The broken cuckoo clock
There are two cuckoo clocks in my house. The exact same clock.
One works. It’s upstairs in my loft, where I work every day. The other one is about as far away from me as you can get and still be inside the same house.
I was teaching at a middle school in North Carolina, and I had just discovered their 3D printer under a sheet. Nobody had used it for years. I was so excited I got deep into 3D printing. My associate’s degree was in computer-aided design technology, where I had learned to write G-code and do 3D modeling and all the things that 3D printing required at the time.
I thought something was wrong with my clock, and I didn’t want to break my own clock, so I originally went looking to have a spare for spare parts. While I was going down this rabbit hole, I was on Facebook Marketplace and I found the exact same clock, except they said it didn’t work. Then it rolled into something much better. I thought, “I really want to take apart a cuckoo clock, see how it works, and then 3D model it and change it so it could work with 3D printing.” I thought it would be the greatest project of all time. Maybe I would sell the plans for it or do a YouTube series on it.
I believe I paid $50 for it. It was wrapped up in bubble wrap. I put it on the shelf. I looked at it, and there it sat. I was interested in it, but I wasn’t committed to it.
My clock turned out to be OK and didn’t need a repair.
The spare was living in a box. It was in a shipping box, and then when we moved, it was in the moving crate, where it sat for 3 years.
Before I knew I had ADHD, I often would buy things that were of interest to me, and sometimes these were expensive things. More often than not, I would start working on them. I’d start doing things, and I wouldn’t finish because, by the time I got through the valley of despair (as they say, the hard part before you jump to a new thing), something else would have inevitably interested me or caught my attention by then. Then I would be off to the new greatest thing.
There’s a lot of these things. I won’t talk about the casting equipment. I’ve spent probably $10,000 on woodworking equipment in order to do some things myself that I could have paid somebody just $1,000 to do. One of the things was I made a toddler tower for my kids, and I probably spent $250 on it when I could have bought one for $500 and used that time towards my business, where it was actually making money.
At the time, I didn’t understand myself.
I first found out I had ADHD when one of my children was diagnosed with it. Actually, more than one of them has it, and we’re open about that. The doctor was going through the list of criteria: daydreaming a lot, losing focus, walking through a door and forgetting what they’re doing. I was arguing with the doctor. I’d be like, “No, no, that’s completely normal. Everyone in my family does that.”
Then I was like, “Oh, wait.”
I had it too. I am also dyslexic and went undiagnosed my whole life, but it ended up being a blessing for me in the end. I believe that ADHD and dyslexia is a super power. It just has a kryptonite.
As somebody with ADHD, and anyone with ADHD can attest, when you see something new that really interests you, your immediate action is to buy it and try to base your whole life around it.
It wasn’t until I understood this deeply about myself that I was able to overcome it. Now I just say, “Okay, Michael, you’re interested in this thing, but it isn’t the focus for today,” and then I move on. If I’m still interested after a long period of time (and the “and” is important here), and it fits within my long-term goals and my short-term goals, or it helps me overcome a constraint in my business, then I will consider it, but I must delay the purchase.
That clock was not aligned with my focus at the time, which was to get my students to be the highest-achieving students in North Carolina. I was focusing my time on building a learning management system for engagement for those kids, which I did and was successful.
I don’t regret the cuckoo clock that still sits there, because of what I was able to accomplish by not doing it. I just regret buying it in the first place, because, at the time, I didn’t understand myself to know that I will always have these shiny object syndromes, and I just got to put them away.
10 years later, I unwrapped it last week. It’s sitting on the workbench in my 3D printer room, where I have vacillated between throwing it out and storing it again. I say that laughing. I’m trying to get up the courage to end that project forever and free that cognitive load, but it’s hard.
As a founder, you really have to focus on the value of your time and the cost of losing focus.
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