Acceptance of the fact that I will always have executive function difficulties and there is nothing that can really improve it. It's not the realization I wanted to have, but it is one I wish I learned earlier.
Accountability, mostly. Either by gamification, for example a simple small whiteboard counting how often I did y (or not, that would be a strike). Couple with someone holding me accountable it works wonders, throw in a "punishment" or reward...
Or, if that doesn't fit, deadlines (which maybe is just another kind of accountability...). Both made me finish my degree in time and with a very good grade (A in Americano?).
How to translate this into the workplace, I'm not sure. You might have a supportive workplace and can be open about it, which is what I did.
We are creating animated corpses out of our culture.
The point of art isn’t to generate beautiful patterns. It’s to create meaning. And you can’t have that without human care and intent.
Furthermore, that care needs to be intrinsically interwoven into the patterns that comprise the work. That’s what craft is. The mastery to generate exquisite patterns, and the care to infuse them with meaning at every level.
Without care, in a Heideggerian sense, we are left with something which tastes sweet but is completely hollow, perhaps even illusional.
Aren’t we all living with an illusion of intentionality of our actions, and the uncanniness of a machine is because it doesn’t pretend?
Meaning is listener’s own perception (author’s own intent is a suggestion at best - if I’d be paid a dollar every time I thought some artist meant something when they didn’t or meant something different, I’d sure have a good wad of cash), and when a listener learns about the purely mechanistic “authorship” they start to feel uncanny unless they find an outing in appreciating the mechanicity itself.
You can also listen to the transcript of four Russian composers, including Rachmaninoff, playing this pattern recognition and generation game at a dinner party in the late 1800’s: https://youtu.be/PlFPOWuwBHI?is=EKBK7QQkJs4MsTCU
Composers at the time could do this just by looking at sheet music and audiating, without using a piano.
To add to this: classical extemporization, post-Romantic period, also sort of fell out of favor as the composer began to pre-empt the performer and the "written note is sacrosanct" effectively became the de jure standard.
There's a great story around how Beethoven, perhaps one of the strongest improvisers of his day, completely upstaged Steibelt, a contemporary musician and by all accounts a bit of a charlatan. I'll include the entire quote verbatim from "The Lives of the Great Pianists" by Harold Schonberg.
This time Steibelt had prepared a brilliant fantasy for piano and strings, the theme coming from the Beethoven trio he had heard the previous week. Steibelt's admirers were in raptures. Now the issue was joined, and Beethoven had to show his strength. He walked to the piano, grasped the cello part of the Steibelt work en route, put it upside down on the piano and insultingly drummed out a theme with one finger. Then he improvised, and—angry, excited, on his mettle—how he must have improvised! Before Beethoven had finished, Steibelt stole from the room. He never again would meet Beethoven and made it a condition before going anywhere in Vienna that Beethoven not be invited.
Probably the last truly great classical improviser on piano was Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894). His Fantaisie in E minor, Op. 77 is probably the pinnacle of his skill in (notated) improvisation.
After that, the great classical improvisers were probably organists in the 20th century, like Marcel Dupré (1886-1971) and Pierre Cochereau (1924-1984). Cochereau created vast, highly personal, symphonic forms with dazzling orchestral registration.
Check the article for the full context. It’s basically a musical version of exquisite corpse. One composer wrote the start of a phrase (on sheet music, without using a piano), then passed it on to the next composer, who continued the phrase based only on reading the sheet music.
This illustrates the extraordinary degree of audiation, or the cognitive ability to imagine music in the mind in a symbol-linked, systematized way, that used to exist in classical music.
Each composer could read what was just written, audiate how it would sound, audiate a continuation of the phrase, and then transcribe that aural imagination back to sheet music.
