I’m OK, You’re OK, We’re OK: Living With AD(H)D In Infosec by Klaus Agnoletti

yeah welcome to my talk on living with hght in infosec obviously this is a very personal talk and but I do it to raise awareness about what achd um also is more than what you probably think it is I also do to break down to boost um and uh hopefully Inspire others to help break down the taboo and get a diagnosis or or just get a better life because I've been doing this talk for a couple months and um I've been supported in my idea that that some kind of diagnosis or neurodiversity or whatever you want to call it is somehow over represented overrepresented in our line of work so not talking about it is simply um the wrong approach we need to yeah we need to talk about that and um that illustration is the best illustration I've found of how I find it to have ADHD because it's all about those bees buzzing around in your head and and taking up all the attention and it's really annoying but that's another thing um the worst thing about black cats I know if you had them that is for one thing is that they're really hard to take to take a photo of them and then when you do take a photo of them that's very good and you want the shirt into certain to everybody they can't see it but uh these are my cats uh um my wife and I though well these are the kids we have right um I lived I live in Copenhagen I've I'm 47 I've been working in infosec since 2004 and um during that time I've gained experience with a lot with many areas of security because funny enough I've never really wanted to become a specialist I wanted to do all sorts of new things all the time so I've done everything from DRC and and vulnerable scanning maturity assessment and my last reel if you want to say it like that security job what's this was as a security architect where did Dental advisory and so all sorts of things at least before my career took a turn I've been involved in my local ovas chapter since 2008 and I've co-founded Visa Copenhagen in 2019. I used to be the head of uh community and account in a company called crowd Shake which is like it was marketing but it was also very technical marketing it's probably not what you would think of as marketing but um part of what I did was to travel around conferences uh and that's that's why I was here last year I'm not doing that anymore instead I'm I've I went freelance a couple of months ago to help companies get more secure but also teaching them how to use the community in a profitable way um there's no need to take photos of sites because on the last slide there is a QR code where you can download the entire site set um the best thing that happened to me was when I got at least in my professional professional career was the last two times I got fired um and the reason for that is it was a good opportunity to stop and reflect on my situation um but um let me start from the beginning because you see I may look you know relatively normal but um looks deceived right and and you know what that's actually okay I was diagnosed three years ago which you could probably say is relatively late um but as it turns out that's not really unusual because the way I have ADHD I'm not hyper active meaning when I was a kid I wasn't that annoying kid that was all over the place and driving the driving to see driving the teachers nuts that was that wasn't me I was just sitting uh in the room and not really paying much or giving much attention to myself uh all the weird thing that was going on it was inside my head where nobody could could hear it or see it but that explained a lot to me I've had an increasing problems concentrating for the last 15 years and I really didn't know why um and also we got really quite harder to get a job that I really cared about um and um all those things also also contrasting things lead me to be not very effective and it turns out when you have a have a high concentration job and you're not really good at concentrating you're not really the best worker so you get fired a lot and um that wasn't really sustainable something something had to be done because getting fired all the time that's not nice of course sustainable yeah first I want to tell you a little bit about ADHD because I assume we don't know much um I didn't either so that's completely Fair uh at least not before I I knew that was it was relevant to me um ADHD 80d what is it what's what but uh welcome to ATAC 101 um hdad means attention deficit hyperactivity disorder um and it means that you can have both the attention deficit or you can have the hyperactivity or kind of both one of them or both um it's still ADHD um and without the hyperactivity which I have it's just called add sometimes so um ADHD can take many shapes and forms um but many things are in common and and and they are somehow connected as you will see later uh when I'm when I'm giving you an overview of of Telltale sign of ADHD which you know individually they really don't look and look really interesting but together they form AJC um but to me finding out finding out all those things that wasn't that was connected and was connected to hdhd to me it was groundbreak because it was some all of a sudden there was a reason to all those uh all those weird things that I'd been doing all my life and proved my wife not all that stuff um at least some sort of explanation not an excuse but an explanation and then it had always just been there so here's an overview of the general indicators ADHD it covers all spectrum of ADHD hyperactivity or not or whatever you have um it doesn't apply to everybody hey I won't go go through all of them but what you can probably see is that all of these things to some degree they're normal traits so it's not like if you have if if you ever procrastinate something then you have ADHD that's not that's not how it is because everybody can do that but when it turns out to be you're doing it all the time when you always procrastinate when you can never concentrate when you always forget stuff in them then it turns out to be you know then it can be ADHD I was um when I was diagnosed I was somewhere in a gray area my my psychiatrist wasn't really sure whether he wanted to diagnose me or not or give me the same but um he ended up doing it because I actually had a problem right I'll talk we'll talk a little bit about that later also Cara's mistakes distracted by noise around you getting fidgety all that stuff and also interrupting others while PC can't wait for your turn probably it probably does not sound familiar to anyone at all um this the the overview I gave you is from something called asrs adult AKC self-report scale it made by made by who and you can test yourself for adsd later um but for the first time I saw this it really blew me away because as I said before everything was everything certainly certainly made sense so it suddenly made sense um one important thing I want to say is that that you shouldn't you are not a PhD you you have ADHD that means that you shouldn't let HDT control your life so if you have HTT yes you have challenge but they can be overcome to some to some extent it doesn't prevent you from responsibility here but the key to do that is knowledge so you need to know about ADHD if you have it you need to know yourself uh what what challenge you have so that you can mitigate them right just as any other vulnerabilities you have you want to mitigate this as well Jesus this is no view of some of my traits um first the ones that I see us quote unquote negatives the most annoying thing is in my brain does not want to focus at all ever right so I have to cheat it to do that it's hard and when and then when I am concentrated it's hard for me to keep it some HTT people have them a hyper Focus where they can focus on one thing and then just forgive it forget everything about everything around them unfortunately I'm not even able to do that so that it also means that I'm better planning I bet I have a bad short-term memories I'm so I'm really bad at remembering names or even common uh common words sometimes um so if I can't remember your name it's nothing personal okay um and also one thing that I that I found out even before all of this ATAC I found out that um I really didn't feel many I did I did I did have many feelings I don't know how to explain it but but I really didn't feel extreme extreme happiness or extreme anger or anything I was just there I mean that was the first time I went to college psychiatrist then that was when I was 25 because I really didn't know what was going wrong going what was wrong with me at some point I thought I was you know incapable of you know feeling happiness or something like that but unfortunately unfortunately of course it's not like that it just means that it takes it takes more for me to feel to feel things um later I learned that that it it can be a coping mechanism because as a child I was I wouldn't say outgoing but I had a lot of fights I changed Google a lot and some doctors claim that this is actually a coping mechanism that that that detached me from those feelings just to cope and then as your brain as your brain grow and you and you grow with it you sort of become the default setting of your brain I'm not sure if it's true but um at least it can be trained so I'm working on that um yeah also the low level low level dopamine means that there aren't many many things that really gets me excited professionally it's all about to me it's all about getting new ideas all the time which is hard but especially when you want to have the same job and also we're getting new ideas I also like that um and the others there aren't as many of those I admit that but I'm really good at getting ideas I I don't see limitations I just that is in business Copenhagen for instance my my role is to know people and have stupid ideas and not think too much about whether you can be none or not because there are other people who are very good at doing that I will if if they weren't around there wouldn't be any b-sides in opening so yeah I think different I I'm good at saying one idea in one situation and putting it over in some way or something else and to me that's just radical but apparently that's not so for everybody um here's the list of things I've I've done to cope better I'm maybe if I help you too because I said before understanding your HSC is vital so you can mitigate the first and most important one is is medicine this is the stuff I'm getting it says amphetamine and that's because it's another right it actually enables me to enables my brain to work the entire day and trust me that is an advantage um I'm also get I'm also getting you're a better ad that helped me getting better at your deep conversations I was I'm able to keep focused for more than 15 minutes which my wife is very happy about um we also enjoy playing board games I can actually do that now but before I got the medicine I was in I was considering to stop driving my car because when I when I was out driving us I just there were too many things I didn't see because I got you know I got caught up my thoughts got up got caught up with something else and I couldn't bear with them uh with the with the potential consequences of that but unfortunately when then when I get there then when I got then when I got the Medicine things got way better so I'm still I'm still driving my car even though that I drive in the right side of the road compared unlike you guys and it confuses the hell out of me just saying it so I'll never I'll never even want to try to drive a car over here because I'm I I would be so afraid of screwing something completely up but that's but that was a little bit uh of a sidestep sorry also learning about htsd that also helped me I also I also talked a lot to my wife about it and uh and because one thing that's important here is to share share the information share the knowledge with with people around you because the more they know about you why why you are so [ __ ] annoying the less they'll hate you because if you understand then it's hard for them to hate you so and and also of course they shouldn't they should understand what's going on how it is to be inside your head because that you want to probably want to be in theirs um also as I said before um no like I said in terms of in terms of my brain cell one for Brainerd wanting to um to focus I can trigger it by uh by by putting headphones on and just play like focus music classical music before I want to concentrate then my sort of then my brain sort of gets um prepped for for doing actual work then it's not so hard but that took some time to find out um as I said at the beginning uh having acsc is a lot like having peace inside your head and this guy makes them go away right he started a um I won't call it a call because that really sounds so negative right but uh but but he built up he built offensive old Indian way of meditation and then right in in the invented his own system and I was at a course uh a month ago almost a month ago and for the first time there was silence in my head so I don't I don't care I don't care if he has a code I don't care that I don't understand why these freaking reasons exercises work I just they just do and that's really all I care about and they also have it's called out of living it's available in Ireland in Ireland as well if you want to join the cult um yeah and then there's this whole tough situation what do you what do you do with that voila first of all no matter who you are you deserve the best working life you can have that means that um that you should get the best out of it you shouldn't settle with an unhappy situation you should go with what you want to do um the difference between me and I guess normal people is that I don't I literally don't have a choice because I can't do I can't have a job that I don't care about is this physically impossible I can't do it I mean even if it was my life I wouldn't be able to do it like this and that's very normally for people not to understand that but that's a little bit how it is um so yeah if and if that job you want to have doesn't exist create yourself you have nothing to lose um compared to do nothing and having a job you don't like you don't like at least to me I realized what I like most about my job was all the things that I did in my spare time ironically enough or the community stuff are any meetups and so around the time of my diagnosis I I discovered that that could be a job I also discovered that it was marketing and I was like what the hell but because because that is the thing about marketing because when when you think about marketing you think about all the annoying marketing that really yeah that you just want to kill but those are the marketers that hadn't understood that marketing has to bring value and and being annoying doesn't work um but that was also recycling besides them um getting back to why getting fired was a good thing because um the first time I was fired that was my first changing career path that's when I got into marketing and community but well it didn't work but it obviously didn't work because I still got fired so something was still up then um as my yeah luckily I have a I have a very clever wife and when I got fired the second time he said that she said that um I can't go around talking about HTT and claiming that my that my brain is different and not trying to do something differently because if you do if you do the same then the same would probably happen so she so she suggested it's locally The Possession that I'm going freelance because then I'm able to create my own uh time or I can board when when my brain when I can work when my brain works and I can do what I want to do and that's a really good idea especially if you can get get customers then it's not so good an idea but I'm working on that um yeah and also when when you're Your Own Boss things gets assembled even my brain can understand it that if I don't make money then I'm not able to pay myself right so that makes things more simple and and that's motivating oh I had oh I need I need a bit of water here's here's an overview of things I've learned along the way maybe it can help you if you're in a similar situation um the the most important thing I'll say is that if if is that if you don't have a problem don't get a diagnosis really because when you get the diagnosis you have a stamp and that stamp is not always good to have uh to me to me it meant too significant thing one of them is that I'm able to have my medicine that's good it also meant that it's hard to get a life insurance and that's bad because it turns out insurance companies isos right they claim to they claim to vet you before you sign up and then they don't understand it anyway so they so they just somehow think there's a bigger risk with me so they won't they won't insure me but um yeah I'm happy every day so I need that that's also something right um also um HSC is normal it's nothing to be ashamed about and um find your you should also find your weaknesses and your and your your limitations and mitigate think of it you can compare a little bit a little bit to being short-sighted but who wouldn't who wouldn't get get a class or contact lenses if if their site wasn't good it's the same thing with atsc you need to do something to to make yourself better um recognize and accept your weaknesses find out what helps you mitigate them and when people know your brain as I said it's really it's really hard it's really hard for them to be to be upset with you and if you met one person with HSC then you've met one person with atsc that means that this is my ADC that I've told you about you should not assume that you have you have anything like that at all because that's not how brains work um yes also I've I've been working I've been uh had I've had to work for for many years and um in that regards are some things that I wanted that I want to tell you that maybe can help you out a little bit um first of all people are hesitated to talk about about it about ADHD and and and and you shouldn't be and but I just I completely understand that that that some people don't want to open up because maybe it will backfire but being transparent yes the best long-term strategy both for you and and and your and your boss and your workplace so basically turn turn the downside to your advantage utilize neutralize the bad things and and then maybe acot to superpower and and if you have to if you have the right employer then they're there to support you and the other way around as an employer you should you should definitely um like Embrace different people hey also if if they if they don't Embrace different people then there's a limit to how many people they can actually hire because as I said it's relatively normal in our business um and people you know they work different regardless if they have a diagnosis or not um some kind function in Open Office Space like me uh some some need some help some need help to plan their work but but again that's relatively easy things to fix maybe not the Open office space but you know an employer can an employer can do a lot and then and they also need to so they need to be more flexible in what is really important in your job is it important to be in the office every day or is it important that they just that you just do your job right what's the most important and also as an employer don't ask what you can do for your for your for your employee because the employee has no idea instead gives suggestions like it would help if I did this and this because then they get an idea of what what can I actually expect or what can I even even request because this is a win-win for everybody for the employer for the employee nobody wants to get fired nobody wants to not have success and also as an employer it's expensive um yeah we have some time for questions but I'll be around for for the entire day and just look for the look f