New Podcast for Business People with ADHD

Last year, I started writing a little bit on my personal blog about the fact that I have ADHD.

This was quite a startling revelation for reasons that I won’t get into now. But the “shiny object syndrome” which is clearly shared by many of the:

  • entrepreneurs
  • business owners
  • freelancers (designers, software engineers, web developers, marketers, musicians, etc.)

… that I’ve known is clearly related.

Do All Entrepreneurs Have ADHD?

Clearly that would be a bogus claim to make. But the idea that entrepreneurship is correlated with ADHD is grounded in science. One study from 2018 said:

This grounds prior research on ADHD and entrepreneurship, indicating that individuals with ADHD are indeed more likely to not just espouse entrepreneurial intentions, but also to initiate business venturing.

Lerner, D.A., Verheul, I. & Thurik, R.

Resources for Entrepreneurs with ADHD

An overwhelming majority of the information online about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (“ADHD”), formerly known as Attention Deficit Disorder (“ADD”) is focused on children, schoolwork, and parenting.

For someone like me that was diagnosed as an adult, it’s been difficult to find credible, reliable information that I can use as a business owner to help me manage the downsides of ADHD and maximize the many upsides of this powerful trait.

After working with Dana Rayburn, who is a very successful (and helpful!) coach for professionals and business leaders who have ADHD, I experienced such incredible benefits, that one day I suggested on a whim that we start a podcast.

Thankfully, Dana was a fan of the idea!

And so, Kick Some ADHD was born!

We launched a couple of weeks ago, and we’re releasing a new episode every Monday morning. In fact, today’s episode was part 2 of a two-parter on the unique ways that we procrastinate (everyone does it, but people with ADHD have refined it to new levels!) and what we can do about it.

You can find the podcast by searching Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and most every other place you get your podcasts. Or just visit the website for links.

I hope you enjoy the show!

More Evidence that Geniuses Collaborate

This evening I picked up The Geography of Genius out of the pile of books I’m currently reading and dove in again. As I mentioned in the tweet (above), this book is the first of Eric Weiner‘s brilliant writing that I’ve been exposed to, and I am hooked.

I’m only about 100 pages in, and I’ve traveled with Weiner to Athens, Hangzhou, and now Florence. He’s making the case that something about these locales—not just the places, but the conditions that existed at specific moments in history—sparked creativity and innovation in ways that are worth studying.

Reading his accounts, you get the sense that the individual geniuses who made these places famous required the opportunity to bump up against other geniuses in a “nitro, meet glycerin” way in order to produce the explosive bursts of talent (and the products of talent) we attribute to them individually.

This line of reasoning called to mind a point that Walter Isaacson loves to make. He drills the idea home in The Innovators, but it shows up in his other works as well. The one I just finished was his brilliant biography of Leonardo Da Vinci, and it surprised me to find that he made the same point in it as well. The point he makes is that the most effective innovators (geniuses, inventors, change agents, whatever you want to label them) collaborate.

We may remember the names of certain individuals, but usually only when they were surrounded (by choice or by happenstance) with others who helped fuel their creativity, add missing ingredients, or even finish their works of genius.