When I realized that one of the symptoms of ADHD was hyper-focusing on certain things I thought "No wonder I seem to spend too much time on the things I am interested in and not enough time on the things that will benefit me."

This is really difficult to explain to the people in my life that automatically assume what little they know about ADHD to be all-encompassing or "just growing up".

It sounds like the people in your life simply don't have a deep enough understanding of the symptoms of ADHD, and if you could sit them down and show them, they might get it a little better.