For some years I’ve referred to myself as someone with “managed attention deficit disorder (ADD).” It has seemed to me that with "wandering attention" from one topic or idea to another, a thoughtful person can often see connections that others miss because their thinking is more orderly or linear. I often take conversations in directions that I learn later are non-sequiturs for others, but that I feel are clearly connected.
There is a certain beauty to this ADD. Being “all over the place” means you can connect science and liberal arts, spirituality and behavior science, visual art and music in different combinations, many different experiences and insights, and so on. This opens up opportunities, if one is selective, for innovation and new, often illuminating and fresh perspectives, insights, and product/service ideas. While one might have more ideas than it is possible to execute in a lifetime, if prioritized, there might be some that are quite valuable. Such a thinker needs to be selective, or to build a team and off-load those ideas so that others can direct and refine them. But the ADD can become a kind of engine of creativity.
The painful aspect is that one will surely leave behind a long list of ideas to pursue, inventions to commercialize, and often better ways to do things or better things to create, never to be completed.
A challenge, then, is to be able to leverage that "networked" thinking, while trying not to drive friends and colleagues crazy by bouncing around from here to there in ways not always obvious to them. It is especially important for such a person to prioritize and decide on the best ideas to pursue, something that can be quite challenging at times.
That, at least, is how it looks from this attention deficit disordered perspective.