Hi, OP, this one seems right up my alley.

What you describe is very much how my life was for most of it. There were other complicating factors in my case, but what you describe was part of it. I have significant executive dysfunction by default, enough so that it nearly killed me in the distant past. And while those struggles are by no means gone or trivial (I am in fact writing this post partly to procrastinate on my work!), they are not things that constantly cripple me anymore.

I'm the founder of my own company that, while it may or may not succeed, at least exists under fairly challenging conditions. I don't feel constantly crippled and scared about my ability to handle basic personal growth. I've lost 135 pounds in the last two years. None of these things were possible in the very recent past. So I feel comfortable saying that I have at least somewhat figured out how to overcome some of my innate tendencies.

Everything that follows is just my own personal observations. They're the "view from the inside" of how I feel about it. I'm not an academic expert on mental health, but what experts can give you from the outside I can give you from the inside. I also strongly recommend considering medication if you've never tried it (it was life-changing for me despite the fact that it only worked for a short time), but I can't help you with that one.

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So, let's start with an observation:

> I feel I've been stuck both cognitively and emotionally at a late-teen stage...constantly flying at 1000 feet.

"Constantly flying at 1000 feet" sounds like inattentiveness. You mention elsewhere you have an ADHD diagnosis, and it's worth thinking about paying attention to your life in the same framing that you think about paying attention to anything else. If it's hard for you to focus on school or relationships or other things, why WOULDN'T it be hard to focus on your own life?

As I wrote that paragraph, I was eating my breakfast, and I realized I hadn't been paying attention to the food I was putting into my mouth. I was trying to do several things at once. I consciously stopped writing and took a slow, deliberate bite to try and refocus my attention on my current situation.

And when you struggle to pay attention to your experiences, of course you struggle to learn from them or recall them. It's no different from struggling in an English class because your eyes keep skipping over paragraphs without really digesting them, or struggling in a math class because you couldn't sit down to memorize a few formulae. (I didn't personally struggle with these things, but that's because they interest me. Anything that didn't was borderline impossible.) Or to use a more abstract analogy, it's like trying to read a blurry whiteboard from far away - your experiences are dulled, softened, greyed out, by the fact that you can't fully experience them in the first place. More precisely, that you don't fully experience them in the first place by default.

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> The older I get with no improvement, the more it feels my goals keep drifting farther away. I want to get fit, I want to read more, I want to develop skills, I want to build relationships, I want to be an entrepreneur.

I currently do three of these things: I'm maintaining a diet after massive weight loss (328 lbs -> 196 as of my last measurement), I've developed many, MANY skills in recent years and in recent months particularly, and I am the solo founder of an early-stage startup. I don't do the other two: rarely read and I have few relationships. But I have to often remind myself that getting even this far is actually a pretty extraordinary achievement. Most people could not do what I do, and even I couldn't have done it in the very recent past. (I'm not even sure I can do it NOW, but I can at least take a reasonable stab at it.)

So the first piece of advice I'd give you is to stop thinking of these things as easy in the abstract. Being an everyday functional human being is already very hard. Losing weight ALONE was a major challenge for me. Growing in my career ALONE was a major challenge for me. And that's normal.

Most people have vices they will never overcome. That's not a horrible failing on their part. It's just the nature of being a human being at all. If you've got a job, a few close friends, keep your home in order, and are basically happy with your daily life, you're doing better than the vast majority of people! EVERYONE has the equivalent of those leftovers in the back of the fridge that you'll totally get to any day now.

All that being said, there's nothing wrong with wanting to do better than the average and to be more than you are. So how can you do that?

Well, for one, your goals are (a) scattered, (b) big, (c) vague, and (d) have ill-defined success criteria. And that's a recipe for killing motivation, even in neurotypical people:

- Because they're scattered, your efforts to get started get distributed across all of them. Rather than roll one boulder up a hill, you're trying to roll five boulders up five hills simultaneously.

- Because they're big, they seem insurmountable and difficult. And the difficulty of a task tilts your motivation towards inaction. "Start a company" was a gigantic impossible task for me six months ago. But "figure out what I think we should sell and get a working website up" was more manageable.

- Because they're vague, it's even harder to connect with concrete actions. You already have trouble focusing on something. But right now you're trying to focus on something that shifts and changes and morphs every time you look at it.

- Because they have ill-defined success criteria, you can't connect with the potential rewards of the action. Note the way you phrase it: you want to "be an entrepreneur", not "found a company". You want to "get fit", not "BE fit". Your thoughts are focused on the task and the challenges of it, not on the rewards at the end. That's a key problem with executive function, which we'll get to more in a moment.

Note that I am not saying "you're doing it wrong" or "you're screwing up and it's your fault you're not acting". This advice is more akin to "you're trying to build muscle but there's no protein in your diet". Your motivation, which is weak by default, is not being fueled with the things that it needs to have in order to work.

That isn't a personal or moral failing on your part. It's a problem with your environment (which I will argue includes your existing thought patterns that you're not consciously enforcing), not with "you", and it's fixable as an environmental problem without you being any less you.

(continued in a comment, this post is too long for HN)