You know I’m proudly neurodivergent. Divergent seems to be the wrong word, because it demonizes the difference. Divergent sounds stiffly contrarian, and while I am, the connotation isn’t fair for everyone. We’ll call it neurodiversity then. A good portion of even why we consider various forms of neurodivergence to be disabilities is because they are no longer adaptive to life.

Dyslexia is a great example. It’s likely you think of it as a reading disability. Dyslexic people are great at pattern recognition, spatial thinking, and visual processing. Sure, it jumbles letters up on a page a little, but that has only been a problem since the invention of the printing press, and for most workers, only since factories started requiring minimal reading skills of workers for safety reasons. That’s thousands of years of civilization, let alone pre-civilized times, when they simply would have been good hunters, not “bad readers.”

Think of neurodiversity like different operating systems – some people run on Windows, others on Mac, and some on Linux. All the money is in PC/Apple, which is the equivalent of society. Linux works great, is more secure, adaptable and can multitask well. Yet it is unlikely you personally chose the divergent one of the mix, because you might have to learn how to adapt to it and no one ever sold you on the advantages.

That is exactly why employers often frown upon neurodiverse hires.

 This includes folks with:

•     ADHD (think: turbo-charged brain with amazing multitasking powers, studies have found they may think twice as fast as people running different mental operating systems)
•     Autism (imagine: next-level pattern recognition and attention to detail, while thinking 40% faster than average who may be socially awkward)
•     Dyslexia (picture: master solvers of 3D puzzles who may take longer to read)

Different isn’t wrong

You might know someone who can also find a missing object, or Waldo in a picture. Maybe they watch a few minutes of a mystery and resolve the show. They’re great at pattern recognition, which could be any of these. It als