My “mindset” (if you can call it that) is that most people don’t get much experience tackling hard problems, at least up through school. In light of that, what I would “advocate” is that people should try to get practice working on problems at their current level of stamina/ability (which might be very low), and slowly work their way up, instead of beating themselves up when a problem much more difficult than what they were used to seemed like an impossible challenge.

Maybe you can elaborate about what “mindset” you were thinking of, and why it came close to breaking you? I suspect you were misunderstanding my intended message, and that the “mindset” you are imagining is pretty far from my own set of beliefs.

Note that before I was not advocating anything; only stating an observation that most people don’t get much practice tackling hard problems, and that people with or without ADHD can have difficulty tackling hard problems. Do you think that is inaccurate? It seems pretty uncontroversial to me. I know a lot of people who have difficulty with hard problems, and some of them definitely don’t have ADHD.

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I am taking care of a 3.5 year old full time, so I’ll give you some relevant examples from that context:

If I try to read a book aloud which is much too hard for him (say a novel pitched at teenagers), he gets bored and wanders away. But his attention span, vocabulary, grammar, etc. are gradually improving, so the books he understands now (e.g. Pippi Longstocking, The Cricket in Times Square) are much more sophisticated than the books he could understand a year ago (e.g. Henry and Mudge, Frog and Toad), which are in turn much more sophisticated than the books he was interested in a year before that (e.g. Go Dog Go, The Very Hungry Caterpillar).

If we try to work on some 1-player logic puzzle games, the ones that say “age 7+” on the box are currently too difficult for him and he gets bored/frustrated and wants to do something else. The ones that say “age 5+” are pretty good, and he can do them with some external help. The ones that say “age 3+” are getting to be easy by now, and he can do them independently.

If we go out to practice balancing on a vehicle, a 2-wheeled scooter is now getting to be okay if we go carefully, but 6 months ago it was too difficult and therefore very frustrating. A year ago, he was just starting to figure out the (pedal-free) balance bike, and now he can zoom around on it. If I tried to get him to ride a skateboard I predict he would fall off and not want to try (heck, that’s probably what I would do if I tried to ride a skateboard).

One of my son’s friends has no experience with a balance bike, and is embarrassed to try in front of anyone, because my son (who has more than a year of practice) can zoom all around, whereas any kid just starting finds it to be a great challenge. But the same kid can swing across the monkey bars, something my son cannot, because that’s something that boy has practiced for a few months.

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Activities like writing computer programs, playing music, writing essays, playing sports, cooking, etc. are similar: they require many challenging skills which must be slowly built up over the course of years of practice, and are very daunting for someone who is unprepared. The way to get better at these is to start at your current level and practice, in a playful and low-pressure environment, slowly improving until you can handle high-level challenges.

And the same is true of meta skills which apply to many domains like searching and reading academic literature in a field you are unfamiliar with, coming up with a few choices of high-level problem solving strategies and then picking one to apply, breaking the problem solving process down into smaller manageable chunks until you get down to a chunk small enough to just dive in, taking organized notes, trying many small examples when you don’t yet have a solid conceptual understanding, finding and tackling a simpler related problem instead, stopping occasionally while working to check if you’re making progress and if the current strategy still seems promising, recognizing that you are badly stuck and finding the right person to ask for help ...