In partnership with

NoScrubs laundry delivery - same day, affordable laundry delivery

• 2-3 hour turnaround - never wait to wear your favorite clothes

• Professionally washed and folded with quality guarantee

• Live laundry free for less than $2 a day!

Sign up now at noscrubs.io

📩 In Today’s Email

•  The Deep Dive: Explorer Brain & the hidden cost of traveling with ADHD

•  The Read: How to ADHD by Jessica McCabe — the book that made me rethink everything I thought I’d “grown out of”

• The Stream: Dr. Ned Hallowell on the surprising advantages of ADHD

📢 Newsletter News

1. We just crossed 150 subscribers — our first big milestone!

2. To celebrate, we released the Digital Nomad Checklist free to all our early supporters. That means, all y’all!

3. Mint has officially shut down. 1 Year Ago. Apologies for the recommendation in last week’s Money Issue but, hey, that fits with this week’s theme.

   • Scrambling for replacements? Here’s a solid roundup: The Best Budgeting Apps to Replace Mint (via Engadget).

   • As Norm Macdonald once said about staying informed:

     “I tweet something, and people tell me I’m wrong. That’s how I get the news.”

🤿 The Deep Dive: Explorer Brain and the Art of Traveling Well

I was diagnosed with ADD before it was cool.

That phrase now sounds like a humblebrag, but trust me, at one point it was certainly not cool.

My first memory? Sitting in a small white office room in a mid-sized building in Houston, staring at a glowing orange square that sometimes lit up to be solid, sometimes didn’t. Click the button when it changes, they said. It felt like the version of Tetris that was rejected on the floors of a Russian computer lab.

So, I passed. Or failed. Or whatever… I was diagnosed.

Now I had these small white pills wrapped in bits of tinfoil, tucked into my pocket at school. I’d take them quietly, in the nurse’s office or the bathroom, trying to hide it.

There was no underground market, yet. Back then, ADD wasn’t viral. It wasn’t quirky or cool. It was something you kept quiet, and hoped was solved.

I grew up on Ritalin and Dexedrine and others — the early prototypes of hocus focus. I stopped medicating before Adderall even hit the scene.

So yeah — I might be the only person in America who’s had ADD (or not had it), gone to college, worked in media, and never taken an Adderall.

Not once.

The Myth of Growing Out of It

In high school, I was constantly late to first period. My shirt untucked. Hair a mess. Friday dress code called for a button-down. I wore a rugby shirt — it had buttons, didn’t it?

Dr. Miller, my yellow-eyeglassed, tweed-suited teacher, was on my case. Which sucked — because I loved that class. English. Of course.

We were studying Mr. Tambourine Man, dissecting the rhythm and the ache inside the metaphor. It wasn’t just lyrics — it was poetry with motion, a kind of coded freedom. I still remember his lecture on the song, how Dylan uses alliteration to a brilliant level that gives the song a dreamlike state, elevating it to art.

I don’t know if the beginning of the song does also; I missed that part of the class (it does). Miller took me into the hallway to berate me until I broke and mentioned ADD.

Something shifted. No punishment. No lecture. He adjusted the way he taught — more rhythm, more movement, more space to think sideways.

He became one of the best teachers I’ve ever had. It was the first time I saw what real understanding looked like — not pity, not leniency. Just… alignment.

I thought I’d outgrown ADD after that. Stopped taking meds freshman year of college. Built systems. Made it work.

But later in life, something cracked open again, or maybe I just sneezed, and all the dust I’d swept under the rug came flooding out.

You don’t outgrow this.

You evolve with it — or you drown.

Explorer Brain: Not a Disorder. A Pattern.

There’s a theory that what we call ADHD today may have once been essential to human survival.

Not everyone in the tribe could afford to be cautious and methodical. Some had to scout. Roam. Notice the flicker of danger before it had a name.

These were the pattern-hunters. The restless ones. The ones who followed a strange sound in the dark — and came back with fire, or food, or a new path forward.

Without Explorer Brains, we might never have crossed oceans or climbed mountains.

Modern nomad life brings that instinct roaring back. You learn languages in fragments. Adapt in motion. Decode a dozen cues at once.

You survive — and thrive — by noticing what others miss.

But Explorer Brain Has a Dark Side

Untamed, it turns inward. It eats itself.

You chase passport stamps like badges in a game.

You treat countries like checkboxes.

You drown in options, paralyzed by abundance.

I know.

Obviously, many also self-medicate and go through drug and alcohol issues. Often learning disabilities come along for the ride. Can get un-cool again real quick.

I sprinted through dozens of countries without even noticing.

Lisbon for lunch? Sure. Pop over the border of Slovenia just to say you did? Got it — you “did” a whole country in an afternoon.

I remember eating grilled sardines in Alfama while checking flights to Berlin. A Fado singer’s voice cut through the alley like a prayer, but I barely heard it. I was already somewhere else.

Oddly, if you’re seeking depth and connection, because you’re wired to crave newness, ADD can stop you from going deeper than the roots of a tumbleweed.

ADHD ≠ “I Feel So Scattered Today”

Let’s clear something up.

Everyone feels a little “ADD” sometimes. That doesn’t mean you have clinical ADHD.

The clinical version wrecks relationships. It destroys routines. It burns through careers.

It’s not quirky. It’s not aesthetic. It’s disorder disguised as energy.

Explorer Brain lives on a spectrum. Some days it’s a gift. Other days, it’s a trapdoor.

The Scariest Thought of All

What if the times you feel happiest… are only a 6 out of 10? But you think it’s a 10 because you have never experienced a 7?

Because you’ve never known what true stillness, clarity, or joy feels like.

Not because you’re broken. Because your brain runs on a different operating system — and no one gave you the manual. And no one built a ramp for you.

Luckily, the times they are a changing.

So Why Does This Matter for Nomads?

We didn’t choose this life just for the photos.

We chose it because we were searching for something:

More freedom.

More connection.

More meaning.

Nomad life works because of Explorer Brain — and in spite of it.

The key is learning to partner with it. Not to suppress it. Not to shame it.

To aim it.

The Real Win

It’s not about how many countries you touch. It’s about how deeply you see — the world, yourself, the moment.

Sometimes, a deep dive is the only way. And ironically, hyperfocus is one of our superpowers.

Build the muscle. Sharpen the lens. Bring back stories worth telling.

🤓 The Read

I thought I had grown out of ADD—until I picked up Jessica McCabe’s book.

One tool that hit me early: you don’t need motivation to take action—action creates motivation. That sounds simple. It’s not. ADHD brains wait for a feeling before doing.

But what if the act itself creates the feeling? What if putting on your shoes is the way to want the walk? That one idea reframed a decade of false starts.

I saw this book on a shelf and thought, “Oh yeah, I used to have that.” The cover looked like homework. Something overly cheerful.

But then I opened it—and it was like someone had taken every scattered note, voice memo, and abandoned Notion board in my brain and turned them into something useful.

Then something essential. Then something direly necessary.

Like a lot of these books, there’s a section at the end with exercises. Most of the time I skip those. They read like filler, or like the author’s editor told them to hit a page count.

But this one, like Noah Kagan’s book on million-dollar solopreneurs, actually delivered.

The exercises weren’t busywork. They helped synthesize everything I’d just read—and more importantly, they made me do something with it.

This book isn’t pretending to be a miracle fix. It’s a flashlight. It lets you see what’s under the hood. Jessica doesn’t lecture or posture.

She talks to you like someone who’s built her own system out of scratch paper and duct tape, failed, rebuilt it, and figured out why certain strategies actually work.

Her real gift isn’t the tools—it’s the why behind them. Why emotional dysregulation shows up. Why time feels abstract. Why forgetting doesn’t mean you’re careless.

She includes quotes and confessions from other people with ADHD throughout the book—some funny, some painfully familiar. It creates this group-text kind of vibe, like you’re not the only one who feels like a fraud with 18 open tabs, 4 active alarms going off, and 5 different types of drinks on your desk.

Yep, that’s a sign…

For me, this book did something uncomfortable: it showed me how much I’ve been compensating. I’ve built elaborate systems to function “well enough.”

But this made me realize I need to go back to home base and start over. Look at what I’ve missed. Look at what I’ve buried.

If I have one critique—it’s the “ADHD strengths” section at the end. It’s presented like a bingo card, and while it’s a fun gesture, it deserved more depth.

That’s why I’ve included a stream from Dr. Ned Hallowell alongside this, to explore the positive traits more seriously.

Not because we need a gold star, but because sometimes you need a rope out of the quicksand.

Bottom line: How to ADHD is not a pep talk. It’s not a lecture. It’s a guide that meets you exactly where you are—and hands you something real to work with.

🍿 The Stream

Dr. Ned Hallowell on ADHD Strengths

If How to ADHD helps you understand the daily how, Dr. Ned Hallowell helps you reframe the why.

A Harvard-trained psychiatrist and bestselling author, Hallowell has spent decades redefining ADHD—not as a deficit, but as a different kind of brain with its own advantages.

He’s not shy about the challenges, but he insists we don’t stop there.

In these two videos, Hallowell breaks down the positive traits often hiding beneath the symptoms: creativity, hyperfocus, resilience, entrepreneurial drive.

If you’ve ever needed permission to see your ADHD as potential instead of pathology, this is it.

→ Watch: ADHD’s Negative and Positive Traits

→ Watch: Seeing Positive ADHD Traits

It’s a strong complement to Jessica McCabe’s book—and a necessary dose of perspective for anyone crawling out of the shame spiral.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention isn’t just about where you go—it’s about how you create.

Every place you land is a blank page. What you write there? That’s the legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it along to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection—one story, one share at a time.

Enjoyed This? Share It.

See you next week. Keep moving. Keep making. Keep hyper-focusing.