Maybe I was using &quot;motivation&quot; in a jargon sense. Motivation (some people call it &quot;willpower&quot;, but that ascribes it a &quot;choosability&quot; it doesn&#x27;t really have) is the resource you have that allows you to do things you don&#x27;t want to do.<p>To put it another way: some things in life are a <i>hassle</i> (or a &quot;schlep&quot;, in pg&#x27;s phrasing[1]). The more motivation you have, the less this matters. The less motivation you have, the more of a problem a thing being a &quot;hassle&quot; will be. When you have chronically-low motivation, you avoid &quot;hassles&quot; as a rule, to the point that you stop even being able to lead your mind down potential avenues of thought that involve &quot;hassles.&quot;<p>If you want a fictional example of what having ADHD really tends to look like, it&#x27;s not Calvin of C&amp;H, it&#x27;s Shikamaru from Naruto[2].<p>This model, by the way, has all sorts of consequences outside of just ADHD. When people are &quot;too hungry to decide what to eat&quot;—that&#x27;s because hunger depletes motivation, and decisions are fundamentally hassles. The hungrier you get, the less motivation you can tap to &quot;just&quot; decide. (You can <i>force yourself</i> to decide, or <i>trick yourself into</i> deciding, but you can&#x27;t &quot;just&quot; decide.)<p>---<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;schlep.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;schlep.html</a><p>[2] Yui from K-On is also a striking example. That show&#x27;s entire theme, actually, is essentially &quot;how to succeed in life despite having ADHD&quot;, which is a real surprise for something so fluffy.