How ADHD Made Me a Better Entrepreneur and Product Builder

As a kid growing up with undiagnosed ADHD, I often felt incompetent. Tasks that seemed easy for others and were expected to be easy for me often felt herculean. Because I didn’t understand why these things were so difficult for me, I internalized a lot of shame. I developed a loud internal voice that rationalized this as a lack of intelligence or competency.

It took me 32 years to learn that there are neurological reasons why my brain works this way. I don’t lack competence or intelligence, my brain just works in divergent ways from other neurotypical people.

A few of the hallmark symptoms of ADHD, particularly ADHD-PI (which is a subtype of ADHD called Inattentive ADHD, and is particularly prevalent in girls/women) are impulsivity, difficulties with working memory, poor organization and time management, low frustration tolerance, and difficulty following instructions. I relate hard to these challenges. My time in school was marked by missing instructions given out by teachers, forgetting important information, and forgetting to turn in my homework or misplacing it only to find it a month later crumpled in the bottom of my backpack.

I had a strong aversion to authority, of being told what to do and how to do it. I now know an aversion to being told what to do and a need for autonomy is common amongst people with ADHD. This is partially because we’ve received frequent feedback out whole lives from people with authority that we weren’t doing things correctly. It’s also because ADHD brains tend to think in a non-linear, associative style, which means we often need to find our own way of doing things to ensure they get done.

I have a tendency to be impulsive and quick to make decisions especially when excited about something (which happens often). Growing up I’d interrupt people when they’re speaking (because I have something really important and exciting to say! duh) and had a really hard time waiting my turn in class (every report card said something like “Rebecca is a really enthusiastic student, but she needs to learn how to raise her hand and wait to be called upon”). Impulsivity is a key trait of ADHD because the signals that are supposed to tell us to “stop, evaluate, and make careful decisions” aren’t as strong in ADHD brains.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a misnomer: ADHD doesn’t deplete attention, it scatters it unevenly and only activates focus under certain circumstances.

Specifically, people with ADHD can hyperfocus but only when something is:

1. Interesting
2. Competitive
3. Novel
4. Urgent

How we motivate ourselves to do something is largely related to the level of dopamine in our brain: in short, your brain has to release dopamine to get you motivated enough to do something. For neurotypical folks, something that is simply important (like paying a bill) or a priority (like studying for a test) is enough to release that dopamine and motivate you to accomplish that task. But for ADHDers, something really has to hit one of those 4 areas listed above to trigger enough dopamine to motivate us to do something.

I can’t tell you how much I relate to this. My difficulty sustaining focus on things that weren’t particularly interesting to me resulted in an academic performance marked with lots of B’s and B-’s and even C’s (the horror!). But on the side I would spend hours tracing the anatomy of the brain from a book and memorizing its functions, or doing unhinged things like reading for pleasure about archeology (there was a month-long period where I was convinced I wanted to be an archeologist as a kid, don’t judge).

Entrepreneurship and building products

Ok to review, some traits of ADHD are:

• Impulsivity
• Aversion to authority
• Ability to Hyperfocus when something is 1) interesting, 2) competitive, 3) novel, and 4) there is urgency
• Difficulty regulating attention
• Difficulty with working memory
• Difficulty with executive functioning (cognitive processes that help us plan, organize and compete tasks)

I started my first company when I was 22. It was called Purple, and we made it easier to stay informed on politics and political news by breaking down complex issues in a way that was digestible and easy to follow.

First of all: hilarious that I was passionate about making complicated topics easy for others to understand, given one of the hallmark traits of ADHD is difficulty comprehending complex information (due to issues with working memory and attention). I clearly was building something I desperately wanted and needed given my brain’s specific challenges.

Over the next 10 years I sold that company, worked on a second startup as a product leader and cofounder, and worked on multiple consumer social products as a product manager.

Sitting back and reflecting on all of this, it has become clear as day to me that it’s the exact ADHD traits I struggled with my whole life that directly enabled me to become an entrepreneur, two-time founder, and design thoughtful and meaningful products with my teams.

ADHD traits that make great entrepreneurs

To start a company, you must possess a few core things:

1. A belief that you can develop a solution to a problem that bucks conventional norms
2. A bias towards action
3. Hyperfocus on what you’re building

Let’s examine these key entrepreneurial traits through the lens of ADHD.

A belief that you can develop a solution to a problem that bucks conventional norms

Sounds a lot like an aversion to authority would help with this, no? Every entrepreneur who has developed an innovative, successful company has been told at one point or another that they can’t do what they’re trying to do. Or they’re given endless reasons why it won’t work, typically by legacy players in that space.

I received a lot of feedback early in my entrepreneurial career from people I greatly admired and had much more experience than I did that what I was working on was either not worth it, or wouldn’t work. If I deeply respected authority, it would have been more prone to listen to them and internalize what they were saying as true. It was that inherent aversion to being told what to do and how to do it that gave me the foundation I needed to build something new, innovative, and that defied convention.

A bias towards action

This is where the impulsivity can really come in handy. When you’re building a company, often you have to make quick, definitive decisions. Don’t get me wrong, thinking things through is obviously important. But having a bias towards action is a crucial component of creating momentum and learning quickly by not letting perfect be the enemy of good. When you have limited resources and time, you have to ship, learn, and iterate very quickly.

Hyperfocus on what you’re building

This is the component of my ADHD that when harnessed appropriately can truly feel like a super power. The spark that led me down the path of entrepreneurship was finding an intense, sustained interest in something (namely, politics and journalism) that fueled spending many hours studying it for my own personal interest. It didn’t feel like work at all. On the contrary, it was a blast.

Remember, someone with ADHD can only hyperfocus when something is 1) interesting, 2) competitive, 3) novel, and 4) there is urgency. With Purple, it checked all 4 boxes.

You have to run through walls to build companies. It’s really fucking hard. But when you’re hyperfocused and driven it feels like a performance enhancement drug. You can run through those walls.

How difficulties with regulating attention, working memory, and executive function make for better product builders

The core principles of UX design and building consumer-facing products tell us that good design is simple, it reduces the cognitive burden on users, and it motivates users to exhibit the behaviors you want to elicit.

Well there is nothing that teaches you how to do that effectively like having ADHD. Being someone who struggles with attention to detail, short-term memory, organization, following instructions, and comprehending complex pieces of information, you have a great deal of empathy for those challenges and intuitively have a honed sense of how to tackle them.

In other words, it is precisely because of the burden these challenges place upon you when you have ADHD that you can develop a real knack for what makes a great product experience.

If you struggle with working memory, you might find it obvious that you should use progressive disclosure to educate users about the features in your product during onboarding. Or you might already know how to wield visual cues adeptly.

If you have a hard time processing complex information, you might already be adept at things like chunking which is a powerful way to help users digest information.

When you struggle with motivation to complete tasks, you get really good at developing strategies for this like gamifying things or making them competitive, or breaking things down into more manageable tasks (goal gradient effect).

These are just a few of many examples of UX strategies and concepts that I think having ADHD helps with.

A call for inclusivity and awareness amongst product teams

Diversity makes teams better, period. The more diversity your team has in lived experiences, backgrounds, and yes even neurology, the more likely it is that the best ideas bubble up to the top and you create high quality experiences for your users.

It has only been very recently (at least from my POV) that neurodiversity is better acknowledged, understood, and even celebrated in the professional world. Case in point: I didn’t even know until this year that ADHD was considered “neurodiverse”. The more individuals learn about their ADHD, how to manage the challenging parts of it and harness the parts that can be superpowers, the better. Creating a team environment where folks feel safe and comfortable sharing their neurodiversity and educating their team members on how their brains might work differently can be incredibly empowering.