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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Use your strengths
This means giving yourself permission to try things badly and drop them, which is hard if you have been told all your life that you never finish anything. Ten abandoned attempts and one that holds is a good result, not a bad one. Keep the search cheap so that quitting costs nothing: borrow the equipment, go to the taster session, ask a friend if you can watch them do their thing once.
The ways you take differ greatly (Quran 92:4). If the paths genuinely differ, then nobody else's list will tell you which one is yours.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The paper that introduced the classification of character strengths and virtues set it up deliberately as a positive counterpart to psychiatric diagnosis, alongside empirical work validating positive interventions. It made the case that what a person is good at is describable and worth describing, rather than being left to chance while difficulties get all the vocabulary. It offers a framework and some early evidence rather than any instruction about how widely to search.
Seligman ME, Steen TA, Park N, Peterson C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions.. The American psychologist doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
What engages you is too particular to predict, so it has to be found by looking.
A calm, undemanding life is supposed to be the goal, and for a lot of people with ADHD it is quietly unbearable. Comfort does not hold you. Something with a bit of pull to it does.
Some of the low, grey stretches are not depression. They are what happens when there has been nothing on the go for a while, and the colour comes back when a project starts.
A relationship with no friction in it can leave an ADHD partner restless rather than content. A bit of heat is not the same as a bad marriage. What matters is what happens afterwards.