The game of business is hard enough.
It’s brutal when you don’t know you’ve got custom rules.
The fried nerves of too many late nights. The insecurity from missed deadlines. The heroic last stands, with a chaser of shame that they were needed in the first place. The constant frenzy of activity that leaves you with nothing to show for your effort. The emotional work needed to get to the work that needs doing.
The cycle of excitement, commitment, disengagement, and self-sabotage that leaves you standing in a graveyard of your own good intentions, feeling like a failure regardless of what you’ve actually achieved, knowing you were capable of so much more. Fucking ‘potential’. When exactly is it supposed to become ‘actual’ anyway?
It doesn’t have to be this hard.
I’d say that it took too many cycles of self-sabotage for me to understand I was living with unmanaged ADHD, but it took as long as it took. If this rhymes with your experience, you might share some ADHD characteristics. Many entrepreneurs have at least a dash.
We all find our own words for it and ways of coping. Ways of playing around the hidden rules of how our brain actually works. We get a lot of practice at picking ourselves back up when we fall. We also wind up doubting why we keep falling in the first place. We start thinking that maybe it’s us. Maybe we're broken.
The good news? I don't think we’re broken.
The other news? It’s still our responsibility to learn how to not fall.
As kids we adapted best we could to a world that wasn't designed for us. As adults, especially as entrepreneurs, we have the option to adapt our environment back. To align it with how we play.
We can choose to accept our brain type as a design constraint, not just an impairment.
But we can’t design for a constraint we don’t understand, and it’s damned near impossible to understand something we’re in denial of. So the first step is to accept that we work differently than we’ve been taught to expect. Then we can get curious about what our hidden rules are, and learn how to design a business that enables us to play by them.
This is the game. The wicked problem I want to help you solve.
We’re surrounded by implicit and explicit messages about how simple shit is, and how we should just be able to do the work, and just be consistent, and how weak our wills must be to not be able to just fucking do it. And it all just adds to the mountain of shame and anxiety and self-judgement that’s been piling up through our school years and early careers.
Every time I hear the word ‘grindset’ my eye just twitches in irrational anger.
It’s not that consistency doesn’t work (it does) or isn’t important (it is), but grinding on willpower isn’t sustainable for the ADHD brain. It either burns us out or drives us to burn it down.
Let’s tailor your business, strategy, systems, and expectations to fit your actual brain. Develop ways to put your natural inclinations at the heart of your business’ engine. Apply your natural peaks of interest and intensity to driving the most important outcomes.
Let’s manage the troughs as well. Discover how you can make the boring shit that needs doing more engaging, or at least less painful. Build support systems that run without you and scaffolding that helps you maintain minimum viable engagement, even on your potato days.
Learn to dance to your natural rhythms of intensity with skill and grace.
Before you trip on them again and call it self-sabotage. Before your next self-imposed herculean all-nighter. Before the missed deadlines add up to missed opportunities. Before the frenzy and grind burn you out.
Cause this is the game.
‘The only way to win is by learning.
The only way to learn is by playing.
The only way to begin is by beginning.’
So let’s begin.
-Jared
P.S. Did you skip straight to the end? I see you. I help ADHD entrepreneurs redesign their businesses, strategies, systems, and expectations to better fit their brain.
Book a call and let’s chat.