The ADHD Habit That Is Silently Killing Your Business

Presented by Understood.org

You keep switching direction mid-project, and now nothing in your business is fully built.

In this episode, we break down ADHD novelty bias and why new ideas don’t just feel exciting. They feel urgent, important, and hard to ignore.

You’ll hear how this shows up in real businesses. The team is aligned, work has started, and then a new idea comes in. It sounds better, feels right, and within days everything shifts. Six months later, you’ve got multiple half-built projects and no clear direction.

This isn’t random. Research shows ADHD brains assign higher reward value to novelty, even when it works against long-term goals.

We also look at the other side of it. Why boredom feels almost painful, why sticking with one direction gets harder over time, and how this pattern quietly impacts growth, team focus, and execution.

This isn’t about lack of discipline. It’s about understanding the pattern that’s driving your decisions.

What We Cover:

• Why new ideas feel urgent instead of optional
• How novelty bias overrides long-term plans
• The “half-built business” pattern many founders fall into
• Why teams follow the founder’s attention automatically
• The link between boredom, disengagement, and switching
• When novelty is useful and when it starts breaking the business

If you're enjoying ADHD Skills Lab, you may also enjoy Understood.org’s new podcast, Sorry, I Missed This.

Listen here: https://lnk.to/sorryimissedthisPS!theadhdskillslab

 P.S. Losing work because the admin layer around your business can't keep up with you? Invisible Systems is a 90-day done-for-you sprint where I (Skye) extract the processes from your head, build the operating layer, and find the right person to run it. Six spots left at the founding price, book a call at invisiblesystem.co

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

People who had ADHD and were not medicated were more likely, like a lot more likely, to select novel stimuli, even when that stimuli wasn't as helpful for them in terms of reaching the biggest number and then trying to make the most amount of money. Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode of the ADHD Skills Lab, brought to you by understood.org, the leading nonprofit helping millions of people with learning and thinking differences like ADHD and dyslexia. Today, we are gonna be talking about a struggle that honestly I felt really called out by. I'm not even gonna lie. I felt very called out, even though I was the one who told Robbie that we should talk about this, which is the ADHD founders' novelty bias and the way that it can affect the whole business. So we're gonna go today into a little bit of the research behind what is going on, why is this happening, and then we'll do another episode where we talk about some of the practical strategies and what to do about it. So, Robbie, and I am joined as always by my co-host and husband and co-founder, Robert Waterson, and a little special audio appearances probably by our little baby Ember. So why was this a call out? Because if I'm being honest, this is something that I struggle with the most out of everything. And I think the most out of everything compared to you, Robbie, because you have ADD, I have ADHD, and I think this novelty bias is more of an at least in terms of driving everybody to a different in a different direction.

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Yeah, I I don't know. I I don't think that you struggle with it more than me. I think okay, I I think there's two parts to this episode. One's the novelty bias, um, like the novelty seeking, but the other part is sort of this attention gravity well. I think that really is a problem of like your position in the business. So like I'll get super I have over like 600 games on Steam. Like I I have a novelty bias. I like I explore a new thing, kind of map it out, discard it, move on to the next one. Like that's not a problem for the business because I'm not steering the whole thing in a new direction.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

Yes, that's true. I am technically the CEO of the business, and I'm the one who decides the direction. So let's get into the two the two sort of scenarios. So the first one is the business has a quarterly focus, the team is aligned on it, the work has started, and then the founder comes back from a conference, a conversation, a mastermind, a long drive with a new direction. It feels urgent, it sounds exciting, and it's probably a good idea. They share it widely, they share it enthusiastically, as we do. The team reads the room, and then within a week, the quarterly focus has quietly dissolved and everyone is working on the new thing. And six months later, the new thing is also half-built, and now we've got kind of like a multiple of things. And you see this in businesses. Sometimes you'll see a business. I've seen this before where you're like, oh, I think that business is definitely run by an ADHD founder because the services section is really long. It's like the services are kind of like, Well, what don't you want? You know, I do anything, and you've got this and this and this and this and this, and then you have the other founders that you see where they're like they know not to do that, so they have like five different websites.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

That's kind of a scenario B is the half-built portfolio. So, yeah, like three new service lines in 18 months.

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And that that's a real problem, but also not always a problem. So we'll get into that. But it it can definitely be a problem, and especially when you're scaling, I think it's so easy to want to do everything and to feel like everything is important and also to feel like everything is doable. It's that novelty seeking ADHD brain's tendency to experience new stimuli as genuinely rewarding and creating that pull towards new ideas that, you know, in a way that makes them feel urgent and important, like this new idea. It's kind of like the hope hyper focus idea, you know, with ADHD. We can get into a hyper focus and we can just be like, all I want to do is figure this new thing out. And I would say it's it's something I've struggled, I've struggled a lot with. I studied, just to give you a sense of it, I studied before I found out I had ADHD. I trained over the course of my academic career to be a lawyer, a clinical psychologist, a general psychologist, a sociologist, a public health advisor, and uh sociologist, and then an academic. So, you know, just a couple of different adjustments. Robbie's like, oh no, we're gonna talk about all the different jobs we Yeah, no, I'm not gonna go through my list.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

But yeah, yeah, similar vibe.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

I feel like this is a founder problem, and we're gonna talk about it as a founder problem, but it's a it's a problem that a lot of people struggle with.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

And yeah, it's an ADHD problem.

SPEAKER_01 4:38

Yeah. And it's also a problem I would say that maybe is becoming more almost it used to be that having multiple jobs in your lifetime was considered unusual and also kind of weird, and that was one of the sort of ADHD traits. Yeah. And now everyone's like, why aren't you trying to run three businesses and start three things at the same time? So I don't know what that says.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Yeah, I think with this Founder Struggle series, there is a risk of being a little bit too critical and sort of a little bit too focused on the negative of these ADHD traits. And obviously, we're sort of in this time of ever-increasing disruption and like novelty. Having that novelty-seeking bias can be a really good thing. You know, like a third sort of opposite scenario would be we just keep doing the same thing we've been doing, we don't find any new opportunities, and then we slowly get out competed by our competitors.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

It's a balance. I think it's definitely a balance. And I know CEOs who struggle with ADHD who have gone down an AI rabbit hole and never come back. You know, I know the owners who, you know, take over, you know, you hear all this this all the time. People who take over companies that are run by CEOs who had ADHD, they don't innovate and then they just slowly the business slowly goes down over the next sort of decade and then eventually dwindles away. So it's a tricky one because as we go through this, I just want to I just want to point out, maybe slightly selfishly, that you know, on the one hand, this is this is a struggle, but on the other hand, this is also the reason the business exists in the first place. Like the entire business, if it's run by the person who started it, exists because it was at some point a random hyper focus that they probably shouldn't have been doing.

SPEAKER_02 6:28

There's a good chance that your ADHD founder didn't get you into laundromats and you know car washers and whatever else established businesses. Shout out to Cody for Yes, I know. I was like, except for Cody, that was chances are you your whole business is the yeah, the sort of novelty seeking, the outcome of the novelty seeking of the ADHD founder that you're working for.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

Exactly, exactly. I mean, I think about my own this business, and it's like, yeah, it was a thing that I wasn't supposed to be doing because we were focusing on growing the food business that we were running. And this was a thing I was doing on the side. Yeah, there was. When COVID hit, I'd already been working in schools talking about ADHD, which I absolutely was not supposed to do. In fact, I wasn't even supposed to be running the business. I was supposed to just be running, I was supposed to just be doing my PhD and not focusing on anything else. So both of those businesses were things that I wasn't supposed to be doing.

SPEAKER_02 7:24

Yes, there was always an excuse.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

No, it was supposed to be a thing that I focused on and I did, and I didn't do anything else. But yeah, it I guess what I'm saying is yes, and okay, with that preamble, now that I feel like I've defended uh those of us who, you know, are the reason this business exists is the novelty-seeking hyperfocus.

SPEAKER_02 7:45

I think um we will we will get into it's not it's not just a problem to be solved. It is it is an advantage to be harnessed, but also contained.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Which is, I think, maybe the reason I'm more defensive of it because like working memory struggles, time blindness, like there are problems to be solved. Like it would be great to have working memory and it would be great to not struggle with time blindness. Like maybe there's trade-offs, but for the most part, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

I'm I am curious to explore all of these things as as trade-offs rather than as just deficits. I'm not obviously I'm gonna have to go looking for the research for it. I'm going to have to make a case for it, and it might be sort of hypothetical, but we're giving a try.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Well, actually, you felt the same way about the time blindness. You were like, Oh, I refuse to believe there's not a benefit to this. There was another one that you felt sensitive about.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

So, okay, yeah, I feel I feel the way about ADHD. I think the way that Stephen Fry has talked about sort of manic bipolar.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Yeah, he said he wouldn't he wouldn't trade it.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

Oh, so yeah, in the documentary, he f he interviews other people with it and poses the hypothetical. Like if there's a magic button that you could permanently remove it, would you? And their answer is sort of no, because it's too the the feeling is it's too integral. The the manic heights are too integral to their creativity and energy and identity, even.

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Yeah, it is an interesting one.

SPEAKER_02 9:01

Yeah, I kind of feel the same way about ADHD, where I'm a little bit skeptical of the like pure deficit framing, going to do a whole series arc on it. But yeah, like start with the DSM, go through to some interesting papers about genes and evolutionary trade-offs, sort of nomadic people versus settled people. I can't remember where. Again, we'll get into it when we get into it. And then go into all these strengths and try and have a think about all the different deficits and mechanisms through that lens of is this just a deficit or is this a trade-off?

SPEAKER_01 9:31

Yeah, I was talking to talking to the CEO of Shimmer, and she was talking about that now. I think it's becoming a more widely discussed conversation in general, that it's not just a deficit.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Yeah. And I think the obviously the hyperfocus is is one of the are there other I think hyperfocus is one of the first sort of clear examples of people talking about a pure positive.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

It's also considered to be a negative by a lot of people. It's actually both.

SPEAKER_02 9:56

Well, it's it's yeah, I mean that's my point, is the flip side of it's the flip side of an attention disorder is the hyper attention.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's and it's interesting because uh we're gonna get into it and let me actually go there now. But the first paper that we want to talk about actually really does remind me a lot of um of this idea of you know, would you trade it? The reason I thought that was quite interesting was if you read this paper, which is a really good paper about how, you know, they did brain studies, which we love, they looked at it, they compared people who had ADHD and were medicated to people who had ADHD and were unmedicated, as well as the controls. And what they found was what they found, and what I want to dig into here, was that if you were medicated, you were less likely to seek novelty, which made me feel a little bit less excited about medication. I mean, there's many good reasons to have it, but for that particular reason, I was like, Okay, that's I don't love that.

SPEAKER_02 11:00

I guess also people had I remember you telling me about people who had gone on medication and felt their creativity and their sort of I think one person we were listening to in particular was saying they were kind of the person their friends came to or their colleagues came to for ideas, and they really felt once they were medicated that that ability was gone.

SPEAKER_01 11:19

Yeah, but then I've also heard of other people who didn't, and to be fair, I'm not medicated, so I wouldn't be able to say like what the effect it's had on me. I do know people who have taken it and felt it really, really helped them. Maybe they were doing too much novelty seeking and they couldn't stop.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

Yeah, yeah. And I think also again, it's worth mentioning that medication is super idiosyncratic. It's like we're all operating with different genetics and different different experiences.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Okay, so let's get into this paper. So this paper was by Sethy and colleagues from 2018, and it was a neurocomputational account of reward and novelty processing and the effects of psychostimulants in attention to deficit hyperactivity disorder. So it was a very interesting paper because they looked at your brain, which we love. We love when they look at your brain because we can show that things are different and it just makes it feel a lot more real. So, what they were doing basically was they had 30, so they didn't have a ton, but that's pretty normal when you're doing MRIs. They had 30 adults with clinically confirmed ADHD, so DSM specialist assessment, versus 30 people who were not ADHD, and they had a task that they had to complete over two separate days, and they did a randomized control trial because on one of the days the group was given, both groups would be given uh uh stimulants.

SPEAKER_02 12:47

I was gonna say they they medicated the control group.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Yeah, they did. They did. They gave they gave individuals stimulants or non-stimulants on one of the days. So one of the days an ADHD group and a control group would be given stimulants, one of the days they would not be given like a like a sugar pill, so you didn't know what it was. And what they were testing for was how the brain performed differently, specifically in terms of whether the brain preferred novelty in that environment. Like how was like and they the the way they did it, and this is my one critique on this, but I completely understand, and they had it as a critique as well, was like a very weird game where you were looking at familiar and novel pictures, and you were assigned a certain dollar amount to certain pictures, and you were trying to make the most dollars. And what they found was that people who had ADHD and were not medicated were more likely, like a lot more likely, like I think it was double, it was it was a lot. They were a lot more likely to select novel stimuli even when that stimuli wasn't as helpful for them in terms of reaching the the biggest number and trying to make the most amount of money.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

They were favoring novelty at the expense of the goal of the game.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Exactly, exactly. So they were they were chasing novelty even when it cost them. You know, they were they were when they were off medication, they were selecting novelty even when it cost them a lot more, significantly more. It was like 0.04. And then they were, you know, if they were medicated that night, that wasn't the case as much. What they also did was they they looked at the brain, like we said. So they they studied the brain, and what they found was that when people were in that heightened novelty-seeking state, you could see it in the brain. So it wasn't just coming through in what they chose, it was also coming through in the parts of their brain. So the substantia, nigra, and the VTA in ADHD participants off medication. You could see the heightened novelty seeking in that part of the brain, which was really interesting. So this is the kind of thing that always gets me excited because it's like, oh, this is a real thing.

SPEAKER_02 15:07

Ventral tigmental area.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

I mean, yeah, I think ventrals right. And I'm pretty sure you're right about the other one. Three years of um neuroscience was a few years ago now.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

Yeah, and I think that that sort of the fact that the the persistence in choosing novel options predicted impaired performance is sort of the key finding here as well. So yeah, like like we were saying, it's it's a strong preference and it's overriding, it's overriding other goals.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. We focus on productivity here at the ADHD Skills Lab, but our executive functioning challenges do not disappear at 5 p.m. In fact, they follow us home, affecting every aspect of our lives. That's why I'm recommending the podcast Sorry I Miss This from the team at understood.org. Hosted by Kate Osborne, it's a thoughtful look at life, love, and neurodiversity. Instead of masking, it looks at how to build a relationship and a life that actually works with your brain, not against it. I've been listening to Sorry I Miss This and the discussion on decisions, decisions, ADHD, and the trap of analysis paralysis. This episode talked about how decision fatigue depletes our working memory, and by the end of the day, we can find ourselves really struggling to make decisions. This really resonated with me. I know so many of you guys talk to me all the time about decision making ADHD, and it's something that I struggle with as well. Kate and Dr. Shrine provide a helpful perspective on how narrowing down your options can help protect your cognitive energy. To listen to sorry I missed this, search for sorry I missed this in your podcast app. That's sorry, I missed this. So when you were on medication, then that novelty signal was reduced. People were less likely to choose novelty, they were more likely to just focus on the ones that gave them the most, the highest number, so that choosing novelty even when it wasn't working for you decreased. Which, yeah, again, it was really, really interesting. But they did have a caveat, which is that, you know, it this is an abstract thing they were doing here. This is in a room looking at landscapes, basically.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

We're inferring from this that sometimes the ADHD founders' pivot is biased by that novelty seeking at the expense of, you know, it's sort of it's a compelling new direction to go in, but not necessarily the the most strategic new direction, or or at the very least, yeah, it's biasing it to a degree.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Yeah, so that that's but I but I would say like even though obviously they had to do a little bit of limiting because this was a study that was done in a lab, they were they were you know doing their due diligence, they were randomizing the controls, they were randomizing the medication, they were you know doing all of those pieces, and they were finding really big differences in the brain. So it is a very interesting study for that reason. Let's jump into the second paper. So this paper was interesting because it started out with a few very graphic descriptions of what boredom feels like. And uh, I'm gonna read some of them to you because they were very, very good. But this paper was from 2026, so brand spanking you, Miris and colleagues, the boredom ADHD Nexus, a narrative and meta-analytic review of the evidence into ADHD and boredom. Okay, so this paper describes that for individuals, and let me know if this sounds like you, uh, with ADHD, boredom is not merely dull or unpleasant, but profoundly aversive. It was described by people who had ADHD as torture, almost painful, like wearing an itchy coat that you can't scratch, or a profound inner restlessness that um, you know, leads to an urgent need to escape the situation. And then they also reported that boredom and silence can feel as though the world walls are closing in. And then they also recalled childhood boredom that was so overwhelming and unbearable that it elicited tears. So these are all examples of things that people have said with ADHD about boredom.

SPEAKER_02 19:18

I've definitely made decisions that were not financially optimal in to accommodate my desire for novelty and my like aversion to boredom.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

And I think it's worth mentioning, and if you're somebody who has ADHD and feels like this, maybe you should send this episode to your friends and loved ones because it is worth mentioning to them that boredom feels painful. Because I think a lot of people don't get that. And often when I talk to clients and I say boredom probably feels painful for you, they're like, Yes, how did you know? But it's it's that that difference is not just uncomfortable, it's literally feels painful, like having itchiness that you got in a restlessness, like restless leg syndrome, but for your whole body and your internal brain.

SPEAKER_02 20:05

Yeah, it's like anything would be better.

SPEAKER_01 20:08

Individuals in general are the same. Like they did another study, which I'm not gonna say where it is from here, but you guys can look it up, where they had a small electric shocker in a room and a person, and they left that person alone, and they found that most of like more times than you would expect, people just started shocking themselves because they were just bored.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

Yeah, I think the mental image that comes to mind is almost like animals in the in cages or in the zoo, like pacing. I mean, I think I guess modern, it's more of like historical zoos. Yeah, I I may have already told the story, but my friend got me like my first job at like a telemarketing company. Oh, I yeah, I left two weeks in. I uh you couldn't pay me enough to do that on repeat. It's definitely definitely limiting in some ways, but then again, it's kind of that trade-off, right? Of like, I don't know that I want to have a brain that can do that.

SPEAKER_01 20:58

Well, it definitely would have been easier in my early 20s to have a brain that could do that because it would have meant that I was more likely to stay in jobs and and you know do that work. Now, being an entrepreneur, I think it has a lot of benefits, but that's one of the reasons so many people with ADHD go into entrepreneurship, is because of those benefits.

SPEAKER_02 21:17

I think I think it's sort of yeah, there's a few things going on there, right? Like the employment also comes a lot less control, so you can't make minor changes that would massively help you perform in that position. Often there's roles that you can't delegate that you like, yeah. I think the classic one is just any admin that's been added onto a role where the person loves the core of the job, but then they have to do the forms afterwards. Probably police is a classic example of this. I think teaching as well, but like, you know, someone might love teaching and then all the admin that comes with it, or like I think avoiding paperwork is a common idea in the in in sort of law and order.

SPEAKER_01 21:49

Yeah, yeah, or anything. I mean, I work with a lot of clients who come to me with you know this idea of like, you know, when I work with executives, they're like, I'm you take. Running my own department, but I have much less control, and that lack of control is often a big part of the conversation. Anyway, that's that's slightly more of the strategies.

SPEAKER_02 22:11

Well, I think in terms of how it applies to this episode, this is around novelty seeking. It's more like I think in terms of novelty seeking and boredom, it really precludes us from doing routine, repetitive jobs, a lot of office work, a lot of things that are sort of under stimulating environments and not a lot changed.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

I I I was reminded when they said that initial story about childhood of, you know, I grew up, I didn't have a phone, the internet wasn't as big of a thing when I was growing up. And so I would go to the library and get like a stack of books because I knew I would get stuck at a car. Some you know, my parents would go to Bunnings or whatever your version of the local hardware store is, and they would be there for hours looking at stuff, figuring out what to get, and I would be so bored. So I was just like, I have to bring as many books as it takes to get through this, and I would always over over prepare for that. I never ran out of books, but it was always like, what if I did? I would be so bored.

SPEAKER_02 23:14

I feel like my my childhood was just a lot more boring.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

You just put up with it.

SPEAKER_02 23:18

Library visits weren't really a thing. I think I'm wondering why I didn't latch on to that as a workaround. Because like I I think when audiobooks turned up, I always like, I don't know, I sort of can't comprehend my life pre-audiobooks.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

I think it's because you don't read as fast as me.

SPEAKER_02 23:33

Like I think that option wasn't as available to me, possibly because of some sort of dyslexia or something.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:39

I don't I don't have dyslexia to the degree that it like I know it's in my family, but I I don't I've heard the symptoms of it in terms of like things moving, having trouble with like rotational not I don't relate to any of that, but I know I'm a relatively slow reader. Not to a degree that it negatively impacted my school to a noticeable amount, although it probably is the reason I favored a lot of STEM subjects away from like literature subjects, and when it did come time to like write essays for exams, I'd sort of I'll pick one and I'll scrap the other two.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

You were born in the wrong decade, my friend. If you'd been born a bit later, you could have had audiobooks to listen to on the car rides. Yeah. Robbie's gone off into like a deep hole. Just rethinking childhood.

SPEAKER_02 24:22

Yeah. So many sidetracked car rides home to the XYZ shop.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Yes. Yeah. I don't know how many other people have had a parent who's like swears it'll only be five minutes.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

The ADHD parent who's time blind, who thinks that they're not boring you absolutely out of your mind.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Okay, let's get into it. I don't want to stop there before you this becomes a therapy session about ADHD boredom in childhood.

SPEAKER_02 24:49

Anyway, mostly when audiobooks turned up, they were amazing. Basically, never stop listening to things. Um and then podcasts, obviously, after that.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Yeah, and look, now we're here. We are on the podcast. So this paper, this boredom nexus, they wanted to do a meta-analytic review of the evidence of boredom with relation to ADHD. Their argument was it's really surprising that there's not that many articles on ADHD and boredom, given how everybody talks about ADHD and boredom all the time. So they did the methodology of only 18 studies that they found, but 22,000 participants in those studies, and they looked at what they measured. So they measured trade boredom mostly, and they looked to see if there was an effect. So there was a moderate to strong association between ADHD and boredom, which meant that you know, seven out of a hundred people with ADHD would be expected to fall into a high boredom range compared to 30 out of 100 without ADHD. Basically, we are more bored as a group.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

More borable.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Yeah, don't bore us.

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Can you explain trait boredom? Is it a trait? I associate trait with personality, like the big five personality traits. A dispositional tendency to feel bored more often, more quickly, more intensely, even in situations other others might find neutral or stimulating. People high in this trait report frequent boredom in daily life and struggle to sustain interest in routine activities.

SPEAKER_01 26:18

And I think it's it is a tough one because you know, for people who do not struggle with this, it does feel a little bit like I'm gonna okay, I'm gonna go off topic here, but I swear it's important. The idea of hang of relating to or being even in a relationship with or anything with a person who has a trait of boredom can be quite intense, right? Like, I mean, we've we've hung out with people before who are even more, I guess, high on the boredom trait than us.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

Can be exhausting if they don't have a hyper focus.

SPEAKER_01 26:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:54

I think the way it exhibits in our relationship is we've just had to develop etiquette around interrupting each other's podcasts or audiobooks or what have you. Like the expectation is we're going to be doing something to simulate, to to we're going to be listening to something interesting, most likely, most of the day. And there's just an etiquette around interrupting that because the expectation is not that we're not going to have our headset on. The expectation is we are going to be listening to something.

SPEAKER_01 27:21

And if we want to talk and walk, we'll usually go for a sorry, if we want to talk, we'll usually go for a walk. Because we find that that's a better time to have like conversations, essentially.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

The example you're giving is sort of they've come to a social situation, but they are clearly understimulated.

SPEAKER_01 27:40

Well, I guess the if we think about a founder, you know, I wanna I want to be aware of what that must feel like to run to be in a business run by a founder who struggles with boredom in this way and seeks novelty in this way. Like that must be difficult.

SPEAKER_02 27:58

Yeah, well, because there's there is definitely kind of a social exhaustion from being around someone who clearly is trying to like inject energy into the environment. Yeah, there's almost a feeling that you need to cater to them. It's yeah, it's interesting to think of that in terms of it's your boss.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Yeah, because you do need to cater them if it's your boss, more so. Yeah. The feeling is probably stronger.

SPEAKER_02 28:19

Yeah, that person's actually picking what we're doing next. Yeah, I can see that being a problem.

SPEAKER_01 28:24

Yeah. So I guess what I would say is coming around on this episode. Like, on the one hand, I started off really strong with being like, hey, but this is a good thing. Like, let's not get too negative about this. But on the other side, I am now also going, okay, but like let's give some credit to the people that work in those ADHD founder businesses, including our own team, for handling the pivots. Yeah, handling the the novelty bias, you know. Like, shout out to them because they could have gone and worked in a business where nothing changed and they chose the chaos. That is a startup, you know. It's start they call it startup culture, but I think it's it could also be called ADHD founder culture.

SPEAKER_02 29:03

Yeah, probably depending on the startup, but yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:07

But if someone says move fast and break things is their entire ethos, then you might wonder. Not diagnosing anything. It might I I've heard it from a couple of I feel like one person said it and then everybody said it after that. Well, one of the caveats I will say of this paper is that, you know, the studies that were included were correlational. So they couldn't establish causation, obviously, from this meta-analysis, and they were predominantly self-reported measures. So it was a lot of discussions of do you feel bored? Yes, I feel bored. What does bored feel like? They weren't doing the kind of you know neurological study, randomized controlled trials that you saw in the in the SETI paper in the first paper.

SPEAKER_02 29:46

I'm guessing there will be brain regions associated with boredom though.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Oh, I uh I well, they have to be, Robbie. Brain regions associated with everything.

SPEAKER_02 29:56

Well, I guess it's more like I think there are things that we can't read with an MMR MRI.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

There's definitely I I I don't remember it exactly, but I do remember like things like that having a specific place in the brain.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a base feeling enough that it will be like a region.

SPEAKER_01 30:14

So then to kind of bring it back, we've got, you know, when we think about these two papers, what we see here is that in the first paper we see the ADHD brain assigns intrinsic reward value to novelty. So especially unmedicated, you're getting a real dopaminergic focus on the brain as some wanting to focus on novelty even if it's not going to be helpful in this case, even if it's not going to win you the game that you're playing. And then the second one is the idea of the opposite, is like when novelty fades, now you're experiencing boredom. If you struggle with ADHD, boredom is pretty bad. Boredom is pretty difficult.

SPEAKER_02 30:57

I think one of the key findings from this paper that we're that we're using to illustrate our point is that the boredom drives the disengagement and and a search for simulation. So this is sort of the other half of that coin. We're novelty seeking and we're also having trouble staying engaged once the existing work becomes sort of stops being new.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

Yeah, once the novel becomes familiar, which is what they talked about in the first paper. Like technically all the images what they show showed were familiar at the beginning, but once those beginning images had become familiar, then they were no longer interesting.

SPEAKER_02 31:30

Yeah, and then the boredom leads to task avoidance and an increased drive to seek stimulation, and that's through novelty seeking, rapid task switching, or just disengagement.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

Exactly. Exactly. That is both a positive and a negative, I will say. It has positives, which we can talk about a little bit if we want to, and it has obvious negatives as well. One of the positives sometimes is that if you are only interested in something when it's novel, then once you solve it, then you can or you see that somebody else can solve it, then you're off on another idea. So if somebody said to you, please come up with a unique and very usable business idea, for example, being the kind of person who could go through and come up with something novel and seek something novel would mean that you'd be more likely to come up with a good idea, essentially. Or at least an idea no one else had thought of before. If you're thinking about that blue ocean, red ocean, you've got to find stay in the blue ocean, which is basically the idea that you've got to stay in an environment where you're not competing with hundreds of other people for the same thing, you're gonna find more ADHD people in the blue ocean than the red ocean, basically. But also the the people who run the business alongside that owner are being dragged into the blue ocean.

SPEAKER_02 32:44

I believe I heard you talking about exploration versus exploitation. One of the papers I'm looking forward to covering on genetics at a later date is is about that. That sort of the the novelty seeking is the exploration preference rather than exploitation. So yeah, that trade-off of looking for a new looking for a new opportunity versus harvesting the one you've already found kind of thing. The point of that was there's pros and cons to both, like depending on the environment, staying put or finding something better.

SPEAKER_01 33:15

So yeah, so Cethy and colleagues, they said the ADHD brain assigns intrinsic reward value to novelty. It's a real dopamine signal. We see it in the brain, it's not just enthusiasm, which means that new ideas really do feel more urgent on a neurological level, especially if you are not medicated and you have ADHD. And then for MURIS, they talked about the experiences of boredom and they did a meta-analysis on boredom, and they found that boredom is driving disengagement and a drive to find something more stimulating, and it's all kind of contributing, and you specifically see that in a lot of founders who struggle with ADHD.

SPEAKER_02 33:51

I think one of the things we wanted to point out was that this is happening at the project level to some degree. We've been discussing that. It also sort of happens at the organizational level in terms of the direction the company's going in.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

Yeah, it it happens wherever the person who has ADHD has influence. But the founder isn't flaky, like that's the key here. It's not a fault, and I think we've tried to try to say that throughout here, but you know, their brain is just doing what it's wired to do. Like our brain is just doing what it wi was is wired to do when we we started this business, even though there was other things going on, and technically, like logically, it would have made sense not to start talking about ADHD in schools because how are we to know that the government would shut down the frozen food business and we would have to go and do other things, you know, like but as it turned out, multiple sort of pans. It wasn't a bad, it wasn't a bad idea. It actually was very helpful.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

Is multiple pans on the fire a thing?

SPEAKER_01 34:48

Yeah, I think it is something on the fire. Irons on the fire. There you go. Yeah, so it is it is an advantage in many cases, you know. But you know, what it means is that like you said, the founder, the organization will follow the founder's attention, so that could become a real struggle if you end up with half finished projects. If you are the person who has the website that has the services and there's 10 of them, this might be you, you know, like how many services do you need? Um, the rule is you really should have three. If you have more than three, yeah. Maybe it's a different kind of business. I don't know. I'm not gonna judge a business. But yeah, though that architecture can mean that you go from new thing to new thing to new thing, and you never quite fully sit and you never quite fully grow, and you end up in situations like I know some big podcasts they talk about like what are you looking for? And one of the biggest things they were looking for is just have you been talking about the same thing for 10 years? Can you stay in the same space for 10 years and grow the knowledge and push through the difficulty and push through the boredom of it versus just jumping from now I do this to now I do this to now I do this, which is also easy.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

It's kind of a filter for it's a filter for, I guess, ADHD people, people in general, but probably ADHD people in particular who uh who haven't got that novelty seeking Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:12

Well, I think it's it's just looking for depth. You're you're not gonna look you're not gonna find depth if you're jumping all over the place. And I say this is somebody who, as we've discussed, loves jumping all over the place.

SPEAKER_02 36:23

Yeah. I think the problem isn't the founder's novelty seeking exploration bias. It's it's when it's propagating down in into the whole business. So it's it's also that sort of gravity well of they're pulling the whole thing with them.

SPEAKER_01 36:36

So really, this is where you know it becomes important. We'll talk about this obviously in the next episode, and then we'll talk about this even more when we get to delegation. It becomes important to start handing things over because you want to have that architecture, you know, that is holding the company's direction that is not the founder, if the founder's gonna constantly come up with and develop new ideas.

SPEAKER_02 36:57

Have the structure in place that stops that excitement about the new thing from becoming what we are all doing right now or next week, and instead funnel it into the planning for the next either the next month or the next quarter or whatever makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

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