This blog entry was written by Lisa-Marie Karvonen a member of Crazy Town in Hämeenlinna. ”Lissu” is the nerd behind WP-Ensure, a platform dedicated to auditing, securing and maintaining websites month-by-month.
ADHD and entrepreneurship
I have ADHD like an estimated 29% of entrepreneurs. I was officially diagnosed at 38, medicated and I’m still figuring it all out. I’m going to be publishing a few posts about the effect ADHD has had on my company including The Good (this one), and The Bad (the next one) and I’m pretty sure some of it will be ugly too (just to round it off).
I think most people would agree that it’s rare for something to be wholly bad, or wholly good. The same goes for ADHD. It’s really specific to each person so don’t take what I write below to be a generalization for all ADHDers but some of them might resonate with other ADHD entrepreneurs.
A Whole Lot of Learning
Diving deeply into subjects isn’t just for ADHDers but can be a feature of most neurodiverse people. It can be handy to inhale a huge amount of information, for example, if you need to fix the brakes on your camper van in a hurry (did that), but also can suck you in, to the point that you work for 6-7 hours without a break.
You can forget to eat, visit the loo and take care of basic needs. This is hyperfocus. It’s handy when you have deadlines, you get a lot done. Not so great for well-being. Hyperfocus is how I learned to code, and how I keep learning new things.
Deadlines Are My Friend
There’s nothing better than having a clear deadline. They mean you have a clear cutoff, it has to be done. That pressure makes me hyperfocus and I power through past the point of reason to get the job done.
Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
My brain tends to be hyperactive in the morning before I take my medication. This is not always a bad thing. Recently I’ve been so excited about everything at work that I’ve been waking up at 5 am.
I can’t get back to sleep because my brain is already pinging with all the cool things I’m about to do. Then I go and get started and get sucked into oblivion (see hyperfocus above) until 7:30 (actually 8:10 when I’ll be late for dropping off my son at daycare).
Sometimes a problem I’ve had the day before will arrive with a fully packaged solution first thing in the morning. I try to use these quick brain jumps to my advantage such as hashing out some blog posts, writing down ideas for marketing, and making quick lists of what I could do, would do, and should do. Then I take my medication, life slows down a little, and I can actually focus and curate my brain dump into something (hopefully) useful. It would be nice to be able to have a morning like that every day, but the truth is it can vary. I try to take advantage of it when I can.
Positivity
This one is a bit of a see-saw if I’m honest.
First thing in the morning I’m hyperactive. This also means I feel like I could do just about anything. Entrepreneurs need optimism in their lives to function, otherwise we’d all pack up and go do something else. I’m not saying we need to be optimistic all the time because that’s impossible and is not genuine.
I doubt I can credit ADHD fully for being an optimist, but I do think being a bit more impulsive and positive about things affects how willing you are to take a leap and a risk in your business.
Afternoons are a bit of a roulette, especially if I don’t eat lunch early enough, but humans aren’t robots, and everyone gets tired as the day wears on.
Connecting with Customers
As I mentioned, I love learning. That extends to learning things about my customers and their projects. One customer recently asked how I could just ’get’ what she meant when she was explaining her idea.
The excitement of two people who are really into a project can’t be beaten. It was a great idea, I got it immediately, it was fun to code and the customer is fab. Winning combination as far as I can see.
Connecting Weird Things
If there’s something that connects ADHDers, it might be the speed at which we associate ideas. This might be only a feature of the hyperactive/combination type, I am not sure.
We make the most random of connections. When I get going (usually in the company of other neurodiverse), we ping from one thing to another without needing to explain the connections. For sure this can baffle other people, but when you find your people (neurodiverse or not) who get it, it makes those relationships even more special.
It usually means you can tie together funny stuff to the amusement of all (assuming you can get the thought out, more on that in my next article). But it can also make you seem weird to people who have a more serious nature, such as business-suit types and consultants.
DO IT ALL (or go home)
Connecting seemingly random ideas as I mentioned above is part of the course, but this feature of my brain has also meant that when I do something, I go all in.
I coded a platform for managing and auditing websites. It wasn’t enough that the hosting was good. It wasn’t enough that the auditing was good. I wanted every damn thing to be perfect (spoiler alert, it’s still not!).
I couldn’t stop tweaking and adding and perfecting and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s been 7 years now and I’m only just now deciding that it’s good enough to start marketing.
If I had remained unmedicated, I would have developed it till the end of time without telling a soul about it.
I blame this on ADHD. I could see the connection between hosting and security, hosting and SEO, privacy, SEO, auditing, how bad DNS management can affect the hosting, how bad management affects everything etc etc. It’s exhausting at times. I wish I could have gone all MVP. But my brain wants it all, and it wants it all to be perfect and it will hyperfocus to get it done.
I consider this feature to be a good thing because I connect things that should be connected. They ARE connected and affect each other. This is great for getting a complete view of a subject, but it’s a bloody nightmare to define, market and sell what it does.
Going Forward with ADHD
So these are the features of ADHD that I see as mainly positive ones. I wanted to start with some positives because we all know there are negatives to this whole thing also which I will write about in my next article.
I also want to reiterate that my opinions are my own experience. There are plenty of long-suffering ADHDers who have more inattentiveness, issues with impulse control or who have difficulty with meds.
I also have an unmedicated friend who sees her ADHD as a superpower (I wish I could have her level of confidence). Everyone is very different and I’d like to hear from any other ADHD entrepreneurs because we are not talking enough about it.
