One Idea: Flying Without Instruments
For most of my adult life, I didn't know I had ADHD.
I knew I was fast. I knew I was restless. I knew I could sprint through a crisis and fall apart in a quiet room. I built a career in enterprise IT. Led teams. Earned titles. Served in the Air Force. Got the MBA. Did the work.
And I did all of it without the documentation for how my brain actually works.
That's what "flying without instruments" means. Not that you crashed. Not that you failed. It means you figured out altitude by feel. You read the wind through the seat of your pants. You landed things — jobs, relationships, decisions — that you maybe shouldn't have landed, because you were making sense of feedback in real time without a single gauge to tell you what was actually happening inside the cockpit.
I got diagnosed at 62.
Sixty-two.
Four decades of improvised navigation. Four decades of not knowing why the good days felt accidental and the bad days felt like evidence of something broken in me.
Here's what I want you to hold onto: you didn't fail at those things. You did them without instruments. That's a different sentence.
The instruments exist now.
That's what this newsletter is.
One Prompt: Your Week in Review (For the ADHD Brain)
You don't need a course. You don't need a setup. You need to open Claude.ai right now and paste this in.
Most of us with ADHD spend Sunday night doing a low-grade postmortem on the week — not formally, just the quiet sense that we were busy but productive on the wrong things, or that we started strong and then something happened, or that we can't quite account for where the time went. This prompt gives that process a frame.
Copy and paste this into Claude.ai:
I want to do a quick debrief on my week with your help. I have ADHD, and my weeks often feel scattered — I'll be highly productive on things that don't matter, avoid the things that do, or feel like I'm running hard but not going anywhere useful. Here's what my week looked like: [describe it briefly — what you worked on, what you avoided, what felt off, what surprised you].
I'm not looking for motivation or a to-do list. I want you to help me see what patterns might be showing up — what my brain might have been doing and why. Ask me a few follow-up questions if you need to. Then give me one honest observation I can carry into next week.
That's it. Don't clean it up before you paste it. The messy version is the useful version.
One Thing: What's Coming May 1st (And Why I Built It)
Three new courses go live May 1st at education.602north.com:
Home Base — building the kind of environment your nervous system can actually work in, not the productivity setup you see on YouTube.
ADHD & Money — because financial chaos is one of the least-talked-about costs of unmanaged ADHD, and it deserves a real conversation.
The Cost of Running Hot — what chronic dysregulation actually does to a body and a life over time. I lived this one. I built this one from the inside.
And the book — Flying Without Instruments: The ADHD Brain's Guide to AI, Self-Knowledge, and Building Something Worth Keeping — available now on Amazon.
None of this is aspirational content. It's built from what actually happened.
— Rance Johnson
602North Education
ADHD Coach | Neuroscience Coach | Neurodiversity Coach
If someone forwarded this to you and it landed, you can subscribe here.
If you want to know more about your own ADHD patterns before spending a dollar anywhere, start at knowyourshadows.com — 32 questions, no email required, no cost.
602North Education | education.602north.com
Real guidance for real life. Built from scars, not a syllabus.