Flying Without Instruments is part memoir and part practical guide, exploring what it means to be diagnosed with ADHD later in life while showing how AI can serve as a thinking partner. Why was this an important book for you to write?

I spent most of my career being told I was “too much” or “not enough” — too intense, not organized enough, too fast, not consistent enough — without anyone, including me, understanding why. Getting diagnosed with ADHD at 62 didn’t just explain the past, it gave me language for a pattern I’d been managing badly for decades without knowing it had a name. I wrote Flying Without Instruments because I know I’m not the only person who built an entire life and career flying blind like that, and because AI turned out to be the first tool that actually worked with how my brain operates instead of demanding I operate like someone else’s.

Being diagnosed with ADHD at sixty-two must have reframed many past experiences. What realization surprised you the most?

That the traits I’d spent my career trying to suppress or apologize for — the hyperfocus, the pattern-jumping, the inability to sit still with one problem — were the same traits that made me effective at the things I was actually good at. I wasn’t broken in the roles where I struggled; I was just misapplied. That reframe was more disorienting than the diagnosis itself.

You acknowledge both the benefits and the risks of using AI. How do you personally keep it from becoming another distraction?

I treat it the way I’d treat a sharp direct report — useful because it pushes back, not because it agrees with me. The danger for someone with ADHD isn’t that AI is distracting by nature, it’s that it’s infinitely patient with tangents, which for me is dangerous. So I built real guardrails: my AI systems are structured to keep me anchored to the actual task, not just chase whatever’s interesting in the moment.

What would you say to someone who suspects they may have ADHD but has gone undiagnosed for years?

Trust the pattern more than the doubt. Most late-diagnosed adults spend years being told — by others or themselves — that they just need more discipline. If you’ve built elaborate workarounds for things other people seem to do without thinking, that’s not weakness, that’s evidence. Get evaluated. The relief of finally having a name for it is worth more than staying comfortable in not knowing.

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