SOLVED with Mark Manson - The Best Thing About You is Also the Worst Thing

Episode Date: February 25, 2026

A Hungarian doctor discovered that handwashing saves lives, and was destroyed for proving it. Michael Jordan’s competitiveness made him a legend, then turned him into a prisoner of his own intensity. My ADHD nearly derailed my life and later became the foundation of my career. This video explores an uncomfortable truth: the traits that make you exceptional are often the same ones that create your biggest problems. The real question isn't “How do I change?” but “Is this worth it, and how do I manage it?” For practical, science-based advice each week that might change your life, sign up for my newsletter here: http://bit.ly/3JRg3NX Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get 7 days free at ⁠https://www.purpose.app Check out our sponsor: Get one month of BrainFM free with my link: https://go.brain.fm/idgaf Written & Directed by Mark Manson Edited by Daniel Johnson Director of Photography Jess Choi Thumbnail by Jonathan Sippel Follow Mark Mark’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content, the books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, It gives you specific personalized direction. So check it out.

You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose.com. Hey, everybody, it's Mark here. So this episode is going to be a little bit different. It's a little shorter, a little more personal, less of a discussion, and more of me just thinking out loud

about something that's been rattling around in my head for a little while. I've been wanting to try something a little bit more raw on this feed and today felt like the right time. Because today, I want to talk about 80s. More specifically, I want to talk about why ADHD might be both the best thing and the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I also want to talk about a question that has haunted me since I was about 15 years old. Because here's the thing that nobody really tells you. The traits that hold you back the most, they are often the same exact traits that make you exceptional.

So the trick isn't necessarily to fix yourself. It's to, well, it's to do something else. So without further ado, here are some of the lessons that I've taken from ADHD. When I was 15 years old, my grades were terrible. My room was a mess. I stayed up all night playing video games, and I slept through half my classes. That year, I was diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication. And it worked.

My grades went up. My room got clean, the video games turned off, and I could sit through an entire class without my brain wandering off to some random thought about whether fish get thirsty or what would happen if gravity reversed for exactly one second. But something else happened too, which is that my interests narrowed, my social life quieted. I became quite functional, productive, and completely uninterested in most things that I used to be interested in. I just figured that this is what growing up was, trading spontaneity for grades, the messiness

for metrics. But then one day, one of my teachers pulled me aside. He asked me about my ADHD meds and how I was feeling. I thought I was fine, but he wasn't satisfied. He said, look, Mark, it's great that you're making an A in my class, but you're not the same. You've lost your sense of humor, your creativity, your funny and weird perspectives. And I didn't know what to say. I just kind of sat there blankly nodding at him because he was right.

But then he asked me a question that I'd never considered before. Are you sure this is worth it? That question and that teacher ended up changing my life. But it's taken me over two decades to figure out why. In this video, I'm going to talk about why ADHD may actually be the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm going to talk about how our biggest handicaps are often also secretly our biggest strengths. We'll look at why society quietly tries to prevent us from being exceptional and whether the goal in any situation should be fixing yourself or simply learning to manage who you already are.

This one's going to get a little bit deep and very personal, so get ready. But first, let's talk about washing your hands. It's Vienna 1847. Women are dying. One in six mothers who deliver babies at the doctor's ward in the Vienna General Hospital are dead within days. And worse, the death is horrific. They called it childbed fever. And no one could explain what was wrong.

That's just the way it is, people said. This is just what happens sometimes. But here's what made Vienna strange. There happened to be a second maternity ward in the same hospital. Except instead of staffed by doctors, this second war, was staffed by midwives. And what was even weirder, in the second ward, the mothers rarely died. Word got around, and women would scream and beg to be admitted to the midwives ward instead

of the doctor's ward. Some even opted to give birth in the street rather than be treated by the doctors in the hospital. Until a Hungarian doctor by the name of Ignes Simmelweis arrived. Ignis was stubborn, disagreeable, combative, obsessive about details that everyone else found tedious. He immediately annoyed the other doctors. These traits often made him difficult to work with, but they also helped him figure out the mystery of the dying mothers. He started by tracking data, something that no one else did at the time.

He ran through every possible variable. Women in the midwives ward gave birth on their sides. Women in the doctor's ward gave birth on their backs. So he changed the positions. No effect. Then his friend died. A colleague named Jacob Kalechka nicked himself with a scalpel during an autopsy. Within days, he developed the same symptoms as the women dying of childbed fever, same progression, same horrific death.

And then something clicked for Simmelweis. Medical students started their mornings in the autopsy room, cutting open the women who had died the day before. Then they walked directly into the maternity ward to deliver babies. They didn't stop and wash their hands because nobody understood what germs were yet. Nobody thought they needed to. Midwives didn't do autopsies. Midwives weren't carrying death from one patient to the next. Next, Sybilweis instituted a very simple protocol.

Stop and wash your hands in chlorinated lime solution before touching any patient. Within months, the death rate from the doctor's ward dropped from 18% to under 2%. He had solved it. And then his life completely fell apart. The medical establishment at the time rejected his findings. They were, well, offended. The idea that doctors, educated elite gentlemen of science were killing their patients with their own bare hands. This was unthinkable, a mockery.

They dismissed his data outright. And here's where Simmelweis' gift became his curse. The same stubbornness that let him see what others couldn't, it made him incapable of diplomacy. He refused to publish his findings for 13 years because he thought it was self-evident. When he finally did write a book, it was so rambling and paranoid, nobody wanted to read it. He wrote open letters to his colleagues publicly calling them murderers. He made so many enemies that he was kicked out of the hospital and tricked into checking into a mental institution. And then when he realized what was happening, he tried to escape.

The guards beat him, put him in a straight jacket, and locked him in a cell. Two weeks later, Ignis Simmelweis was dead. The cause? An infected wound on his hand. He died because the doctors who treated him had not washed their hands. The story of Simmelweis illustrates something that I think about often. The best thing about a person is also usually the worst thing. Simmelweis discovered what would later be understood as germ theory because he was stubborn, disagreeable, and detail-obsessed.

Those traits were not incidental to his genius. They were his genius. Someone more diplomatic, more willing to go along with consensus. More concerned with fitting in likely never would have tracked the data in the first place. He never would have run so many obnoxious experiments. He never would have kept pushing when everyone told him to stop. But those same traits of genius also made it impossible for. for Simmelweis to spread his own discovery.

His combativeness alienated the people he needed to convince, and his stubbornness made him incapable of strategic compromise. But really quick, this video is brought to you by Brain FM. And look, if you've got ADHD like me, you already know the struggle. You sit down the work and suddenly you're 13 pages deep researching whether octopus's dream or not. They might, actually, it turns out, which would suggest a lot about theory of mind and the nature of consciousness. But anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, I've tried everything to focus.

So lo-fi playlist, study with me videos, white noise, brown noise, that one 10-hour fireplace loop. Look, nothing sticks. My brain just like eats background noise for breakfast. But then I found Brain FM. And it's not just another productivity playlist. This is actually patented technology backed by the National Science Foundation. Their music is literally engineered to sync with your brain in boost focus.

They claim 119% increase in focus brain waves within the first five minutes. And for my ADHD brain, it's the closest thing I've found to a cheat code yet. They've got a deep work mode, a creative flow mode, and of course, my personal favorite, turbo. Now, Brain FM is giving a free 30-day trial to Mark Manson viewers to go to brain.fm. Yes, that stands for exactly what you think it does. Link is in the description. Check it out. You cannot separate Simmelweis' genius from the Simmelweis of the Impossible Colleague.

They're the same person. In this pattern shows up everywhere. The mother who gives so much of herself to her family that she builds these incredible deep bonds, but loses herself in the process. On the one hand, she needs better boundaries and better self-care. On the other hand, it's her constant selflessness that makes her such a powerful force in the lives of her family. Or the founder who works a hundred-hour work weeks and builds an empire, but destroys his own marriage and barely knows his kids.

It's easy to look at him and say that he needs work-life balance, but the empires never would have been built with balance. Or the artist whose sensitivity lets them create work that moves people to tears, but who is so sensitive to the world around them that they struggle to function in ordinary life. We may say that they need to relax and be more grounded, but no brilliant piece of art has ever been created by a grounded mind. We tend to talk about these traits as if they are separate,

like you could keep the good part of a person and just fix the bad part. But I would argue that you can't. After my conversation with my teacher, I wrestled with the question of ADHD all summer. The next school year, I got off my medication. My grades promptly dropped. My room became a fucking mess. And I was forgetful, impulsive, constantly bored and playing video games until 3 a.m. once again. But I was back to my funny, creative, and weird self.

And I was happy again. In university, I developed a set of protocols for myself, odd ways of studying that seemed to work for my brain and helped me at least get by. But once I got out into the real world, my ADHD actually began the shine. See, I get bored incredibly easily. Ideas feel old to me quicker than most, so I defined new and interesting ways to express the same thing. My endless need for novelty drove me into studying more and more strange subjects, trying to connect them and make associations where others didn't. It caused me to try building new and weird businesses, travel to strange uncharted places.

The same traits that held me back in school were the exact same traits that made me so successful in my career. Today, I'm comfortable with high levels of risk. I have no problem in awkward social situations. I don't mind looking ridiculous in public or on YouTube. And I'm willing to express ideas that other people are either scared to admit or would never consider in the first place. And I became good at these things, not because I decided. to, but because my ADHD necessitated it. Yet, I still pay the costs. I struggle with boredom constantly. I over drank and over partied for many, many years. I lose patience with people

quickly, am often distracted, become obsessive about obscure topics, and have a tendency to start 10 projects and complete none of them. Because the traits that are your greatest gifts are also likely the cause of your downfall. The talents that make you special are also probably the extremities that cause your problems. What causes your successes will also, likely cause your failures. The best thing about you is probably also the worst thing. Our most prominent traits have an inherent trade-off to them. Yet our culture doesn't really acknowledge this. It wants us to retain our best traits while refusing to acknowledge our worst. And that, I would argue, has huge consequences. The diagnostic and statistical manual mental

disorders, or the DSM, is the Bible of psychiatry. It's the book that defines what counts as a mental illness and what does not. And if you look at its history, something very interesting happens. For example, homosexuality was in the DSM until 1973. It was officially considered a mental disorder. Then, after years of activism and shifting cultural attitudes, it was voted out, not because of some new scientific discovery, but because society changed its mind about two dudes fucking. Or consider Drapetomania. This was a diagnosis given to enslave people in the 1800s who had the disorder of wanting to escape captivity. The treatment, of course, was whipping them.

In the late 19th century, women who were overly emotional and disobedient to their husbands were often diagnosed with a disorder called hysteria. Cures included forced bed rest, social isolation, and dildos. Lots and lots of dildos. Now, these sound really absurd now. Obviously, those weren't real disorders. But how do we know that our current categories are any different? ADHD has probably existed in some shape or form forever.

There have always been people whose brains work this way. They're distractible, impulsive, constantly seeking novelty and unable to focus on things that didn't interest them for long periods of time. And for most of human history, these people weren't sick. They were probably hunters or explorers, the ones who noticed the rustle in the bushes while everyone else was focused on the task at hand. But then we built schools. And schools need kids to sit still to focus on one thing for hours and hours at a time. time to move through material at the same pace as everyone else. Schools need humans to be legible. That means they need to be predictable, manageable, easy to measure. And suddenly, the brain that was an

asset for tens of thousands of years suddenly becomes a liability. And so in the 1990s, ADHD diagnoses exploded. Not because there were suddenly more ADHD brains, but because there were suddenly more environments that could not tolerate them. Now, the medication from my ADHD diagnosis temporarily helped fit my brain into the environment I was stuck in. But later, once I changed the environment to better fit my brain, I ended up flourishing. Which raises the question, what deserves labeling as a diagnosis, and what doesn't? Isn't the DSM-5 as much cultural as it is scientific? After all, mental health is really just being able to adapt and function well in one's

environment. Therefore, it would make sense that psychiatry, therapy, and self-help are focused primarily on sanding away the extremes of people's personalities. as those are the traits that are least likely to fit in. And when you don't fit in, the message is clear. There's something wrong with you. You need to be fixed. You need to be medicated.

You need to be therapist. But when you sand away the worst elements of someone's personality, chances are you're also going to undermine their best elements as well. The traits that make you inconvenient, the distractibility, the intensity, the inability to just go along with things, those might actually be the exact same traits that in a different environment make you exceptional,

a one of one. So the question isn't whether your brain is normal. The question is whether you're in an environment that lets your brain be an asset rather than a liability. I remember reading a piece about Michael Jordan a number of years ago. Jordan, for those of you who don't care about basketball, is the greatest basketball player of all time and one of the greatest athletes in modern sports history. He was a once-in-a-generation talent who won literally fucking everything he ever tried. And what's more, he was a famous asshole.

People could not stand him. His teammates couldn't stand him. His coaches couldn't stand him. His own family, by all accounts, often couldn't stand him. Yeah, let's not get it wrong. He was an asshole. He was a jerk. Hey, try not to be dogs for you tonight, dog.

For one time, come out, raise the plate. He was intense, obsessive, compulsively competitive, and he worked harder than anyone else before him or since. Jordan has been pretty private since his retirement, but when he turned 50, he let a reporter follow him around for a few days and do a piece on him. It was called Jordan at 50. And as a lifelong Michael Jordan fan, I can tell you,

reading it was actually very sad. Because Jordan at 50 still believed he could play in the NBA. He still went to team's practices and talked shit to the players. He was still trying to play against them. He was trying to get down to his playing weight. I mean, you know, honestly, I wish I can take a magic pill, put on shorts, and go out and play. the game of basketball today

because that's who I am. When not talking shit the current players, he was up in his office, watching every NBA game, talking shit about every coach, every team, every decision, every shot.

His competitive intensity was nearly sociopathic and he clearly did not know how to turn it off. But saddest of all, he spent his free time compulsively playing Candy Crush on his iPad for hours and hours every single day. At one point,

he bragged to the report that he had one of the highest scores in the world and that he thought was some more practice, he could soon be the number one candy crush player. This neurotic competitiveness, the thing that made him arguably the greatest basketball player ever, didn't retire when he did. It just found new targets. And when you're no longer competing at the highest level of a professional sport, that same intensity starts to look less like greatness and more like a prison.

And this is the thing that nobody tells you about your superpower, whatever it may be. The intensity that makes you great at one thing doesn't stay in its lane. If you're not careful, it will bleed into the other areas of your life and potentially derail them. The obsessiveness that builds companies can destroy relationships. The sensitivity that creates great art can make ordinary life unbearable. The drive that produces achievement can curdle into anxiety when there's nothing left to achieve. So after I quit my medication at 16, I thought I had some things figured out. Be yourself. Embrace the care. chaos, learn some study habits, bro. Problem solved. I was wrong. For the next two decades,

I ran away from my own brain. I dove into self-help, reading every book, trying every system, convinced that if I just found the right framework, I could optimize myself into someone who didn't struggle with these sorts of things, someone who could focus when they needed to, someone whose brain didn't feel like a browser with 47 tabs open and music playing from one of them that you couldn't find. And when the self-help didn't work, I tried. meditation. I tried healing. I tried therapy, psychedelics, trauma work. The assumption being that something was broken and needed to be repaired or at least needed to be optimized. That if I could just find the wound and fix things, then I'd be normal. I'd be better than normal. I'd be fucking amazing.

I could fix the negative sides of myself and maintain the positive. But none of that worked. So I just ended up trying to escape. I traveled incessantly. I partied all the time. I was just a fucking hedonic mess. If I couldn't fix my brain, maybe I just outrun it. Or maybe I'd just drown it in a bunch of alcohol. Meanwhile, during all this, I was compulsively doing all the things that ADHD people do. Compulsively working, compulsively drinking, compulsively partying, compulsively fucking. Much of my life was out of control.

Yet I had deluded myself to thinking I was totally in control. None of it worked because all of it was based. on the same assumption, that there was something fundamentally wrong that needed to be changed, to be fixed, or to be improved. And it wasn't until I was almost 40 years old that I finally realized that my high school teacher was actually asking something much more profound. He didn't say, you should quit the medication mark. He also didn't say ADHD is a gift, it's a superpower. What he actually asked was far more profound. He asked, is it worth it? And underneath that question, question was an even deeper one. If you're going to be like this for the rest of your life,

shouldn't you figure out how to manage it? Most self-help subtly reinforces the assumption that there's something about you that must be changed, that there's something broken needing to be fixed, that with enough work and enough healing and enough optimization, you can become someone fundamentally different. But what if that's not true? What if the goal isn't to change who you are, but rather successfully manage who you are. To put yourself in environments where you're most adapted to excel, what if instead of trying to eliminate your extremes, you built a life that could leverage them?

What it's taken me nearly 20 years to learn is that I need guardrails, like a lot of them, which sucks because my mind hates guardrails. My mind, when left to its own devices, wants to stay up all night binging video games and then invite everyone over for an orgy before doing a cannonball into a swimming pool full of cocaine. My mind, when left to its own devices, wants to watch a seven-part docu-series about whales instead

of finishing this video. My mind, when left to its own devices, wants to do something excessively weird on camera right now for the simple reason that it will be novel and interesting and will break up the monotony of simply existing for a few moments. But the guardrails I have leveraged my talents. They optimize my propensity for boredom and distraction, and they make me a better version of me, rather than a version of myself that I hardly recognize. So when you think of the worst aspects of yourself, ask yourself, what if this is actually

the best part of me? And then what does that life look like? My high school teacher's question changed my life, not because it gave me an answer, but because it taught me to ask the right question. Because that's probably a happier and healthier version of you, a more genuine version of you, and a more honest version of you, because the goal isn't to fix yourself. It's to understand the tradeoff inherent in who you already are and put yourself in the environment that maximizes that potential. Because good grades are nice, a clean room is nice, fitting in is nice. But the question is, are they worth it?

Hey, everybody, so if you like this format, the shorter, more personal thing, please let me know. Drop a comment, send us an email. If you hated it, also let us know because, well, we read everything. And by we, I mean, my team. I'm a fragile, fragile, delicate creature, and any criticism will just completely derail me. We're always experimenting here at Mark Manson headquarters. Arguably, we experiment too much, and that's probably because I have ADHD. But the point is that we're always trying to make something better.

We're always trying to give you more valuable, interesting information and stories. So we want this feed to be something that actually helps you every single week, helps you think about your life, helps you situate yourself in the world, make better decisions, and just be more educated on who you are as a person. So please, tell us what works for you, tell us what doesn't work for you,

and as always, thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.