So I've got quite a special job now that I really love and enjoy. So I work in education, and it's funny because I wasn't that great at it when I was a kid. So I'm from a place called Stoke in The UK, and it's a really poor socioeconomic area. Nobody in my family had ever been to university. My parents really, they believed in the power of education to shift you out of that. So they just worked incredibly hard, and they worked hard to send me, my brother and my sister to good schools. When I was 11, I got the choice of either passing an exam and going to a private school or getting sent to a boarding school. I passed the exam, I went to this private school.

And mean, the majority of the kids there I didn't really understand. They all had, like, loads of money and all the stuff that went on there. I mean, I just hated it. I had, like, lots of fun being naughty with my friends, but it was a British public school, so corporal punishment was a big thing. Used to get hit quite a lot by teachers. Mean school was really weird. I was like really useless academically, and was just basically naughty, so that's kind of what I left school with was that I was a naughty lad basically. So yeah, school wasn't great. So I didn't do very well at school and I used to hang around with a bunch of folks whom I'd call the wrong crowd, so getting up to no good. You know, didn't do very well academically.

When I was in my early twenties, I sort of decided I'd better get my act together a bit. So me and a friend thought it would be a bit of a laugh if we became lawyers. So you can apply for any course in The UK if you're an adult, so we got onto a law course. And I went to the first lecturer of the law degree and this boring kid stood up in a suit and literally read out of a textbook and I just thought, you know, solve that, I've got much more interesting stuff to do with my time. So I.

Got a law degree, it was a crap law degree, I never went to any lectures or anything, I just used to, you know, we had to write five assignments every semester, I'd literally just go in for five days and be like, what the hell do we have to do? And just bang out these crap assignments and just swap the night before the test. So I got a two two, it'd like I think 46% was probably the highest mark I got at uni. So I got a really crap degree. But I was lucky in a way because when I graduated from university, was huge a glut of graduates in The UK, and the law society had brought in a minimum wage for trainee solicitors. So nobody could get jobs at all. But I.

Had other sources of income, so I didn't need to get paid, I put a suit on and knocked on doors and said give me a job, don't pay me, and somebody said yes. I ended up becoming a lawyer, which I hated because I kind of went into it thinking it was about helping people, but it turned out it was about earning fees. So I did that for a little bit. I packed that in. I had a job working in big fleet car sales. I went to work for a marketing company and hated that. When I was in my early thirties, I I decided to go back to uni, so I kind of I fell in love with computers. So, like, I've I've got a big misspent youth that pretty much lasted into my mid thirties. Acid house music happened when I was a kid in The UK, so I used to.

I loved taking drugs, and I loved going to the parties. Still do love the music. You know, I learned how to DJ. I got a bit interested in making the music. And, you know, through that and computer games, I got interested in computers. So I applied to do a computing course at university, and I got an interview with the course director and he was like, yeah, you can do the course, but you've got to do a maths, you've got to pass a maths paper. And I just couldn't do maths when I was at school all. So I left the interview just feeling shit really and thinking that's it, I've I've got no chance. And.

I got a kid's maths fluke out of the library and just took it home and started working through it. And actually, it was weird, I actually discovered that all the maths that I couldn't do when I was at school I could do. And even though I'd never done anything academically, because I was interested in computing, I actually ended up I got a master's in computing, and I even got a distinction for it. So I actually got this sort of real personal understanding of this thing called engagement and learning. You know, when I was at school, I had I literally wasn't engaged with anything and I couldn't learn anything, but I found that when I was interested I could learn whatever I wanted.

And I decided to become a teacher, so like my master's project, I built a system for a bunch of primary schools, I spent a lot of time working in these primary schools. And they were really cool. Know, I used to love going in and seeing what they were doing with the kids. And I remember standing in a classroom one day and thinking, I love computers. School's cool now. I'll be a teacher. I'm a bit of a dick. I became a secondary school teacher, so like I went on my first placement in a secondary school and just kinda discovered it was the same boring crap I'd been forced to sit through when I was a kid, you know, school's just full of shinier toys.

So I mean, I did that for a little while in The UK. I moved to New Zealand, I think nearly seventeen years ago. I taught her to Decile ten school on the shore, Decile two school down in South Auckland. I'm not doing too much teaching. I really did a lot of stuff around infrastructure because I'm a geek, and then trying to help teachers use technology in the practice, which to be honest, because I didn't know what I was doing was like pushing shit uphill. And I was I was just getting very disillusioned with it and almost had enough, and then I had one of those sort of really magic life experiences happen. So Frances Valentine, who's my boss now, she'd set up a place called the MindLab, and.

I'd been sort of following what they were doing, and I got home one night and my ex wife was like, Oh, Francis Valentine's been in touch with me. Wants you to go and see her. And I just thought she'd want me to take some kids from the school I was at at the time, so I left it for a bit. And I still remember turning up at this really cool, funky building on a crappy winter's night in Auckland, and it was raining. And I just walked in and I saw something that I'd never seen before. There were like 30 odd teachers there late at night after a full school day, and they were doing professional development, were learning, but they were like cheering and smiling and laughing and having fun.

Know Francis had just sat me down and said I want you to work for me and I just said yes. And has, that's been really a profound moment in my life for lots of ways. So why is it special to me? Up until I went to work at the MIND Lab, I'd never had a job that I enjoyed. I'd never had a job that I was good at. Work had always been a struggle, and I didn't know why. But then I went to work at the Marla and all of a sudden, I had work that I loved, and we had a purpose that I really, it really aligned with my personal values. And I suppose one of the things is that we do at the Modern Lab now, which I'd never experienced anywhere else, was we collaborate. And that's, I just don't come across that anywhere because to collaborate you need.

Psychological safety. So to really collaborate, you have to be able to talk openly and honestly with your colleagues about not what you're good at and and not to have to pretend to be good at things that you're not good at either. It's, you know, I've got a hell of a lot of stuff that I'm crap at, But we've we just built this culture at work where it was it was okay if you're not good at stuff. And then you find out weirdly that you've got these wonderfully different colleagues who they're awesome at all the stuff that you're crap at. It's like, well, you do all of that, and I'll do all of this. And, you know, that's real collaboration. So since I've been there, I've just had really a wonderful work environment.

The kind of but around that is even though I'd had that and I was really beginning to thrive, so I, you know, I look like a white privileged male, and, you know, I am because I'm white and male. But I am diverse as well. So I didn't find out until I was in my 40s, just by accident, that I got ADHD. I felt like a total dick when I found out. Was like, of course it's ADHD, you know. I got given a form to fill in by a friend and I went through and it was like somebody had just written my life down with tick boxes next to it. It's like, do you do this? Yes, yes, yes, Yes. All the time. Yes. So I mean, when I found out, it was I don't know. It was interesting because I'd always felt like I was just a bloody alien walking around and never really.

Known what it was or why it was different. And so it was like, oh well, that explains it. But when you read about ADHD, all the language around it, it's it's deficit language. So it's an attention deficit and it's a disorder. And then I've got all these other things that sit around it, which are wonderfully named comorbidities. And you know, was just it kind of explained why I was the way that I was, but I was embarrassed about it. You know, I didn't tell anybody at the time. But then at work, I I had something go I was on the board of my daughter's school, basically we had to exclude this.

Six year old kid who got ADHD defiance disorder. It was basically me as a kid, and we're like, we ended up excluding him in a board meeting because the legislation's shit. And it really destroyed me, it really upset me, and I ended up telling all the board members. And then I went to work the next day and I was fine, but then a board member rang me up to see if I was okay, and it destroyed me again. And yeah, I'm normally really happy at work and I ended up going out with Frances's PA Melissa and just telling her everything. She was like, you need to tell Francis. And I went home and I told my ex wife about it. My ex wife works in HR and recruitment and she was like, don't tell Francis. Anyway.

Melissa kept on at me for a few days, and one day I literally was just walking past the office and she just pulled me in and just said, Richard needs to tell you something, and just kind of blurted everything out to Francis. And it was really quite a profound day because when I told her, the first thing that she said was, oh, I knew. And I was like, oh, shit. I thought I was doing a much better job of hiding it. But she said she said, I didn't know what you got, but I knew you were different, and that's why I want you to work for me. And that was just this big mental flip. You know, I'd never seen having a different brain as having any value, and she just totally turned that on its head.

And the next thing she said was, what do you want me to do to help? And the magical thing about where I work is nothing because I already had a really wonderfully supportive environment. So I'm profoundly grateful for where I work because I can go in every day and be me. And you know, if you've got ADHD, that comes with a lot of stuff that normally you try and rein in, know, it's like my brain thinks it, my mouth says it, and that's like a blessing and a curse. Yeah, so I mean I've got a really awesome work environment that I love. It's made me think differently about ADHD. Know, myself and my partner, we've got four children between us and three of them, you know, one of them's more towards the neurotypical side and three of them more.

Neurodiverse. And what I do at work is all around innovation, and it's really about the secret to innovation's beautifully simple. It's all about diversity, but not the kind of diversity that most people normally talk about. So when people normally talk about diversity, they talk about gender or religion or ethnicity. And those things are important, but there's a deeper one that matters more, that's diversity of thought. And, you know, what I find through work is that's the beautiful thing about people who are on the neurodiverse side, our brains are different and that makes us think differently and that's a profoundly beautiful thing. And so I get to do that at work, I get to help organisations.

And people just really understand the true power of that. And so, you know, I've had a really good life and I can't complain. And I took lots of drugs and it fun for a while until it stopped being fun. But you know, I don't want any of our children or any children to have to go through the crap that I've had to go through. It's, you know, I've got something that I'm incredibly, incredibly grateful for every day that I can go to work and I can be myself. And that's what I want for our kids, every kid. Everybody should have that. So that's like me and what I do and why I do it.