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An Entire Life and Career Flying Blind
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.
Author Links: Goodreads | Facebook | Website | northclarity.com
Then came the diagnosis: ADHD. At sixty-two.
What followed wasn’t a breakdown. It was clarity.
In this honest and practical book, Johnson shows how artificial intelligence can become something far more powerful than a productivity tool—a trusted thinking partner calibrated to how you actually think.
Not to fix you. To finally work with the brain you’ve always had.
This isn’t about efficiency. It’s about survival. And building something worth keeping.
Inside you’ll discover:
Why ADHD isn’t a focus problem—and what that means for how you plan, prioritize, and recover from overwhelm
How to turn AI into a Kemosabe—a steady, pattern-spotting thinking partner that fits the way your brain works
Practical rituals like the 5am Debrief, the minimum viable day, and brain-dump-to-blueprint planning
The Shadow patterns—Avoider, Pleaser, Restless, Hyper-Achiever—and how they show up in your work and relationships
Honest stories about marriage, parenting, leadership, and the people who carried the load while you were still flying blind
If you’re a late-diagnosed professional, a partner who loves one, or anyone trying to build something meaningful with the brain you actually have—this book will help.
You’re not flying blind anymore. It’s time to build your instruments.
Flying Without Instruments
Flying Without Instruments is part memoir, part practical guide, and part late-life reckoning with what it means to discover the name for your own mind after decades of simply surviving it. Rance Johnson writes about being diagnosed with ADHD at sixty-two, after a long career in IT, the Air Force, family life, crisis management, and the strange private shame of feeling both highly capable and constantly under-equipped. From there, the book becomes an argument for using AI, specifically his “Kemosabe,” as a thinking partner rather than a shortcut. Through stories of 5 am brain dumps, impulsive domain-name temptations, unread recipe folders, the steady love of his wife Kathy, and the hard loss of his “Fixer” identity, Johnson builds a case for self-knowledge as the real instrument panel.
What I liked most about this book is how lived-in it feels. Johnson doesn’t write about ADHD as a tidy diagnosis or AI as a gleaming productivity miracle. He writes from the kitchen table, with dogs snoring nearby, coffee cooling, and a whole life behind the sentence. That gives the book its best texture. The scenes that stayed with me weren’t the frameworks, useful as they are, but the human particulars: Ruckus snoring like a bear cub, the midnight urge to buy another domain name, the quiet image of Kathy organizing her garage on Easter Sunday, the old third-shift IT nights where he learned to sit with broken systems until they spoke. There’s real emotional intelligence in the way he connects those moments to the larger ideas. The writing can be plainspoken, but it often lands with surprising grace because Johnson trusts memory, and he understands that a life is made legible through details.
I also appreciated the book’s honesty about AI’s shadow side. It would’ve been easy for this to become a breathless pitch for a tool or a course, but the stronger idea here is more nuanced: AI can either become scaffolding or another beautifully lit rabbit hole. I found that distinction persuasive. The “Shadows” framework, with the Avoider, Restless, Pleaser, Controller, and Hyper-Achiever, gives the book a useful vocabulary without making it feel clinical. I didn’t mind the practical turns, but I did feel the memoir sections, especially “The Fixer” and “When the Ground Fell Out,” had a richer pulse than the more instructional passages. When Johnson writes about Lou, Alex, Nellie, Sparrow, and the grandchildren whose names become future trails, the book breathes more deeply.
I felt like Flying Without Instruments is less about AI than about finally refusing to mistake struggle for failure. That’s its quiet power. It’s a warm, reflective, sometimes bruised book about building supports without surrendering your own judgment, and about looking back at a hard-won life with more mercy than shame. I’d recommend it especially to adults with ADHD, late-diagnosed readers, partners of people with ADHD, and professionals who’ve spent years being “the capable one” while privately wondering why everything costs so much energy.
Pages: 57 | ASIN : B0GX3B5PFD
