Weaponized ADHD Part 2

Yoyos and Writing.

​About 5 years into teaching elementary school a show came through doing storytelling with yoyo tricks. My grade 2's all bought yoyos so I grabbed one to learn enough to help them.
15 years later I've run over a dozen yoyo contests, competed at the world yoyo contest, won the Canadian Championships twice, written 3 books about yoyo, and built a successful yoyo brand. 

Roll back to around 2017. My wife and I moved in with my father in law to keep him in the family home as long as we could. The downside was I went from a 15 minute walk to an hour drive to work. Except at that point I'd stopped driving. So 1.5 hours on the bus each way. What to do with all that time? Write a book!

This move coincided with my finally getting diagnosed with ADHD and deciding to try medication. Wow. Not for everyone, I know, but it was life-changing. My mother is a retired school principal. One of the many challenges of teaching is that we aren't allowed to say anything that even vaguely resembles medical advice. Which is good. But when a parent is at wit's end and asks "should I try medication" after they've tried all the supports and adaptations for their ADHD kid, the teacher or principal can't give any opinion. But my mom could say "Well, my son has had ADHD all his life, and in his 30s started medication. He's since written and published books and started a successful business, sooooo."

So weaponized ADHD. I got lucky. Found a medication that works at a low dosage. So I still get the hyperfocus and chaotic connections brain, but I have the ability to stop and consider. To DECIDE if I want to spend 4 hours obsessing over something, or if I have other responsibilities. 

This brings us to "How to Run a Boutique Yoyo Business" and "The people of Yoyo." 

Originally they were part of the same book, but it got too big. I still need to write a book on the world of yoyo contests, but that's down the road. It started with a friend insisting I read "The 4 Hour Work Week" by Tim Ferris. It was full of good advice (and some not so much) but one bit that stuck was the 3 types of product.
1. Sell other peoples goods
2. Create and sell your own goods
3. Create an intellectual property.

I'd done the first 2, but I liked the idea of creating something once and selling it forever. And no-one had written a book about yoyoers and the community. Sure, there were plenty of books of history and tricks. But nothing about the people. Yoyo has changed drastically since the 1990s. Technology has allowed for absolute sorcery to be achieved with this little spinning disk. Youtube made it possible for exponential innovation, the instant sharing around the world. So a book happened.

I had to learn how to write. Apparently my university training only got me far enough to plan and write a book, not to make it readable. My first editor taught me how to take academic writing and turn it into something enjoyable to read, and how to identify and delete every adverb I could.

Of course, once I started self-publishing books I got hooked! That side of things actually started  with a different book - "The Duck: How to Make THEM Pay"

More to come!