The basketballer who couldn't tie his shoelaces.
As a summary guide to how so many exceptional people get further in life, this picture tells many stories.
What I find really interesting is that it applies, in principle, to anyone, neurotypical or not. We all have parts of ourselves that we extend out to show value or mastery, and other parts that we compensate against just to overcome the flaw, but we do that so well that we become rather very good at it.
With neurodiverse people, their life journeys are more extreme. When you struggle with something, it is totally debilitating. To increase your bewilderment, you have abilities which are in stark contrast to your disabilities. There emerges a recipe for quite an uneven, jagged profile, matched by puzzling successes and unexpected failures along the way as you muddle through life.
It's turning out to be useful in certain industries: Asperger's in IT, creative people with ADHD in design industries being some of the more recognised observations. But the diagram shows that there are even situations where the disability leads to an almost opposite talent.
I remember one guy, Max, who played professional basketball. He had a combination of neurodiverse traits, principally a strong picture of hyperactivity, which he found useful when it came to training long hours, but also an apparent disadvantage, at first glance: dyspraxia. Dyspraxia is also a developmental condition like autism and dyslexia, but dyspraxia causing difficulties with coordination.
"I could never tie my shoelaces, but I don't care now. It doesn't help my game".
And yet here he was, Max, a master on the basketball court. It turned out that it worked like this: his dyspraxia was relatively mild to moderate: not so severe as to render all attempts to train against it useless. As a kid, Max loved playing basketball when he saw other kids playing, and his height back then gave him an advantage. He recognised that he just couldn't bounce and throw the ball easily, but so strong was his wish to improve- called a 'rage to master' in child development psychology- that he practised and practised to a superhuman extent, never growing tired of playing with that ball, and pushing through any feedback from his body to that effect.
He became a professional basketball player through a combination of
a) extension: restlessness and physical energy from ADHD, and
b) overcompensation: practising the skill of handling the ball way beyond just correcting it to 'normal' levels, but to a learned, effortful mastery.
It was strange and fascinating to see that he wore velcro strapped basketball shoes. His response?
"I could never tie my shoelaces, but I don't care now. It doesn't help my game".
Anyone whose talent is connected to their neurodiversity will recognise this paradoxical picture. There is very little 'halo' effect from practising a skill: you become good at that specific thing, and everything else, even if it looks apparently related, remains shockingly troublesome. He had an attitude of pragmatism which allowed him to breeze through his particular trouble; something that came from a complex mix of time, place, personality, temperament, and incident.
These and many other stories in my coaching experience have come to inform and guide my own practice, and I am ever grateful to work with talented people who often feel misunderstood and lonely because they are exceptional, either through neurodiversity or simply because they are so very accomplished. It's lonely at the top and the bottom, and talented folk find themselves at both places, depending on which part of their life you're talking about. Exceptionality, advantageous or not, is defined by not being average, and exceptional people are rarely in the middle of the field for most of their key strengths or weaknesses. The aim in coaching neurodiverse people is to make the advantages shine and tower above everything else, which they will definitely do: they are genetically predisposed to it. So much so that the disadvantages often become irrelevant.