My ADHD is so bad 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 seems to claim ADHD. Not bragging here – who brags about the inability to focus for more than nine seconds? – but mine dates back to when nobody even had a name for it.

In the early 1970s, doctors in south Mississippi just called me “hyperactive.” Accurate, honestly. At 64, still is. But “hyperactive” only described the bouncing-off-the-walls part. Nobody talked about the focus problem – the part where my brain left the building while my body stayed in a desk at Thames Elementary.

The focus issue made school hard. Reading was the worst of it. 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. One English teacher finally offered a survival strategy:

“Robert, read the first sentence and the last sentence of every paragraph. You’ll survive.”

It worked. Barely.

The teacher who truly changed things for me was Mrs. Nell Smith, my fourth-grade teacher. She saw me – really saw me – this restless kid who couldn’t sit still or keep quiet. Instead of fighting it, she worked around it. She moved my desk to the side of the room and let me write plays. Goofy productions about classic Universal horror monsters that we performed right there in class.

Think about that for a second. A teacher in the early 1970s – no special education training, no ADHD playbook – looked at a kid who didn’t fit the mold and chose creativity over compliance. That kind of intuition doesn’t come from a textbook.

Years later, my high school English teacher, Miss Bettee Boyd, told me I had a genuine knack for writing – if I could ever focus long enough to prove it. Two teachers, years apart, saw potential in a kid who gave them very little evidence to support their optimism.

College didn’t last long. My departure had less to do with academics and more to do with mastering one-arm curls – the kind performed in bars, not gyms.

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 social. Nothing stays the same for more than five minutes. For someone wired like me, it was perfect. For the first time, I wasn’t fighting my brain – I was using it.

The problem was learning. I knew I needed business knowledge, but reading books remained nearly impossible. Then cassette audiobooks arrived in the late 1980s, and everything changed. For the first time, I could finish a business book without my mind wandering off to reorganize a walk-in cooler. It felt like someone finally handed me the keys to a building I’d been circling for years.

Every other summer, I attend an executive retreat in Northern California. No deals, no meetings – just lectures and conversation among highly successful leaders. What surprises me every time is how many of them have ADHD. Surgeons, founders, hedge fund managers, generals – a remarkable number share the same wiring. For years, I thought I was simply bad at paying attention. Turns out many high achievers run on the same restless energy.

Then podcasts arrived, and the game changed again.

Podcasts made learning portable. I could absorb ideas while driving, walking or prepping a kitchen – something my younger self never could have imagined. I tell my son, who’s preparing to join our restaurant business, that he has access to more knowledge than any generation in history. Listen while you drive. Listen while you work out. Just listen.

My current rotation includes 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, Lex Fridman Podcast and Acquired. The list changes constantly – ADHD strikes again – but every one of them has shaped how I think about business and leadership.

Eventually, all that listening led to a simple question: What if I started one?

So I did.

Ya Gotta Eat pairs my co-host and production partner, Drew Wooton, and me with interesting people over a shared meal. No studio. No script. Just conversation around a restaurant table. Everybody has to eat, so food becomes the doorway into stories about careers, failures, family and resilience.

One standout episode features New Orleans chef and restaurateur Eric Cook discussing life after Hurricane Katrina – trying to hold his family and business together while the city struggled to survive. It’s powerful storytelling. We’ve also sat down with chef Frank Brigtsen, one of my culinary heroes for nearly four decades, whose humility matches his immense talent.

Those conversations remind me why we started the podcast: new stories, new people, new perspectives.

So here I am, 45 years into the restaurant business, a guy who still struggles to read a book without his brain doing backflips, hosting a podcast about food and life. Miss Smith would probably smile at that. Miss Boyd, too. That hyperactive kid who couldn’t sit still long enough to finish a sentence somehow wrote a weekly newspaper column for 26 years without missing a deadline, published 15 books and now talks 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

Ingredients:

1 pound lentils

1/2 gallon chicken stock

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon fresh garlic, minced

1 cup carrot, finely diced

Directions:

• Place dry lentils in a mesh strainer and rinse under cold water for 2 minutes.

• In a 3-quart stockpot over very low heat, combine rinsed lentils, stock and salt. Cook over very low heat, stirring occasionally, until lentils are tender but not mushy, about 30 to 45 minutes. Drain and spread on a baking pan at room temperature. Discard 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 until heated through, about 3 to 5 minutes. Serve immediately. Finish each portion with extra-virgin olive oil, if desired.

Robert St. John is a restaurateur, author, enthusiastic traveler, and world-class eater from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He has spent four decades in the restaurant industry, written 13 books, and written a syndicated newspaper column for more than 24 years. Read more about Robert at robertstjohn.com.

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