A lot of people have asked me how we did it …

Read all about it out here.

According to the Wall Street Journal, hundreds of thousands of new college graduates are entering a U.S. work force that has no use for them. While two million college grads remain unemployed, kids with $200k educations get to compete for jobs waiting and busing tables, delivering pizzas, serving as bouncers at night clubs and baristas at Starbucks. Those who’ve gone the distance to earn Ivy League law degrees may be joining other Ivy League law grads working as census takers, file clerks, and substitute teachers. Sorry class of 2010, nobody wants you.

If you’re a recent college grad, you’ve likely spent your entire academic life training to be irrelevant in our new economy. U.S. schooling has probably trained you to follow instructions (instead of blaze your own trail), engage in rote learning (instead of deep, thoughtful exploration), work for grades (instead of your true passions), develop a docile, domesticated disposition, a dependant on the “the system” for security and employment (instead of developing your own rugged individualism); and learning to avoid experimentation and risk, because straight “A” students are trained to think they need to “get it right” at least 90% of the time, (instead of learning to be comfortable taking big risks with the confidence that if you can just “get it right” 20% of the time in the real world, you’ll be among the most successful entrepreneurs, pioneers, innovators and creative risk-takers in the world. 9 out of 10 new businesses and creative ventures fail. Get a 2 out of 10 success rate in the real world and you win. Get 5 out of 10 right in school or as an industrial factory/knowledge worker and you still fail.) Bottom line is, school’s trained you to fail outside of anything but the artificial bubble of the American industrial age, which we have just watched collapse.

After all the hard work it took you to survive seventeen years of this archaic, industrial era academic system, you’re about to discover it was all a giant mistake. You’ve been trained to fail in the worst sense, because you’re not even failing at what you love to do – you’re failing at what you’ve been trained to think you should do. And the new global economy doesn’t give a rat about the promises you were made. “Get good grades, so you can go to a good college, so you can get a good job,” is yesterday’s news and it’s about as helpful as knowing yesterday’s lotto number.

This whole fiasco wasn’t malicious, but rather a consequence of a school system designed over a century ago, for what was necessary to drive last century’s industrializing economy. The U.S. school system was designed in Germany around the turn of the last century to fuel the industrial revolution. That’s where we got much of it from – even the name “kindergarten” (literally “child garden” – a place to grow kids.) The need then was for good factory workers and managers who did what they were told and followed procedures. So the school system wasn’t designed to foster free thinking, a pioneering spirit, innovation, or passion – in fact it was designed to snuff out those traits; it was designed to replace your natural inclinations, curiosities, and creativity with the compulsive desire to earn good grades and subordinate to the system. Instead of learning and working for passion, you were likely trained to learn and work for performance evaluations and your supervisor’s approval.

This worked on a national scale when graduates joined a massive workforce mobilized to build and man factories. In that era industrial citizens needed to be docile and easily trained to execute policies and procedures day in and day out without question or revolt. When industrialization was still the name of the game this approach ensured U.S. economic supremacy.

Back then two major realities of today didn’t exist: computers and telecommunication-driven global outsourcing. With these two factors squarely in place now, there’s either a computer or someone in India or China’s newly educated two billion person workforce who can perform the same tasks for which our school system trained you – and these new solutions offer corporations orders of magnitude greater efficiency than any U.S. grad. That is, unless you’re willing to work for $10k a year. If you are, then your U.S. education may still serve you well for years to come. If not, then you’ve been duped. Some of us have been warning about this for many years, but now it’s finally happened – with 17% unemployment for our latest generation of college graduates, their education is proving to be measurably and significantly irrelevant – epic fail.

American Ingenuity – Our Saving Grace

It turns out the U.S. still has an edge in one area – despite our public education system’s apparent determination to rid our brightest students of it – and that edge is American ingenuity. American ingenuity isn’t just folklore; it’s natural selection. For centuries America has attracted the most adventurous, innovative, pioneering people from every country on the planet. And these pioneering souls passed their pioneering genes on to us. Genes like the DRD4 7R, associated with a novelty-seeking, exploratory, pioneering mindset, have been shown to be over twice as prevalent in the U.S. as it is worldwide.

While the industrialization of America provided our high standard of living, we have paid the price for it with epidemic rates of addiction, depression, and anxiety disorders. This is because we as a population have forced ourselves to conform to a disposition that is literally antagonistic to our genetic temperament. We are natural born explorers, creative risk-takers, and pioneers who have been cooped up in industrial era classrooms for far too long. And this confinement (and subsequent sublimation of our creativity) has taken a toll on our mental health.

We Americans can only sustain our lifestyle if we focus on maintaining our edge as the seat of innovation and progress: not factory workers, not bureaucrats, and certainly not the kleptrocrats whom frustrated creative-risk-takers all-too-often become when they are taught to abandon the passions of their hearts and instead chase external validation. When these naturally creative risk-takers, deformed by our intolerant school system, are put in the role of bureaucrat, kleptocratic looting becomes their only “creative” outlet – and what they create is disaster and chaos – think Enron, Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, and BP to name an infamous few.

What are we to do?

If we want to recover from our industrial-sized hangover, we need to retool our idea of what education should be. (In fact our current educational system defies the very word education, because (as Russell Bishop once pointed out to me), educate comes from the Latin meaning “to draw out of,” which is the Socratic style of teaching, not “to put into,” which is the didactic style of teaching inflicted by our school system.) We need to offer the kind of real education promoted by the likes of Socrates, Plato, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Einstein, Edison, and Henry Ford. The kind enjoyed by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who both fell into unconventional educations that fostered inner direction, passion, creativity, out-of-the-box thinking, and freedom to take risks – lots of risks. This type of education is also the most effective for our most energetic and creative students. Right now these kids are being labeled ADHD and medicated to suppress their high energy, and fluid, creative temperaments; biochemically forcing bright creative children to conform to an antiquated idea of learning, which is tied to a sinking ship. These highly creative kids don’t have a disorder – our system does.

America needs to wake up. We need to help kids learn to be dynamic entrepreneurs, innovative inventors, and accomplished artists. That is what the new global economy may still be willing to pay American grads big $100k+ incomes for. We need to get back to the roots of American prosperity when the leaders of industry didn’t get paid fat salaries and juicy bonuses for manipulating the system and chop-shopping our infrastructure, but instead thought like true entrepreneurs who gain prosperity through courageous, resourceful, creative pioneering.

The ones who prosper in a new world of rapid innovation and constant upheaval are not the compliant, dependent, directionless students we’re churning out of our cog-in-the-wheel education system. Those who prosper in a new world are those cut from the same cloth as our great American heroes: the kind who could shoot from the hip, the kind who could think on their toes, the kind who were comfortable with risk and uncharted territory, the kind who could invent unthinkable things like the airplane, the integrated circuit, and the Internet.

If you’re graduating with the class of 2010, your best bet is not to wait and hope for industry to save the day, rescuing you from your jobless purgatory. Your best bet is to reconnect with your passion, your God-given brilliance, your American ingenuity, and go ahead and invent the industry that will save the day.

For more information on how to harness your natural creative risk-taking temperament visit ______.

Garret LoPorto, public speaker, inventor, and author of “The DaVinci Method: Break Out & Express Your Fire.”

My Answer: Glad to hear it! You can find a whole lot more information on how to harness the strengths of and destigmatize ADD, ADHD and BPD inside DaVinciNation.org. There is a large and growing community of people inside DaVinciNation who are focused on how to re-educate your schools, your workplace, your community, the legal system, the government and the world about how these “disorders” signal unrecognized strengths and should be treated as misunderstood, but positive genetic temperamental traits that should be supported instead of stigmatized. You can get a free trial here.

My Answer: Yes. ADHD has been shown to run in families. Calling the genetic variety of ADHD, (which runs in families), a disorder is a bit strange, because it is a genetic trait that has been shown by the human genome project to be a positively selected gene – meaning that over the history of humanity it’s been a good and helpful trait to have.

My Answer: There is a bit of spoken text for the guided meditations, but the verbal guidance isn’t necessary. In fact we also bundle in the exact same tracks without verbal guidance for those who prefer to do the meditations without the distraction of the voice-over. As long as you can read the English instructions and relay them to your children the program should work well for them. If for any reason it doesn’t work for your children, simply return it for a full refund.

My Answer: Your outer purpose is most likely where your passion meets the world’s needs. It is the place where you can do the most good. It is the pursuit which makes you come alive. The U.S. Declaration of Independence says “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Notice it says “the pursuit of happiness”, because it is the pursuit that is your purpose and passion. Happiness is ineffable and not something you can directly achieve through your outward actions. So here are some tips on how to find your outer purpose …

- Which activities when you do them seem filled with grace?
- In which moments in your life have you felt most fulfilled?
- Where have you experienced yourself as full of life, brilliance and vitality? What were you doing? What were you engaged in?

Now for the world side of the equation …
- What needs do you see in your world that those above abilities might fill? How?
- Which need do you feel most called to fill?
- What’s your next step in filling that purpose? (Must be an action that doesn’t take longer than a day.)

Finally – hold on to your hat, because all of that stuff above – is your outer purpose, not your inner purpose. Your inner purpose is universal – and that’s to love with all your heart, and to forgive those that distract you from that loving. You can love people. You can love nature. You can love what you do. Your purpose is to love as whole-heartedly with as much power as you can. When someone or something comes along to pull you out of that love, don’t take them or it seriously (just find the kind humor in the situation) or they will pull you out of your love. But if someone or something does manage to pull you out of your focus on love, then your purpose is to seek the good in that person or situation until you find a way of looking at them that lets you feel love again.

No matter how good you are at pursuing your outer purpose, if you neglect to honor your inner purpose you will never find true happiness.

My Answer: First of all I want to commend you on serving as a high school teacher with bipolar. You may not realize it, but you are probably a Godsend to the 15% of students who also long to keep seeing the world in an artistic way. Virtually all great artists are inherently bipolar whether they realize it or not. Your service as a teacher and an authority figure to those students will probably save many lives. Your work may be a ministry.

My advice to you is to keep up the great service you are giving these students by simply existing within their system and actually understanding them. Do whatever it takes to ease your administrative burdens so that you can focus your whole heart on this greater purpose. Is there any way you can delegate the grading of midterm papers? The only midterm papers that I believe probably need your direct attention are those from students who are similar in temperament to you and wish to see the world in an artistic way – and you must be careful not to miss any – some may hide behind a veneer like I did in high school pretending to be a shallow “jock” in order to be popular. Those students’ midterms may contain the seeds of genius which only you might spot, grade and acknowledge accordingly. As for the rest of the papers from more “normal” students, a couple ideas that come to mind … Maybe you could see if you could swap duties with other teachers who may actually prefer grading papers instead of ______ (fill in the blank with other teacher duties “unseemly” to normal teachers such as monitoring detention – incidentally where you might also do a lot of good.) Or maybe you could give some sort of college recommendation, course credit, “experience” opportunity as a TA, or community service credit to one of your brightest students from last year to help you grade this year’s midterms. Those are just my ideas, but maybe some other folks reading this might have some ideas, so check for a modified version of your question and answer (fully protecting your anonymity) to appear in DaVinci Nation and on my blog’s Q&A section, where thousands of others may have some bright ideas to share about how to navigate this kind of situation.

Why does it seem like the unique qualities of Olympic superstars are also the very symptoms of ADHD?

With the impulsive and “reckless” Bode Miller — who has been known to be easily distracted with partying and socializing — winning another Olympic gold medal, right on the heels of Shaun White’s hyperactive and rebellious display of loose-cannon greatness. It all may start to make you wonder if the qualities of impulsiveness, hyperactivity, “unnecessary” risk-taking, and rebellion — all normally associated with ADHD — may also be the keys to success for U.S. Olympic superstars. Michael Phelps speaks openly about his ADHD diagnosis; and it seems that instead of being something he had to overcome, his symptoms of ADHD, like abundant energy, restlessness and hyper-focus, may have given him a supernormal capacity to triumph as an Olympic athlete.

ADHD — long viewed as a disability — is proving itself to be quite an asset in the Olympic games. Hyperactivity, thrill-seeking, recklessness, hyper-focus, rebelliousness and impulsiveness — all primary “symptoms” of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder are proving to provide the winning edge that gives an athlete supernormal abilities in competition. Seeing Shaun White nail his own out of the box invention “the Double McTwist 1260″ beating his already gold winning score, shows a temperament unlike the average competitor. Doesn’t the “Double McTwist 1260″ sound a lot like something an ADHD kid would get into trouble in gym class for coming up with and recklessly attempting?

Shaun White loves risk, loves to think different, loves to be a rebel, a troublemaker, a misfit, a trailblazer. These are all qualities of the ADHD temperament that are often disparaged by our public school systems. Yet these are the very qualities that make Americans great — that give us that competitive edge — that pioneering spirit — that supernormal ability to transcend the competition and bring our pursuits to a whole new level.

With it so clear that many classic symptoms of ADHD are actually assets for Olympic gold contenders, we might wonder what else these “symptoms” may be assets for … how about the risk-taking, hyperactivity and great impulses it take to be an entrepreneur, artist or inventor? So what is it that makes Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder a “disorder”? I argue that the disorder is in the context, not the person. People with ADHD don’t belong cooped up in classrooms being evaluated on how well they can sit still and do what they’re told. People with ADHD belong on the slopes, in the water, in the heat of competition, pioneering, exploring, and discovering new ways to transcend obstacles in the pursuit of greatness. That’s where the “disorder” becomes a gift.

So maybe it’s not impulsive, hyperactive kids that have the disorder after all — maybe it’s the society that has the disorder, because it bluntly insists on continuing to try to force these round pegs into its square holes. One definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing again and again expecting different results. Kids with ADHD virtually never try the same approach twice when it doesn’t work the first time — but the society that has been making impulsive, creative, hyperactive kids’ lives in the classroom miserable for the last 50 years most certainly does.

The next time you see a child exhibit the “symptoms” of ADHD — maybe instead of being critical, seeing them as having a learning disability and possibly putting them on medication designed to strip them of these qualities – instead we could recognize the potential heroes these people really are – and help them restructure their lives (like the families of Bode Miller, Shaun White and Michael Phelp’s did) so that instead of being cooped up and frustrated in a little box of a classroom, they are liberated to soar with their compatriots in the thin air of top competition — be it in athletics, business, innovation or the arts.

To learn more about how ADHD can be transformed from a problem into a secret of success, go here.

I want to stop taking Ritalin.  I have been taking it for about 10 years. While it does help me focus and concentrate on some detail-oriented tasks, I sometimes feel that it turns me into someone I am not.  I feel shy and introverted.  I become content and comfortable with mediocrity, which is not the real me.  It feels like Ritalin suppresses the qualities I love most and am most proud of in myself. I worry about my dependence on Ritalin.I just want to be me. I love the fact that I am unique in my DaVinci ways, and different from most of society.

Some days I feel so alive: Upbeat, funny, outgoing, and naturally high on life. I often feel this way when my medication wears off, or if I forget to take it. I want to feel like the ‘real’ me again all the time, and allow the Davinci part of me to shine through. I know that you are not a doctor, but could you advise me as a friend? How can I stop taking my stimulant medication after being on it for such a long time?”

My Answer: Great question… So, like you said, I am giving you this answer as a friend, not as a doctor. I would not recommend going off your stimulant medication ‘cold turkey,’ because chances are you’ve already built a life around the person you are while taking Ritalin. This Ritalin influenced person you’ve ‘become’ for the last 10 years is most likely a lot more organized and tame, but you are also less creative, sensitive, wild, and adventurous than you naturally are. Stopping the Ritalin all at once may cause massive disruption in your life.

For starters, I would recommend taking weekends off. Give yourself Friday afternoon through Sunday night away from the drugs. If you’re in college and you need to study, then take it Sunday night, but try to give yourself the whole weekend if it’s possible. These weekends off will help bring you back in touch with who you are or would like to be again. You can start building your new life during your weekends. Also, next time you have a vacation, take a vacation from your medication too. As you develop confidence in who you are and in your natural gifts, you’ll be able to make more fulfilling choices about what your “work week” should be about. Maybe you’ll discover you no longer want a career as a Ritalin driven engineer, but instead discover you would much rather pursue a life as an entrepreneur or a writer. These kinds of choices often require deep conviction to be successful and may take some time for you to develop, while still playing a part that is not really you. You may need your Ritalin to help keep your old life together until you’re ready for your big breakout.

My Answer: When it comes to school, most DaVinci’s best shot at delegating or “outsourcing” the organizational responsibilities that conflict with your temperament is to play the “disability” card. (Let’s face it; most schools are not going to accommodate you if you say you are a DaVinci with a unique brilliance that comes along with some organizational weakness. You’ll need to have proof of a diagnosed disability to get the support you deserve.) Here, in the US, the National Disabilities Act grants students with a diagnosis of ADD or ADHD the right to free executive support from their schools. Executive function support can include note takers, organizational assistance, extra time on projects and tests, oral exams when writing is too difficult, etc. Virtually every DaVinci can get an ADD or ADHD diagnosis if they choose to. You can use this diagnosis to turn the tables on your school and insist that any school requirements, which conflict with your temperament, or ‘disability,’ now are the school’s responsibility to make accessible for you.