“My Life as an Amphibian,” a weekly column in ATTR on my personal development as a communications professional in Silicon Valley. Journey begins in 1999 — a couple of years before the dotcom bust. This is the first full installment. Subject: my medicinal and technical introduction to Silicon Valley.

Before my life in marketing, I toiled as a ghostwriter, then slaved as a theatre producer. At the end of my second career, I was, for the first time in my life, deeply interested in learning how to make money. As one of my colleagues used to say, the theatre business isn’t a business at all. It’s more like a charity. Especially if you are on the production side; the last two years for me were perhaps the most enjoyable, but they were also — as people in my current life like to say — the most cash-flow negative. I had fun, learned a lot, but it was time to get out. It was time to make a living.

But it was not an easy transition. My situation wasn’t nearly as bad as many actor friends of mine who swore they had no other marketable skills. To become a producer — even in the small-professional theatre world, the slice of the theatre market that I found myself in — requires that you master many skills, some of which are highly marketable. Like PR. To get people to come to my 99-seat theatre in Berkeley required that I learn how to speak to the press. For the press in theatre, to a degree unknown in many other markets, can make or break a show almost instantly. I got good, really fast. But after several successes, I learned something about myself that I really didn’t like. I didn’t just get good at PR; I was good at PR. And so when I began pondering what to do with the rest of my life, I reflected on that epiphany I had mid-career in theatre. And I recall meeting with a very unpleasant PR pro in the middle of my theatre company’s most successful production. He had no idea what I did for the production — the role of producer is mysterious to almost all outsiders — but he was impressed with the reception from the media. I remember — no I rue — the day — he sat with me at a bar after a sensational turnout. It was like he was talking a young-un, someone he was trying to recruit to his agency. “Hey, you could actually become a PR guy,” said he brightly.

This was the late 90’s, when many people my age and younger were making more money than they ever imagined, stoking the machinery of the dotcom boom. I met a lot of people working on the softer side of business — design, marketing, communications — and I thought, why not give it a go? How much does one really need to know to become and marketing or PR “professional.” My arrogance was not entirely misguided. But I rushed into this world without ever really understanding the questions or the implications of my decision. Questions like, “what, in fact, do I know about PR,” “could I ever be happy doing this work,” “let’s say I learn that I am good at it — will I ever be able to leave?” I had no illusions about getting shackled by golden handcuffs. I was thinking, after so many years of self-induced poverty, almost any amount of money would handcuff me.

But there was something else. I was largely unaware of it, but it was apparent to my wife, who got to see the masterful producer for what he was really was at home — someone who struggled to keep up with the simplist details of adult life. Emphasis on struggled, because I almost always got things done, but at an unusually high cost. There was seldom a day when I’d come home and didn’t complain that I was tired. Things got done either too late in the day, or things got done because my wife was kind enough to do them for me (an unconscious coping strategy for me, and of course unfair to my wife). With the help of some people who knew better, we developed a theory: perhaps I had Adult ADD. I wasn’t quite buying it — this was a time when practically everyone in the Bay Area was self-diagnosing and reaching the same conclusion — but it was interesting, and the symptoms, if not the label, felt right. I was about to look for work in Silicon Valley. I owed it to myself to find out what was up. Taking a job in the Valley — a place that was at least partly responsible for the distractions that makes life so hard for people with ADD — had to be a terrible idea if I in fact I had ADD. Right? Cut me some slack — I didn’t really know the place.

The Colonel

Turns out that Silicon Valley is swarming with ADD types. Emphasis on types because ADD is not really a condition, but a spectrum of conditions. If you are thirty-something or younger, chances are you knew the kids on this spectrum by name. They were ADHD — if they were smart hyperactive screw-ups– or just ADD, if they very smart screw-ups of a more subtle yet equally tragic variety. If you are over 40-something or older, chances are you grew up knowing the same kids, but not by name. You probably just knew they were different.

The doctor I visited in the summer of 1999 — in a non-descript medical-professional strip mall in Belmont, California (which sits on the northernmost tip of the Valley) — was of the older generation. He struggled through elementary school, middle school, high school, and medical school, never understanding why he had to work so much harder than everyone else around him. He didn’t work harder on the things that most people found difficult — he was great at math, sciences, and other things that require a facility for abstraction. It was the little things — or littler things — that made life so difficult for him. Like showing up to class on time. Like remembering people’s names. Like putting on his shoes — from the same pair — in the morning. He became a famous ADD doctor — highly recommended by someone close to me and my wife — and a legend in Silicon Valley, though few of his patients will reveal his name. Not because it would expose the patients as ADD people, but because revealing would be rude. The doctor was a gentleman, the furthest thing from rude. He spoke in a hard-to-exactly-place Southern accent, appeared to wear the same suit every time you visited, sported a well-groomed beard, clean, snow-white, cut with a flair. On the right day, he looked just like Colonel Sanders. I will respect the doctor’s anonymity — kinda — and call him the Colonel. I owe him that respect. I may have been his last patient.

When we first met, the Colonel was in retirement. He had diagnosed, advised, and treated many people in the Valley — of course, never disclosing their names — but if you do know the place, you might take some guesses on the kinds of people who sat with him in Belmont. He was a doctor for technology executives, and he came with some technology of his own. The Colonel put me through trials and tests on a number of ancient ADD-detecting instruments. Cannot remember them all, but these were the standouts:

–A series of multiple-choice exams designed to detect ADD-like sentiment and behavior. There were many odd questions — designed deliberately to be odd I am sure.

–A strange exercise where I sat next to the Colonel and he asked me to close my eyes. He then took my hand and guided it in an elliptical orbit asking me what I saw in the room if I had the vantage point of a tiny person sitting on my index finger.

And, of course, there were many, many conversations. The Colonel was a psychiatrist, and despite his attachment to the ancient tests — a throwback to a time when machines did as much of the analysis as humans — he was still an adherent to “the talking cure.” He gave me my diagnosis on the fifth week.

“Giovanno.” He never got my name right. “You could have been a fighter pilot.”

That felt good. I had aced the lights-and-trigger test. But I suspected it was too late for a military career.

“There’s good news and bad news,” he cleared his throat, then looked at me steadily (perhaps readying to reveal his recipe of 11 herbs and spices). My heart lept.

“First the bad news. You have ADD … and I think you are depressed. I am going to prescribe two kinds of medication.”

I was not surprised. I suspected something was wrong a few weeks back when he shook his head reviewing my answers to the multiple-choice exams. He had sighed a few times.

“But the good news. You think in pictures.”

He beamed now. I got the feeling that this really meant something to the Colonel. I got the feeling he was speaking about himself.

“This is good. There are a few things you can do that most people can’t do.” Then more soberly: “Problem is that there are many things that you can’t do as easily as others can.”

The Colonel showed me a diagram of the brain and explained. People with ADD, it turns out, have a big shortage of something that forces them to work harder. But whether as a result of overcompensation, or through divine justice, people with ADD tend to be better at things like synthesis, abstraction, and “thinking in pictures.”

I walked away from the Colonel’s office with two prescriptions and a few difficult-to-evaluate ideas about what to do next. But I did decide to move forward with a career in Silicon Valley, knowing that there might be issues. And I did take the Colonel’s advice and got the two prescriptions filled (more about that later). But what I didn’t see at that time — the summer of 1999, almost exactly ten years ago — was that the Valley would soon provide me with a complex of tools that would both screw me up further and enable me to manage my life more effectively. But it took me a while to say no to drugs and say yes to technology. As I said, I really didn’t know the place.