One of the possible reasons that ADHD people are overrepresented in entrepreneurship might be that they're more successful because they're quicker to pivot, quicker to fail quickly and test to the next thing. And they don't sort of, they don't have as much trouble leaving something behind.
SPEAKER_01Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab. I am here and excited to be here with my husband and co-founder Robert Waterson, and we're going to be talking about what will hopefully be the first of a couple of episodes on ADHD strengths, specifically related to a piece of research that we spoke about a couple of weeks ago now, where we looked at foraging, which might sound like a strange thing, but uh but we'll get into it.
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SPEAKER_02Yeah. And if you can't tell, this guy's recovering from a pretty bad cough.
SPEAKER_01No, I've always sounded like this, guys. I I have a husky voice, as we all know. What we wanted to talk about today was last time we spoke, it was about a piece, an article about attention deficit linked with proclivity to explore while foraging. So this was by Barack and colleagues. Um it was back in 2024. And what was really interesting about it was that it didn't find what it thought it was going to find. It found something that indicates, and again, this is just one piece of research, but it really does indicate something that it's worth having a conversation about. Um, it indicates that people with ADHD might have a strength that even the researchers of this paper were not aware of.
SPEAKER_02They thought they'd set up an environment where the average person was going to leave too early, and that would mean that ADHD people were leaving even more early because of their impatience or whatever sort of you're putting down, putting that sort of desire to move off sooner, novelty seeking, whatever. They're framing it as sort of an inability to stick to it even when they should, and that was gonna be a disadvantage. And counter to their expectations, they accidentally built an environment where everyone was staying too long. And so in this environment, the ADHD was an advantage because they moved off sooner. It wasn't even at the optimum. The optimum was to move off even sooner.
SPEAKER_01This was a sort of uh foraging game based on data about optimal foraging that other you know papers had done before them. And if you want to know a little bit more about this actual paper, you can listen to the episode a couple of weeks ago where we go into this. But what we really wanted to talk about today was the strength part because we touched on it in that episode, but we really wanted to dive into this idea of are there strengths to being ADHD? Because it's interesting and it's we're not talking about superpowers. I know we talk about, you know, people talk about ADHD superpowers, but there's always a feeling, not always, but sometimes it feels like there is a bit of a feeling of like we're just trying to make ourselves feel better. You know, we're like, no, there's there's gotta be something. We're talking about real, potentially research-backed strengths of ADHD that may indicate why we have it.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I think ADHD is pretty widely viewed as a deficit of disorder.
SPEAKER_01It's in the DSM.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it's a disorder in the DSM that you diagnose and then you medicate so that you can function is kind of the broad framing of it. And what we're wanting to do here is sort of explore could we reframe these because clearly there are struggles, but could we reframe those as the negative trade-offs of an adaption to other environments? The the authors were, I think, quick to say, obviously, ADHD is a disadvantage in a dip would have been a disadvantage in a different environment. And it's like, yeah, but let's let's stop and focus on the fact that it was an advantage in the environment you set up, thinking it was going to be a disadvantage. You know, is that true more broadly? Are we stuck kind of thinking of this as a bad thing when it's more like, well, it's a bad thing in this environment? You know, is it a good or a bad thing given a certain context?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. And and for some people this will feel like a brand new conversation. For some people, this will be a conversation you've had for a while. The way we've talked about it at unconventional organization is the idea of strong strengths, strong weaknesses, like uh or a spiky profile is another way people describe it. You know, there's some things that you're really good at, and there's some things that you're so bad at that you don't even want to tell people.
SPEAKER_02You'll see that more broadly with neurodiversity in general, I think, in the schooling system. Like spiky profile, yeah, is this idea that when you're trying to tell if someone is behind on everything or just spiky, like just highly variable in what they're good at and what they're bad at.
SPEAKER_01And this is kind of one of the same things where it's like, oh, well, ADHD is, you know, really underpinned by this idea of having trouble with attention and novelty seeking. But given the right environment, having trouble with attention and novelty seeking can be a strength. And was a strength in this particular paper. Obviously, it's one paper, but it is it is worth mentioning. And then, yeah, shout out to Craig Ballantyne, who came on a couple of months ago now, but requested for ADHD strengths, which is one of the reasons why we're having this conversation, and I think it's a really good conversation to have.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we wanted to finish the founder struggles first. This should be one of many, hopefully. I wonder if part of the reason we have this negative reframe, this negative framing on ADHD in general, is because the first time people experience it, both ADHD people and neurotypical people, is in this one size fits all public schooling system.
SPEAKER_01Not always. Obviously, you've got late diagnosis, but for a lot of people.
SPEAKER_02No, but even then, there's probably an ADHD kid in their class. So even if they didn't realize they had it, their first impression of what ADHD is is, I feel like almost poisoned by this by ADHD's struggle to fit in to the standard schooling system.
SPEAKER_01You know, you make an interesting point. I remember when I was in academia and I hadn't actually I wasn't sharing my diagnosis, I wasn't talking about it. One of the reasons was because I would I would always say, like, ah, well, you know, when you when I say ADHD, you think of like a an eight-year-old boy or a 10-year-old boy. And I'm not a 10-year-old boy. Like, you know, but but that's just what people think. They're like, 10-year-old boy, sky, must be the same now because you said this word.
SPEAKER_02Won't sit still, won't hand it in on time, probably shouldn't work with her.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and and I didn't want people to know that. I would just make sure they got to know me before I said that I had ADHD, because then they wouldn't just go 10-year-old boy, sky, same thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's not you don't want it as a first impression. And I think we've even dealt with people who are wanting to keep it on the down low because they're in sort of a their career has a political sort of element to it when it comes to promotion and reviews. Or legacy when you're dealing with shareholders in businesses or and they don't want those stereotypes to taint how they're being viewed.
SPEAKER_01I mean, so many wonderful people have worked with us who who will not be named and because they want to keep it private. And that's I totally respect that. I mean, I have no idea. Like now ADHD is the first thing people hear about with us. So it kind of pre precedes everything. But still some people think I've had I've gone on podcasts where people think I don't have ADHD because they're like, oh, you must be talking about those people because you seem really competent, and so you must not have it. And again, there's this assumption of it is a weakness and you are here being an authority figure, so you cannot have it, which is which is weird.
SPEAKER_02Well, that's that was the other thing I was gonna say potentially biases the field a little bit, is how many of the people researching it have ADHD versus a just sort of looking at it and they're looking at it originally in the context of children, struggling to fit into a schooling system. The problem with a one-size-fits-all system, or I guess even the problem with any system that's catering to everyone, is that it's naturally going to cater to the most common sort of majority profile. That's the most efficient thing to do, and the exceptions often fall by the wayside.
SPEAKER_01And as we've discussed, we are not the most common.
SPEAKER_02No, but I think that applies to all the neurodiversities, obviously.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, it's the bell curve, right? It's like the people in the middle of the bell curve get supported, and the people on the edges of the bell curve are not necessarily they do they don't have as good of an experience. And sometimes that's seen as a strength, and they go on to like, you know, college early or something like that, and sometimes that's seen as a weakness, and they're you know labeled and put in different classes and things like that, and and it mostly has to do with how much it's fitting within the criteria of what good schooling looks like. Like, aka did you get good grades or not? Like I I I did okay. I did I was confusing because I did really great in English and really terrible at math.
SPEAKER_02I think even if we just jump back to the diagnostic criteria, especially the hyperactivity stuff, like fidgets, taps hands, squirms, leaves the seat when it's not, when remaining seated as expected, runs around and climbs, when inappropriate, unable to engage in activities quietly, talks excessively, blurts out answers, like obviously all the hyperactivity stuff in particular, super ill-suited to your classic classroom and what the teacher wants to do to get on with things, operating on like a one to thirty ratio. But it's not like that energy is necessarily a bad thing.
SPEAKER_01No, no, and that's just the thing. There's like in certain contexts, it can be good, but like you said, the context that we most l often see is the average context. So that's the average schooling system, the average workplace. And those contexts do not support these differences. You know, if you think about it, if you go back to the bush berry research, these contexts would be like you're not allowed to just go and forage whatever makes sense to you. You know, you have to stay in one place and do the task that you were told to complete until it's completed. And that might mean you lose the berry bush game, but you know, that is what you need to do for work most of the time.
SPEAKER_02They've set up an environment where the berry bush is this teacher of this classroom, and these kids are desperately trying to escape and go to another bush. So true. They need to learn somewhere else. This is horrible.
SPEAKER_01Keeps getting up and going somewhere else.
SPEAKER_02This bush's rate of return is it must be less than the average.
SPEAKER_01Robbie, I just realized that foraging is in the DSM as a negative.
SPEAKER_02Think about it.
SPEAKER_01The entire hyperactivity gets up when they're supposed to be sitting down.
SPEAKER_02Oh, literally the mechanism that allowed them to do a good job.
SPEAKER_01So, like, literally the thing that would make you good at foraging, which is that you have a tendency to get up and go somewhere else, is a negative in the DSM because you're not supposed to. And I think this is the conversation that was worth having about the environment. Gosh, that actually got I I'd never thought of that. That's so crazy.
SPEAKER_02The core part of the study is that you have to get up and go to a different bush if you're gonna have a good rate of return. You can't just harvest one bush until complete depletion, even though the rate of return is dropping and dropping and then never go somewhere else, kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01And for those of you who are listening to this and going, yeah, sure, but what about when you pivot from one thing to another endlessly? We can get to that, but we're talking about strengths here today. And so we're giving strengths a moment.
SPEAKER_02Well, we did a founder struggle episode on sort of over-pivot pivoting, on sort of the downside of novelty seeking, the frustration that your team will have with an ADHD founder when they feel like they never get to finish the thing that they're working on. They're constantly losing all of that productivity with having to spend it on transitioning again, not finishing the thing, not getting the reward, all the transition costs. Your team's experiencing sort of a morale cost to this as well. A lot of people don't like, again, like I think the more neurotypical or maybe even neurodiverse in another way, don't like transitioning. And there's often a morale cost for your team associated with pivoting too often, or even pivoting the correct amount. When I was programming, I remember there was a guy in our team who really struggled with even the baseline moving on to another project or having to shift focus occasionally and work on something else. And I remember the manager saying, like, he's not gonna be able to find somewhere that does that less. I've already given him the least disruption to his schedule that's possible. And I was kind of on the opposite end of that spectrum where I was the person he would, the manager would go to to give fires that needed to be put out today, even though obviously there is that transition cost involved. And you know, I'd sort of say, as long as you understand I've got to I'm gonna have to spend half an hour making notes, shelving everything that I'm working on now because I'm in the middle of something, so that when I pick it up again, I'm not having to repeat all of that work. I can actually pick it up again and figure out where I was up to. As long as that's understood, I'm more than happy to switch tact and go work on this now, because obviously someone needs to. I don't have that strong preference against it. It doesn't bother me. I'm kind of, if I'm honest, a little bit happy to just sort of change what I was doing halfway through because I was getting a little bit kind of like, ah, what the hell's going on here?
SPEAKER_01And it's an interesting one because you know, some people will be like, well, how does that make sense when we struggle with transitions? Transitions is a different thing from pivoting. Pivoting is kind of like this idea of like, oh, this one, this one's sounds interesting. I have a bit of dopamine for that. I'm interested in switching. Transitioning is more along the lines of like if you have five meetings in a day and you have like a 30-minute break between each of them, and during that time you're supposed to You can never get anything done because you're constantly shifting. Just the bleed effect that people talk about.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think it's the same thing on different scales, though, isn't it? If your team's working on something for three weeks and then you go as a founder, I think we need to pivot in this direction. Actually, I've been thinking about it. I don't think this is the correct direction, and it's not worth completing, go this way instead. They all feel like, well, I kind of wasted three weeks and now I'm gonna spend a week shifting and we're all gonna get aligned in a different direction.
SPEAKER_01100%. It I think it's it is bad for morale, but it's also necessary. I think that's the that's the tricky part. Like, I mean, and to come back to the the research, if they had made the ADHD members in that piece of research the leaders of their teams, their overall team would have done better because they would have pushed them to move on closer to what was optimal. And that is an interesting reality when you think about what we talk about, which is being an a founder with ADHD symptoms. You feel like you're pushing people and there's sort of like there's a bit of resistance, but sometimes it is also a good thing. Like we need to adjust and adapt for the environment.
SPEAKER_02One of the possible reasons that ADHD people are overrepresented in entrepreneurship might be that they're more successful because they're quicker to pivot, quicker to find, like quicker to fail quickly and test to the next thing, and they don't sort of they don't have as much trouble leaving something behind rather than you know, either some cost fallacy or for whatever reason, just a sort of a preference, a lack of novelty seeking, a lack of curiosity, a lack of having that sort of lower patience for something that's not working. There are obviously situations where sticking with it and getting it done is the correct option, but often in entrepreneurship, you want to listen to those signals and go somewhere else and find the thing that actually works.
SPEAKER_01And that's really what this is about. It's like it's both, right? There I can tell you endless examples of people who stuck with it and that was the right thing to do, and that's why they're successful. And I can tell you endless examples of people who pivoted and that was the right thing to do, and that's why they were successful. So it's really about judgment. It's about having good judgment about when to do one versus when to do the other, but a predilection for pivoting may be a strength.
SPEAKER_02In the right context.
SPEAKER_01In entrepreneurship, which is what we talk about.
SPEAKER_02Which startup still finding a feat, still finding your product or your service, still finding your audience. That might be the type of environment where it is a strength.
SPEAKER_01Especially if it's off the back of paying attention to your audience and what they want and not getting too hung up with what you want.
SPEAKER_02Something I want to do on the other side of a lot of these, looking at these studies, looking at these, speculating on on whether or not something is just a struggle or if it's a that's the negative side of a strength, is find some research on where ADHD people are overrepresented in a career path, and then sort of look at all those career paths and go, okay, what's the what what would this tell us? What could we extrapolate from this that would explain to us?
SPEAKER_01You know, ADHD people are overrepresented in the entrepreneurial career path, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, obviously entrepreneurship. But I'm also wondering, you know, if it's nursing and emergency services and actually some parts of the security apparatus of the government and whatever else. Like if we look at all those things, what does that tell us about the environment where ADHD might be adaptive in modern society? Because I mean, one of the theories is this sort of hunter-farmer thing. Maybe it was adaptive in the past, but it's no longer.
SPEAKER_01But we were talking about this and you know, this idea that it used to be adaptive to be a to have ADHD symptoms, but now it's not adaptive anymore because we've evolved past that or whatever. And I'm like, well, it might be coming back around because you know, being able to run your own business and be flexible and work with AI, like it is becoming the conversation about whether it is a strength to be uh to have ADHD symptoms is coming back around.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Someone from memory, someone wrote an article recently about neurodiversity being a strength in a AI economy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I can't remember who it was, but it was yeah, everybody sent it to me immediately. I got so many DS.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think just to go back to the paper for a minute, so they had this thing, marginal value theorem. And so they they were able to calculate based on, I think, two variables, like the the average rate of return at the other bushes and the time lost transitioning between bushes, they had the exact time you should leave your current bush. I do think it would be interesting to try and try and build the equation for a much more complicated human reality where it's like, well, it's not just gonna be that, it's gonna be the amount of other people who are harvesting the bush with you who are saying, What are you doing? Why are you going over there? Like, why are you leaving? This is a good bush. You know, I think entrepreneurship is actually a great example of everyone kind of looking at you going, like, really? Okay.
SPEAKER_01They call it the lonely chapter.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Their prediction was that everyone was going to leave these bushes too early. They accidentally built an environment, or at least they built a test environment where people stayed too long. And so ADHD was the advantage instead of the weakness. ADHD was the advantage instead of the disadvantage in that environment. I'm curious it'd be interesting to have an equation that better predicted why people are choosing what what about an environment will make people stay longer on average or leave too early on average. Again, that would sort of come back to better understanding what are the environments where ADHD people are at the advantage going to thrive rather than struggle. You're not going to design an ADHD-friendly schooling system for everyone, but you might be able to have a I mean a class of just the ADHD people. I think the problem is though, you have a class of just the ADHD people, right? But then you just still put them in a class. Could you design an environment that would allow them to thrive and still accomplish a contributing to society career path at the end of it?
SPEAKER_01I think a lot of people are trying to do that now. I mean, the conversation about school, it's kind of funny to have that conversation because on the one hand, I feel like it's worth having because school and you know, traditional schooling is still such a feature of everybody's lives. But on the other hand, I feel like I more and more hear everybody saying this. Like modern schooling has to change, it's not gonna work, it's not working for our kids. And I feel like I feel like something is gonna happen for sure. And it is already in a lot of places that can.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think it would be great if even if we just had a better understanding of what environments suit ADHD kids better, and we just started directing them. Like, obviously, if we could improve the teaching environment for them separate from the mainstream population, but also if we knew, oh, well, these are the career paths where you guys really thrive. You guys have these genes that give you these predilections, and you should seriously consider this set of career paths or or anything else that has these, this kind of an environment, you know, probably a lack of office work, office hours, paperwork. I think it's interesting. I was watching something the other day and I was listening to an ex-cop recently talking about the body cam cameras that they have and how if you pay extra, he didn't have it, but he was saying he's probably talking to himself and narrating everything, even when someone's not there, because the AI is going to pick up the transcript and write the report documentation for him, which massively fast tracks the back-end paperwork so that he can spend more time on the job. Another example of how AI may improve the hireability of ADHD people, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01Well, I've been working with a lot of my clients on recording things. So a lot of clients uh have meetings that don't get recorded because you know they just haven't thought about it. Even, you know, I'll hire assistants and we'll be training people's assistants, and they'll be like, Yeah, I wrote down all the notes that they said, but it's really hard to keep up because they say a lot of things, and I'm like, You're not recording this? And like you don't have an AI transcription service like automatically summarizing this for you. Like at a baseline, that is what we are what we are teaching everybody to do now for sure.
SPEAKER_02That's one of the first things you have to teach. It's like, firstly, we're in a meeting. Are you recording? Are you is it being are the meeting notes being auto-generated?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because I want to be having a conversation with you, not kind of like having this such a look of panic, because I'll come up with a lot of things to say.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm gonna unload everything we need to get done. And I don't want you to be missing it because it was too much at once.
SPEAKER_01Or out of context, which is the other thing. It's like, oh, and by the way this and by the way that, and you know, you're kind of like trying to keep track of the context.
SPEAKER_02Well, there's also nothing worse than unloading a bunch of stuff, thinking it's now off your plate, and then realizing it sort of wasn't absorbed, it wasn't uh transferred. I think just on what we were saying before, I I can imagine teaching, for instance, if the more we can get testing and marking automated, the more all the admin backend can be automated, the more people will be able to get on with the actual delivery part of their job, which is like one of the big potentials of AI, I think, or at least one of the big positive potentials. Yeah, I think the big takeaway from the study was basically that who's experiencing a deficit really comes down to it comes down comes down entirely to the environment. If uh people are on average prone to overstaying in this environment, then leaving early is gonna be an advantage, um, or pivoting sooner, or exploring new options. And if people on average are leaving earlier than would be optimal, then ADHD's likely to exacerbate that and and it'll then be a disadvantage. But it's not inherently good or bad on its own. At least this part of it isn't. Again, we're gonna look at all the different parts or struggles of ADHD, and it might be the case that we can't find positive aspects to some of them. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I know that there are creative thinking, out-of-the-box thinking, some consideration about empathy or resilience, it depends. I think this is really interesting specifically for entrepreneurship, but yeah, I think there are a lot of strengths and just because we're talking, I feel like sometimes it's like people get weird about talking about strengths because they're like, oh, I should just focus on my struggles, you know. But really, the reason to talk about strengths is to say we want to understand the struggles so we can mitigate them, so we can focus on you doing the thing that is your strength. Like if you are somebody, and I am somebody, and we both are, where you are an optimal forager, you know, you're more likely to pivot into the new thing, then figuring out how to do that well and have that be a strength is super important. It's like what life is about, you know, like the whole point of it isn't just to be, oh, I have a thing and that sucks, at least not when it's ADHD, because it doesn't just suck. It is who it's part of who you are. It's like introversion and extroversion, you know, there's gotta be a little bit of light with the dark, a little bit of dark with the light, so that we can, you know, understand who we are better and we can go after the things that we want. Like that's really what it's at least to me, with all the research we've done, that is the point of the research.
SPEAKER_02I think I think where we've where we've gotten with personality traits like introversion and extroversion is oh, they're they're complementary. You know, they both still exist because they both have advantages and disadvantages. And what works really well, in my opinion, anyway, is that when you bring them together and they complement. I think um disagreeableness and agreeableness is another great example of that, where the we've actually sort of sexually dimorphed as a species and uh with huge overlap, but leaned more disagreeable with the male um half of the species and leaned more agreeable with the female half of the species. And it's not like one's better than the other. They're complementary. I do wonder if that will eventually be a potential takeaway from ADHD research that discovers, oh, it's it's actually kind of an advantage in this area. Oh, they they turn up more when it comes to this particular career.
SPEAKER_01But it is, you know, and for those of you who are listening who are like, okay, that's cool, but like how do I make sure I don't do the endless pivoting and I don't want to listen to your episode of the podcast again? You know, a pre-mortem is my number one takeaway. Like if you are somebody who struggles, and I I have struggled with sort of pivoting a lot and and seeing this as a strength versus seeing this as a struggle, which is one of the reasons I wanted to really talk about this. You know, just do a pre-mortem on any new ideas you have before you do them. Like, what is it going to become? What could it become? You know, what does it look like if it doesn't work out?
SPEAKER_02I think the Cliff Notes in terms of how to deal with it as a struggle, pivoting too quickly, moving on to the next bush too quickly wasn't the case in the study.
SPEAKER_01It wasn't the case in the study. In this study, it was actually optimal, the amount of pivoting we were doing.
SPEAKER_02But the Cliff Notes were assess whether or not something's actually changed or whether or not you're getting antsy. Are you just excited for a new thing, or does it meet a external threshold for things have changed and we need to go in this direction, this isn't working, and it's been long enough amount of time that we've confirmed that.
SPEAKER_01And maybe also if other people are saying, no, I think you're wrong, I think we need to stay here, consider if they are the people who are going to not get enough berries from the berry bush to win the game.
SPEAKER_02I expect what we'll find from what careers are ADHD people thriving in, it will kind of be the high stimulation, high variety, hands-on, autonomous, fast-switching careers, which obviously entrepreneurship is one of, at least in the startup phase, perhaps less so in like a large established corporation. And it will probably be away from the repetitive, rigid, sort of sustained detention desk work type roles. But yeah, I think there's a expression, like we don't call a monkey a bad swimmer, we don't call a fish a bad climber.
SPEAKER_01Like an expression.
SPEAKER_02I think I think it is.
SPEAKER_01Don't think that's the exact expression, but I know what you mean.
SPEAKER_02I there might be a whole child story.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's like never ask a monkey, no, never ask a fish to climb a tree or something like that.
SPEAKER_02I think we're just making things up, but that's okay.
SPEAKER_01I tell us what it is if you know.
SPEAKER_02The monkey swimming, fish climbing was the bit I remembered. It might be a child's book. I can't remember. But I think the idea was basically just don't judge everyone by the thing you're good at.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, 100%.
SPEAKER_02You know, don't judge the introvert by your extroverted strengths, don't judge, but I mean that that is the thing, right? Disagreeable people, better at sort of standing up for the standing their ground when someone's trying to take advantage, agreeable, better at keeping the peace, better at better at sort of social harmony. I do wonder if we'll eventually see ADHD and neurotypical as complimentary tool sets.
SPEAKER_01You know, I would I would like that. I think that would be really helpful. I mean, I think that there is a conversation to be had about degrees. Obviously, there are some people who feel like I don't want to take away from the fact that some people feel like ADHD has really ruined their life. Yeah. Like it's really negatively affecting them.
SPEAKER_02That's probably the downside of over-emphasizing the strengths is that when people are struggling, that's not much.
SPEAKER_01I feel like that's one of the reasons why talking about the strengths is always a bit of a complicated conversation because of the fact that there are people who are just like, this has been awful, and then I got medication, and now it's better, and my life is better. So I don't want to have the strengths conversation. Um, and but there's a lot of people who don't feel like that, you know. So it's worth having the conversation anyway.
SPEAKER_02I think you can have both conversations.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean it's a podcast, it's long form for a reason.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think in business you often do see the two tool sets complement each other. You you will the first thing you want to do with an ADHD founder is pair them with an EA or project manager, yeah, who's going to take all of the things they're bad at off their plate and let them focus on the things they're good at. I mean, that's sort of just in general, the way we split jobs up is to sort of create a role that uses that particular person and their personality, their traits, their strengths, their preferences, and lets them really excel in this role and then give the other part, the other roles that need to be done to someone whose strength that is. A big part of what we do is mapping all the different roles and procedures in the business and identifying where the CEO is allocated to something that's completely outside their wheelhouse.
SPEAKER_01It's a big part of what we do and what we have done for years. But Robbie's saying going to do because he has plans to make it better.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I think generally speaking, some of the biggest bottlenecks are the roles that the CEO or founder hasn't been able to offload. And so they're stuck doing this thing when they should be in their sort of zone of genius. I do wonder if one of the other sort of takeaways, more so almost from that paper looking at entrepreneurship, attitude, entry versus scaling, I do wonder if thinking of ADHD founders as being great at the exploratory sort of startup phase, but that the natural life cycle for an ADHD founder should be yeah, find identify the problem, pivot until you've got something that works, get it up and running, slowly remove yourself from the business, and then exit the business, sell it, and take that equity and sort of diversify your assets is sort of almost the part of the business lifecycle we're we're specialized for.
SPEAKER_01It's very foraging sounding.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and then it's it's sort of natural to hand that business off to a new owner or to a new manager who is potentially a little bit more neurotypical and is going to excel in the scaling portion of that. And it's time for you and go to go exploring for a new problem. Yeah, take a portion of that equity and put it away in a diversified way for you to your family. For I wonder if that's how HD founders should almost think about. I don't know. I think alternatively, also creating the perfect lifestyle business is also a valid route to go down, getting it to the point where you're just doing the parts of the job that you love and people are handling all the other parts for you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that way you can be creative without it affecting the business. But they are both, when you think about them, two different ways to think about foraging, like going after new ideas, new prospects, new businesses, and leaving some stability behind. So, you know, whether you do or do not, whether whether you do the lifestyle business or the selling the business route, in both cases, you are in the process of systematizing the business so that it is stabilized while you continue to pivot and bring new ideas either to that business or to a different one.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, generally speaking, speaking, in the lifestyle business, you're still doing the dynamic exploratory part that you loved. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yes, exactly. So I think, you know, this is the reason why this is worth discussing because it feels like such a a self-evident strength of ADHD. And apparently it is, according to the research.
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