these certain aspects? I constantly am starving. I can't go to bed because I can't get my mind to stop. I want to peel my face off.

And And so there's just, and I remember sharing that with my doctor and my doctor saying, at a certain point, you might just need to own the role. Sometimes people need you to just step into the role and you just need to embrace it. And that is who you are at work. And that. That struck me deep. And I would spend a lot of time thinking about that, talking about it. And early on, I'd been fired. I'd been fired from that first startup that I worked at after having, you know, didn't see it coming. I was, again, like I tend to do, I was busting my ass.

And I was shocked. And I remember a colleague I worked with at that time had told me, she goes, this is the importance of advocating for yourself. You need to advocate for yourself, which doesn't mean brag. it means you need to make sure people know what you can do and what it is you're doing. Because if you don't, they're all focused on their own things and they're doing their jobs. They aren't thinking. And so it can be really easy to not understand what it is you're putting in to the company.

And so that was an early on a career skill that I learned was how to advocate for myself. And so I thought about that idea of kind of owning that role and just sort of essentially beginning, and I would say that was the beginning of me moving into leadership. And so what I would call that is, it's this idea of the performance of competence. What are the things we do to mask, to perform, to try to hide the ways that we fall short so that we can meet and manage and ultimately not cause distraction with these different things that others sort of expect you to be operating by, these different sorts of policies.

And so with that, I want to talk about, we'll end with, just some of the ideas that at least for me, some of the ways that I've had to found myself compensating in order to be able to do these things. And I think one of those ways has always been this sort of, this outlook I have on my own personal growth. And so I used to, I still say, but I also used to say that I will look to a year, the year before, I look back a year. And if I'm not embarrassed by the quality of my work from a year prior, I'm not growing fast enough.

And so while certain things like consistently showing up, consistent, something like writing A blog. I could talk all day, every day about, innumerable different topics and ideas and different, and move between wine to literature to business strategy. But I can't write a blog post a week. It's just, I'm gonna fall short. It's not gonna happen. And then I'm going to miss that week and I'm going to lose the predictability that your audience and your readership expects. You know, it's often not the quality of the writing, but the consistency of the writing that allows for a successful blog to blow up.

And that's not me. And so one of the things that I've done to overcome that is more adopt this constantly evolving. To me, it's like I have this current perspective on how the world works in my head. And when I encounter new information, I weigh it up against that current version. And I might tune that, I might replace my current ideas given novel, new, important information. But it's always evolving and it's always sort of, it's being maintained in this ever-growing monstrosity. And that's very much how I build systems as well.

It's like, if I, instead of thinking about I need to do three things a week, I'm just constantly evolving and improving the system, then that's going to get there sometime. The other thing that I would do is I would often take on really ambitious, vicious outcomes. And so these are the things that, again, they get me locked in, they get me motivated, they get me is this idea of achieving something no one thinks that can be done. And so with that Looker system, for instance, being able to devise the perfect BI system for the company, regardless of whatever vendor they had happened to choose, I was going to find a way to bend that system to meet our needs, not the other way around.

I wasn't bending to Looker. I was going to bend Looker to what I knew we needed to deliver. And when I would later build on that in founding future model, Lloyd Tab, the founder of Looker, would one day see our demo video and his response was, wow, I didn't know you could do that in our system. And it was those sorts of moments that I had like learned to live for. It was when I dropped that bomb and blew everyone's minds. And everyone thinks things are on the line. Things are at risk. Oh no, is he going to get it there?

Everybody's feeling anxious. You haven't managed me if you haven't felt the anxiety I bring when I go dark and not knowing whether or not that thing is going to get done. But I don't stop. I go until it's done. I know I'm going to get there one way or another. And the entire time I'm bouncing the ideas off those around me. And so one of the ways that I found I compensate is I over deliver on the outcomes, which alleviates some of the edgy aspects of my workflow itself. The other thing that I learned much earlier on in life was the use of authenticity, self-deprecation, humor and just owning your mistakes right off the bat.

Back to when I'd be in group projects in college and I would shoot my mouth off, I would do something dumb, I would somehow find a way to mess something up. And I would use my personality to essentially kind of massage the way that people are interpreting the signs they're seeing from me. And so when you take those together and you start to realize, how much, and the question then becomes, how much of who we are, how much of our personalities, how much of the way of where we are in life is really a result of the way that our brains are wired and the different sorts of techniques we use to overcome those.

And I guess that leads me to then this idea that I want to be exploring over the next three conversations as well, which is that idea of our environment and how it is that the various, because ultimately, I guess there's something I think one of the most interesting things about living with ADD is just how resourceful you can become. You find ways around obstacles, you invent systems, you improvise, you discover that there are often a dozen ways to accomplish something everyone else assumes must be done one particular way.

And there can be something genuinely remarkable about that, but I think the next stage of understanding ADD isn't simply celebrating how good we've become at getting away with it. It's asking what becomes possible when we no longer have to. How much more focus and energy can you devote on solving the problem at hand when you can give up imposter syndrome and give up spending all of that mental energy and cognitive space focused on, am I looking stupid? How are people going to react if I say this thing or that thing instead of just being who you are and saying it?

When we understand ourselves well enough to work deliberately with our strengths, take our difficulties seriously, and build something sustainable around both, because ultimately the goal isn't to get away with anything, it's to build a life where you don't have to. Of course, getting away with it at work is one thing. To my chagrin, relationships are another matter entirely. So next time we're going to be talking about love, lust, and lost attention. And ultimately, how radically these same techniques fall on their face when applied to a very different domain of life.

So thank you all for taking the time to listen and explore and journey through this with me. You all have a good night. I will see you Thursday.