Rick, I love your videos too; it was thanks to someone’s link to your Old Spice commercial – which I loved – that I first wandered over here. Please make lots more.
Toofat, like many here, I’ve enjoyed what you’ve had to say on a number of topics. So much so, in fact, that when I saw your response to my post began with the words “Quizzical – what the hell???” I got a terrible sinking feeling, and it just kept on plummeting as I read on; In your post I was seeing myself reflected back as a horrible, judgmental person, and I began to wonder how many others were silently nodding their heads in agreement.
I can’t really argue back that I wasn’t being judgemental; after all, there I was saying Ed Hallowell was egotistical. And, yes, I was saying it like it was a bad thing.
So it may sound odd when I say I meant well. Your song quote above captures it perfectly: I actually had good intentions in talking about Ed Hallowell’s attitude, and ended up being – and feeling deeply – misunderstood. I’m sure it’s because I didn’t take the time or the keystrokes to fully flesh out my little thought.
In fact, it’s rather ironic, but I realize now that when I begin anything with the words “Here’s a thought,” well, that’s probably a good signal that I actually should stop and think a little more before I go on…. 
So what were my good intentions? I was trying to somehow deflate the initial poster’s idea that successful ADDers are a bad thing, I guess. I wanted to open the door to those of us here who may be accomplished in the ways he describes but might still want to talk about their challenges. I was hearing so much pain in the initial rant, that someone would feel so low, would have been brought down so hard by frustration that the accomplishments of others could torment him to that degree. I wanted to say to him, Hey, you don’t have to see success as a finger in your eye.
So I was looking for another avenue, some other peg to hang the anger on, something a little less global, something more specific and thus more easily avoided. So I focused on one of the few specific things he mentioned: Ed Hallowell’s book. And I thought, maybe the ranter just isn’t into something about the presentation style.
Which I saw, and, OK, I still see, as self-promotional, but no, I actually don’t think that self-promotion is a bad thing. It’s a life skill, actually, in this day and age. The road I never should have gone down was Is he egotistical? Because it’s so subjective you can pick different words and put a completely different spin on it, and yet still be talking about the same behavior, as you point out.
This is all the worse for me to talk about because I actually liked Ed Hallowell, the person, so much when I read his book that I was all ready to send him an e-mail telling him all about how deeply I related to what he had to say. He even said in his book that he loved e-mails from readers. So I was all ready to send him one, to say thank you, and ask his advice, and so on. I was sorry I didn’t live in Boston so I could go to his treatment center. That’s how convinced I was that he was on my wavelength.
So I went to his web site looking for the address, and noticed he had a lot of books for sale, and that he also had a lot of videos posted of his appearances on TV shows, and I realized that they were of course appearances made in order to promote his book. I watched one or two of them, and he just started to look like a lot of people who write self-help books and go on the talk shows, and the air started to leak out of my giddy we’re-on-the-same-wavelength notion. I abandoned the idea of the e-mail, went on to read other books, some by him, some by others. Some were useful, some were not, we’ve all been there, we all have different experts we favor, it may be one person or many. I still count Hallowell as someone whose information is useful to me.
The fact that at times I can’t relate to his – ego? confidence? – says as much about me as about him. I’ve had HUGE issues with lack of confidence and my reluctance and discomfort with self-promotion – enough to fill a book, I’m sure.