"If you just apply yourself, you can do anything - so why don't you?"
People with ADD hear the same things over and over again during their lives. First, they're told about how imaginative and creative they are. Then, they're told about how unique they are - how they walk to the beat of their own drummer. As a person matures out of childhood, they have to start proving themselves, and that's when people with ADD start hearing about their deficiencies: they're behind. They're forgetful, lazy, distracted of course, and they seem to always have an excuse, and always want to explain themselves.
"You're not stupid, you're actually really smart!"
After years of feeling terrible about how inadequate their performance is, and wondering why they'd be comfortable with sabotaging themselves out of every opportunity, something comes to a head: those around them are no longer willing to patiently watch the person they love fail at so many things while succeeding at so many others. So some kind of intervention scenario plays out. This usually involves some kind of aptitude testing. The person is then told that, in fact, they're unusually smart and gifted. And what's more, it's not because of any effort that they put in or any quality of their character, it's just because of something that's going on in their brain. So, all their life they've been held responsible for their failings, but when it turns out that they have tremendous abilities, they don't get to pat themselves on the back for it, because it's not their doing.
"You're failing this because it's failing you."
One of the nicer things that educators tell people with ADD is that it's not their fault that they're such a failure, it's the fault of the system for not being able to keep up with them, because they're so unique. This is nice because it takes some of the pressure off the student and allows them to focus on getting what they can out of their school experience, by subverting it on their own terms, but it's cruel because it underscores how mysterious they problem really is. It's just another way of widening the gap between them and the rest of society.
"Now I really have to get it together, because now it matters more."
A little bit of understanding can backfire. As soon as someone realizes that they can perform well when something is important to them, they will try to set up pressure for themselves. Students enter university thinking that perhaps now that the stakes are higher, they can finally perform. But this is based on the assumption that the problem is laziness or something. In fact, people with ADD respond to pressure in the opposite way that other people do. Instead of getting motivated by deadlines, guidelines and structure, people with ADD will get derailed and unproductive. Where a lack of pressure would make other people less motivated and less productive, it puts the ADD mind into high-gear. People with ADD are naturally over-productive, and don't suffer from laziness except in reaction to stress and pressure. For people with ADD, inactivity is a response to that stress.
"What you need is structure, clear instructions, and extra supervision."
Educators and employers struggle with keeping people with ADD productive and on-track, and they get frustrated because it seems like all their strategies and extra attention end up backfiring. They get into this ever-tightening cycle of trying to reign in the person's problems, giving them more and more structure. Instead of removing the unworkable guidelines and codification that most people need in order to work properly, they apply them more and more aggressively. Most people choke when they're presented with a problem to solve, and asked to solve it without being given a step-by-step set of instructions and a structure within which to work, but a person with ADD is uniquely prepared to solve problems without any of these things, and uniquely handicapped to do so otherwise. So in this way, educators and employers tend to turn what could be an easy situation, where they get to just sit back and watch something get fixed, into an unworkable one, where they put up more and more hoops for their person to jump through, and get increasingly amazed at how things seem to get harder when they should be getting easier.
"Don't worry about doing it right."
People with ADD notice problems that others don't. We can see when something is going to be a problem, even if others can't. This is a massive advantage, because it gives us the ability to prevent a lot of resources from being put into something that's going to get derailed by a little detail. But what seems to us like a very reasonable concern ends up looking to other people like paranoia or worry, so we're constantly being told, "don't worry about that for now," in situations where we aren't worried in the first place, just aware of something, and being told not to worry is the thing that becomes worrisome. If we're working with someone who doesn't take our red-flagging seriously, what else are they willing to let go unaddressed?
"You're so capable - if you choose to be."
People always want to make sure that we know that at any point, we could simply decide that we wanted to succeed at anything, and we just have to flick that switch somewhere inside ourselves. People with ADD end up waiting for themselves to just "turn on" and get on with our lives, to commit ourselves to the tasks in front of us, because, as everybody is constantly reminding us, we're so very capable. Even though they know that we didn't decide to have the gifts that we have, the reason we're not successful is because we decided not to apply them properly. So we can't take credit for the things we figure out - they're an artifact of what we are - but we should be held accountable for our failures, which are the result of an attitude problem that stems from who we are.
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