My ADHD is so bad that I just forgot what I was going to write in this opening sentence.
That’s not entirely true. But it’s close. The attention deficit thing is real, and it’s been with me since birth. These days everyone and their brother claim to have ADHD. Not bragging here—who brags about the inability to focus on anything for more than nine seconds? —but mine was diagnosed back when the diagnosis didn’t exist.
In the early 1970s, doctors in south Mississippi didn’t have a name for whatever was going on in my head. They just called me “hyperactive.” Which, to be fair, was accurate. At 64, still is. But “hyperactive” only covered the bouncing-off-the-walls part. Nobody talked about the focus problem—the part where my brain would leave the building while my body stayed in a desk at Thames Elementary.
The focus issue made it hard to read. Which made it hard to study. Which made it hard to make good grades. Which made it hard to pay attention in class. Which—you guessed it—made it even harder to make good grades. It was a beautiful, self-reinforcing cycle of academic mediocrity. Like a hamster wheel, except the hamster keeps getting distracted by something shiny on the other side of the cage.
Reading was the real problem. Still is. My mind skips ahead like a rock across water—I’ll start a paragraph and my brain has already jumped three pages forward to see how the chapter ends. An English teacher finally gave me a survival strategy. “Robert, if you can just read the first sentence and the last sentence of every paragraph, you’ll get enough to survive.” It worked. Sort of. Barely.
But the teacher who truly changed things for me was Mrs. Nell Smith, my fourth-grade teacher. She saw me—really saw me—this herky-jerky, disruptive kid who couldn’t sit still and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Instead of fighting it, she worked around it. She put me at a desk on the side of the room and let me write. Plays, mostly. Goofy little productions about classic Universal horror monsters that I’d cast my classmates in, and she’d let us perform them right there in the classroom.
Think about that for a second. A teacher in the early 1970s—no special education training, no ADHD playbook, no acronyms to guide her—looked at a kid who didn’t fit the mold and figured out a way to let him create instead of just trying to make him comply. That kind of intuition and grace doesn’t show up in a textbook.
Miss Smith thought outside the box before anyone was using that tired phrase.
Then there was Miss Bettee Boyd, my high school English teacher, who told me I had a genuine knack for writing if I could ever sit down and focus long enough to prove it. She saw something in there, buried under all the fidgeting and class-clown behavior. Two teachers— a decade apart in my memory but connected by the same gift: they believed in a kid who gave them very little reason to.
College didn’t last long. The flunking out had less to do with focus and more to do with my impressive skill set in the area of one-arm curls—the kind performed in bars, not gyms. So that was that.
But landing in the restaurant business turned out to be the best accident of my life. Kitchens are loud, fast, chaotic, and constantly changing. Dining rooms are high energy and interactively social. Nothing stays the same for more than five minutes. For a guy with ADHD, it was like finding the one sport where being wired all wrong is an advantage. The pace fit my personality. The chaos matched my brain. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t fighting my wiring—I was using it. It wasn’t only what I wanted to do. It’s what I was supposed to do.
The problem was, I knew I needed to learn. There was no restaurant mentor in those early days. I was flying blind—flopping around, making every mistake in the book, writing a few new chapters of mistakes along the way. Business books were the obvious answer, except for one small detail: I couldn’t read them. Not in any meaningful way.
Then, in the late 1980s, cassette tape audiobooks showed up. Game changer doesn’t begin to cover it. For the first time in my life, I could consume a business book from start to finish without my brain wandering off to plan dinner or reorganize a walk-in cooler. Suddenly I had access to the same knowledge that people who could sit still and read had been absorbing for years. It was like someone finally gave me the keys to a building I’d been circling for a decade.
Every other summer, I find myself at a huge executive retreat in the woods of Northern California. No business is conducted. It’s all lectures and socialization—and a lot of very successful CEOs wandering around in khakis and ball caps. The thing that always surprises me is how many of those captains of industry have ADHD. Surgeons, hedge fund managers, tech founders, four-star generals—a staggering percentage of them are wired the same way. Made me feel better about my situation. All those years, I thought I was just bad at multitasking and worse at paying attention. Turns out a lot of the most driven people in the world share the same beautiful curse.
Then came podcasts, and the game changed again.
Business podcasts have been transformative—and I don’t use that word lightly. The ability to learn from executives, founders, and creative thinkers across every industry while driving to work, walking the dog, or prepping a kitchen is something my 25-year-old self would have killed for. My son is getting ready to come back and work in our restaurants, and I keep telling him the same thing: you have more great business information at your fingertips right now than any generation in history. Use it. Listen while you drive. Listen while you work out. Just listen.
My current top-ten podcasts—and this list changes monthly because, well, ADHD—are All-In, Founders, Diary of a CEO, The Shawn Ryan Show, Huberman Lab, This Week in Startups, The Tim Ferriss Show, The Game with Alex Hormozi, David Senra, Lex Fridman Podcast, and Acquired. Each one has taught me something I’ve applied directly to our businesses. There aren’t enough hours in the day to listen to all the episodes I want to hear, which is a problem I never imagined having as a kid who couldn’t get through a single chapter of a textbook.
All of that listening eventually led to a question: What if I started one?
So I did. The podcast is called Ya Gotta Eat, and my co-host and production partner, Drew Wooton and I sit down with interesting people to dive deep into their lives and careers. The concept is simple—everybody has to eat, so we let our guest choose a restaurant, share a meal, and talk. No studio. No sterile setup. Just a table, some good food, and a real conversation.
One of the most compelling episodes so far is a two-parter with Eric Cook, the chef and restaurateur in New Orleans. I dare anyone to start episode two and not finish it. His story of navigating the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—trying to hold his family, his son, and his business together while an entire city was underwater—is as gripping as anything on any podcast, anywhere. Truly compelling listening.
We’ve also had the honor of sitting down with Frank Brigtsen, who has been one of my culinary heroes for almost four decades. Frank is a chef of all chefs and a gentleman of all gentlemen. A master of south Louisiana cuisine who carries himself with a humility that matches his talent. Those are the conversations that remind me why we started this thing in the first place.
There are great episodes to come. That’s what keeps me excited about the project—new guests, new stories, new restaurants.
So here I am, 45 years into the restaurant business, a guy who still can’t read a book without his brain doing backflips on a trampoline, hosting a podcast about food and life and the people who make both interesting. Miss Smith would probably get a kick out of that. Miss Boyd, too. That hyperactive kid who couldn’t sit still long enough to finish a sentence ended up writing a weekly newspaper column for 26 years (and never missing a week), publishing 15 books, and talking into a microphone for a living.
ADHD, it turns out, was never the problem. It was just the long way around to the answer.
Onward.
Lentils
1 lb. Lentils
½ gallon Chicken stock
1 TB + 1 tsp Kosher salt
¼ cup Extra virgin olive oil
1 TB Fresh garlic, minced
1 cup Carrot, finely diced
Place dry lentils in a mesh strainer. Rinse under cold water for 2 minutes.
In a 3 quart stock pot over very low heat, combine rinsed lentils, stock and salt. Continue cooking over very low heat, stirring occasionally, until lentils are tender, but not mushy, about 30-45 minutes. Drain and spread out on a baking pan at room temperature. Discard any excess liquid.
In a large skillet, heat the oil over low heat. Add garlic and carrots and cook for 2 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the cooked lentils and stir frequently just until they are hot, about 3-5 minutes. Serve immediately. Finish each portion with extra virgin olive oil as desired.
Yield: 6-8 servings
(Robert St. John is a chef, restauranteur and published cookbook author who lives in Hattiesburg, Miss.)
