Leadership Success and The ADD Brain

I’m pretty sure I’m an unmediated ADD’r. And it can be frustrating. But good too.

I’m not one of those influencers with the perfect morning routine. No ice baths. No majestic note-taking system. No “just start 100 businesses” energy.

Interested in my journaling process? Buckle up. It’s like a bag full of cats. I buy one nice-looking journal — dark and moody, uniquely created for creativity and thought. I wake up excited for coffee and a good morning of journaling, reading, and reflecting. Day 1? Heck yeah. Did it. Until I didn’t. Which is Day 2.

Journaling is just a microcosm of how my brain works. I pack fifteen minutes before it’s time to leave. My best studying happened the night before an exam. Even writing this, I had planned something entirely different — then had a random thought, sat down, started typing, and now I can’t remember what the original idea was. This whole thing took maybe ten minutes to write.

I’m currently rebuilding the suspension on my 911. The process is maddening. Researching one part leads to another, which leads to another project, and suddenly I’m twenty tabs deep wondering how I got there. I’ll overthink and delay until I drive hard into focus and knock out three days of work in an afternoon.

These are examples of a functionally disorganized executive.

I’ve always admired people who aren’t wired like me. Organized. Consistent. Disciplined. People who make lists and actually finish them. But I’ve learned that people wired that way can find people like me absolutely exhausting.

I don’t think I’m brilliant. I’m not dumb either. I have a keen ability to recognize character, spot patterns, and get a feel for who the friends are and who the enemies are.

The idea of spending 10,000 hours mastering one thing is almost nauseating to me (see the book Outliers by Gladwell). I might eventually get there, but it’ll probably take me 100,000 hours — and then somehow I’ll do 10,000 hours of work in 100. See how that makes absolutely zero sense?

My brain is more Usain Bolt than marathon runner. Powerful bursts. The problem is knowing when to pull the trigger, because once I dive in, I really dive in. That also means I have a higher tolerance for chaos and uncertainty. As I get older I know what I am and what I’m not.

What I’ve tried to do is build teams that can do exactly what I can’t. I’m not going to master accounting, contracts, or every detail of due diligence. What I want to master is my contribution — whatever that happens to be at the time.

Sometimes my team needs an M&A strategist. I can do that. Other times they need someone to define what winning looks like, or to provide the belief that we can accomplish more together than any one of us could alone.

Here’s what I’ve realized: what actually frustrates my team is when I try to become the organized, structured CEO that exists in my head. When I chase that image, I become less useful to the people around me. They don’t need me to be someone else. They need me to be me — strategic, creative, adaptable, occasionally impulsive, sometimes frustrating, often wandering, but fully committed to helping them win.

This morning I didn’t journal. I made coffee, watched sports, looked at camera equipment, forgot what I wanted to do five different times, and eventually sat down and wrote this — which almost certainly wasn’t what I originally intended to do.

Did not dump my head in a bucket of ice.