Why Productivity Advice Doesn’t Work for ADHD with Ezra DeWolfe

Today I'm joined by Ezra DiWolfe, founder of ADHD Tools, who helps high-performing business owners better understand and work with their ADHD brains. We explore why ADHD can go unnoticed in high achievers, its connection with burnout, and why traditional productivity advice often falls short. Let's go. Ezra, a huge welcome to the Habits of High Performers podcast. How are you doing?

Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me today.

I'm excited to have you here because we want to talk about a topic that we get asked a lot about from our audience and that we find in the past over the years when we've had someone on talking about this, there's been great interest. And I think the interest is getting greater and greater over this last year or so. So we're going to talk about ADHD. For the person that's listening going, what is that? Is that ADD? Is that ADHD? In your way of looking at ADHD, how would you describe it or define it?

Sure. Yeah. I can, I can share with you a view that I've noticed tends to be true of people who get the highest level of performance. The view that I have is that ADHD is just a type of brain. Some people are left-handed. Some people are right-handed. Some people have an ADHD brain. You have a non-ADHD brain. It's just a set of traits, a set of tendencies. That's our starting point. Now, it does mean that there's particular patterns that we might have in life, things that we excel at, things that we struggle at. In particular, The types of things that I tend to work with, with people, are people who learn that they have ADHD later in life. And there's a whole other set of things that go along with that, of all sorts of learned behaviors that tend to be pretty common amongst that. So the main way I would think about it is it's just a set of traits. Some of those are helpful, some of those are harmful. We can work on the ones that are harmful, we can lean into the ones that are helpful. But that would be the way I would think about it for most people.

That's beautiful. So let's talk about some of those traits because some people will be listening right now. There might be a listener going, I have ADHD, I've been diagnosed. There might be others going, I don't know, I'm curious, maybe might I have it? What might those traits look like in different people? Sure.

So I'll list some of the traits that we might see at the top and how we might know if it's ADHD versus something else. So the types of things that I see with the business owners that I work with, we have challenges around task initiation. We have challenges around time awareness or time blindness. We might have challenges around prioritizing. We have this brain that can exponentially think of all the possibilities, so much so that it then overwhelms you. And if those are some of the traits, how might we know that it's ADHD versus something else? Because a lot of the struggles do look similar to other types of things. We had a guest on some time ago, an expert in procrastination, Dr. Christina Lee. who talked about procrastination as an example, as being a decision to do something that otherwise, or a decision not to do something that otherwise could be done. And so the thing that I would encourage for your listeners, if you're trying to figure out, like, if it's ADHD or something else, is that this is very much not a decision. I'm not saying people—

Involuntary.

Procrastinate. Yeah. There's, there's something that's going on that actually indicates that it's voluntary. There's some executive function challenges. This is one of the ways that often you might figure out if it's ADHD versus something else is that you've already tried all of those other things. If they would've worked by now, they would've worked by now. So it's sometimes through a process of elimination that people learn that this is the real thing that's going on.

How is it that someone could get to, let's say, 35 and went through 35 years of human existence and never been diagnosed or picked up? What might have their childhood felt like or looked like With ADHD that was never diagnosed.

Yeah. So, it is fairly common, particularly amongst high performers. That's why I primarily work with business owners is that you may have actually gotten this far in life because you were able to compensate just based on raw intelligence, based on creativity. So, you might have been the person in class who, if I looked at your report card, you got an A+ in one thing and then a bunch of Cs in other things. Or potentially, you got all A's and everything, but you did it because you just kept pushing through, pushing through, pushing through. You might have done it on grit alone. And what often happens of how people sort of learn later in life, how it goes most of their life without knowing, is that there comes a time in our life where sometimes some of those processes start, or some of those compensation strategies start to fall. So, in our 20s, can you get through a lot of challenges around task paralysis just by drinking coffee and You know, grinding through maybe, and eventually that starts to burn you out. Or, you know, when in, in earlier in life, we might not have as many responsibilities, but as the business grows in complexity, eventually it hits the spot where above our complexity ceiling and suddenly these things starts to stack up quick. So, it's not uncommon for somebody to get through that largely based on just raw talent, intelligence, and compensating for what might have otherwise been going on.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke Please get in touch with my team. caroline@jjlaughlin.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes. Yeah, being really driven, determined. And it's interesting, I study high performers, I work with them. I just think I'm so inspired by them. And I often see this connection between ultra-high performers and burnout, and there's an unbelievable connection. Do you believe that people who have ADHD who are not diagnosed through their childhood and get into their 20s and 30s are maybe more susceptible to burnout?

Yeah, 100%. I would also offer that a lot of the things that people describe believing that those are their ADHD challenges are often actually symptoms of burnout. So I'll give some very concrete specific examples. So I was working with somebody who's a real estate agent this morning in our group. Again, high achiever, high performer, talking about challenges finding words, challenges sort of like pushing through, challenges with motivation in the day. Now, what was actually going on there? Was that purely an ADHD thing? Was it burnout? In that case, it was largely burnout. But what might happen is that the way that people compensate for struggling with executive function is just like by pushing harder, trying harder, pushing, pushing, pushing. And eventually it hits a spot where your nervous system gets taxed and then your performance drops. How do you handle your performance dropping and, but you still have the same amount of things to do? Well, you push even harder and then you go deeper into burnout and those cycles can get going. So there is, there is a pretty high correlation between late diagnosed identified people with ADHD, business owners, high performers, and burnout for that reason that they're not the type of people that when things start to slip, they just say, oh, well, that's just how it is. Who cares? I'll just go on vacation, sit on the beach. That's not what they do. And in some ways that makes sense as a responsible person, but they often end up in this trap that it sounds like you've seen many times before.

Yeah, 100%. And why does traditional productivity advice fail for people with ADHD?

Yeah, so it's not bad advice. Traditional productivity advice is often helpful and we can see lots of people who benefit from it, but what we would offer is that it might be a solution to a problem that somebody doesn't have. So I think, for example, of that example of traditional advice around procrastination. If we think about procrastination as deciding to do something or deciding not to do something that otherwise could be done, there's very specific advice that is very helpful for that. I would think about getting clear on my goals. I would think of the pros and the cons and living in the moment. All of that is helpful if that's the correct diagnosis, for lack of a better word, if that's the problem I'm dealing with. But if the problem I'm dealing with that, you know, I can't get myself into action is something like an ADHD sequencing issue or an issue of like I'm blind to time. By the way, just to define that term, time blindness looks like that feeling of sort of never being able to really estimate how long things are going to take. I could work on having the clearest goals in the world, but if I'm blind to time, it's going to be really hard to stick to a planner.

Mm-hmm.

So the thing, it's not necessarily that the advice is wrong, it's just advice for a challenge that you may not have. Often what we find is that once we've actually helped somebody out, a very common pattern that I have, like most of the people I work with, very familiar with productivity advice because they've been trying it their whole life without success. But once they address their ADHD challenges, suddenly all of that productivity advice that they've spent years learning suddenly works. Because if you, if you're no longer time blind and now you have the best of advice, it works. But until that point, can be hard for it to work. So it's a good solution, but just for a different problem.

When you talk about addressing your ADHD and these traits that come with it, what does that look like? How do you address it?

Yeah. The hard truth of some of these things is that there are no quick hacks. So let's just take an example like time awareness. Time awareness or time blindness in many ways, How we address something like time blindness is we show people to notice the pattern of time. So for example, some people— here's an analogy. If we maybe we understand time blindness, maybe we don't. Here's an analogy of how it applies to something like time blindness. I might not understand music theory. You and I, maybe we understand music, maybe we don't. I might not understand time signatures, key changes, things like that. I've listened to music my whole life, but it doesn't click. On the other hand, if I had very deliberate study And practice and working on noticing those patterns and putting those patterns to my brain, suddenly I can start to pick them up. I grew up in Canada. I have French in every package, and I didn't learn how to speak it until I did very deliberate study. Something's very similar with ADHD, that it might be true that for something like things that are related to neurology, like neuroplasticity exists, we can work on developing those areas. So that's one way we can do it. For learned behaviors, Avoidance, perfectionism. We can unlearn learned behaviors. For burnout, we can do certain things to alleviate the burnout. So what it actually looks like to address the issues is to address all of those things systematically. And, and that's a little bit, that's a little bit tough. I wish I could tell you, hey, you know what? There's a magic color of Post-it note. And if you get that, it's amazing. There's this one Notion planner. You get that, it's basically like you don't have ADHD. It doesn't really work like that. It is—

I'd pay a million bucks for that.

Talking about bigger things.

Yeah, that's awesome. No, I appreciate that. It's interesting when you talk about deliberate study. So as you're talking about time signatures, I'm like, yeah, music theory, I understand it deeply. And as a kid, I was a drummer and I understood that Anders Ericsson did this big study around the 10,000-hour rule. So if I practice drums for 10,000 hours, I'll become a master of drumming. But what I forgot And what was missing from that description from Anders Ericsson was it was 10,000 hours of deliberate, focused practice, not just drumming for 10,000 hours. You're not going to get any better. So what I'm understanding is when it comes to ADHD, again, it should be deliberate, it should be focused, and hone in on something that can actually support your forward movement.

That's right. And that does tend to be the opposite of what most people Which is kind of what's happening. Yeah, so what most people try is that they're saying, okay, I got this problem, I've decided this is the year I just get disciplined. I got ADHD, now I know, I guess I'm going to like do it. But that's kind of similar to sort of saying, you know what, drums, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna learn music theory, I'm gonna figure this out myself. Um, and that's not the fastest way, um, to go about that. I, you know, that can show the importance of having mentorship, that can show the importance of having a proven path. Um, I think one of the things that we do that's a little unique is, and maybe I've mentioned this before, is that we work each year with usually 500 to 1,000 people. And kind of when you get the reps in and kind of like when we see those patterns over and over and we're following a very specific path, like that's the path to results as opposed to a lot of random trial and error, right? If you would've been able to figure it out through random trial and error, I'd offer that you probably would've figured it out earlier in life as well. Yeah.

That's really great advice. And I agree with you that success leaves clues. And anything I look at in my life that I've succeeded at, I've never succeeded by myself. There's been mentors, coaches, friends, advisors. And I think this is no different if you have ADHD. If someone's got a formula, proven track record, they can coach you specifically, you're going to probably save years of suffering. So, can I ask what led you to ADHD? So, ADHD Tools is your company.

Sure.

What led you to getting into this sphere specifically?

Yeah. So, for me, the journey was personal. So, I was also a business owner and I would fall into patterns where I would be hyper when it came to delivering value for clients, off the charts, focused on that, loved it, every moment of it. When it came to sending the invoice, I would freeze a little bit when it came to all the admin things, when it came to sort of running myself into burnout. I was the person who sort of, again, read every Brian Tracy book, attended every Tony Robbins seminar, and still it wouldn't work. And I was like, okay, well, what's going on here? Then I discovered later on that the challenge was ADHD, and I spent a number of years myself kind of trying that trial and error strategy I described earlier of just trying to grab random hacks, hoping something changed. And so what I wanted to do and what sort of led me to do this work is what I wanted to have happen is I wanted to create the environment I created for myself. I wanted to make sure that somebody, you know, who's a business owner who could invest the time and the resources into doing it could sort of like raise their hand and say, I'm ready to do this intensively and I don't want to do the trial and error and spend it, you know, 3 years of my life figuring it out. I want to figure it out in 3 months. And so that's what I want to do is I want to create what sort of I wanted to go through my own experience and say, how could I get all of those same experts that I ended up working on through my journey and compile them together in one place of people who know what they're talking about so others would—

Powerful.

Go through that journey a little bit faster.

May I ask what led you to discover— so I did the same as you, read every Brian Tracy book, Zig Ziglar, been to the Tony Robbins events, and hey, I had a lot of fun doing it and some of it was really helpful, but others I was like, This doesn't work for me at all. What led you to discovering that you had ADHD?

Yeah, I think like many people, I always kind of suspected that there was something going on there. Like, I would— I remember I went to— early on, I went to therapists saying, like, you know, I think I have this weird thing with, like, self-sabotage. It seems like— I don't know what's going on. In my mind, I thought ADHD would be a possibility. But I always rejected it. I think in part, and this is common with a lot of high achievers, in part because I put so much so much weight on personal responsibility, and I saw ADHD as an explanation as being the opposite of personal responsibility. So in fact, I think I was aware of it for quite a long time, but deliberately chose not to. And the sort of turning point was a decision of just deciding like, what if what if this means nothing different than some people are left-handed and some people are right-handed? Some people are analytical and some people are more creative. Some people have Slow twitch muscles, and some people have fast twitch muscles. And does that mean that I got like the wrong body at birth, or that I should just pretend that you know if I have fast twitch muscles that I'm gonna just force myself to run marathons? Or what would it actually what maybe responsibility actually means? You know what? I got this body that's great for sprinting. I'm going to lean hard and figure out how to be the best sprinter in the world. So so for me, it was a combination of always knowing it was there. reframing what responsibility meant in that case. And also just, I just started making a decision that it was time I needed to actually do something about it.

That's awesome. I love it. And if we think about ADHD tools, what are some of the outcomes that you've created for clients that you're really proud of?

Yeah. So although it is primarily a program focused around business results, The thing that I actually like more than anything else are people who talk about the differences that it makes with their family. So almost always the things that light me up, it's the people who talk about like they were able to actually take a week off for the first time. People who talk about like they told, you know, they told their spouse that they were gonna be home at 5 and they actually were home at 5 as opposed to stealing time from their family. So it is true, like there's, financial outcomes of doing this work because nothing really determines the success in business more than your ability to do what needs to be done. But all of the stuff that really juices me, it's people telling me things like that they were in marriage counseling and then once they were able to get through some of these issues, it meant that they were able to reconcile some of those things with their partner. People saying that they were able to show up different from their kids. Those are almost always the ones that kind of juice me a little bit more is how we show up for others in the world.

Yeah, so powerful. I love that. And if we think about building consistency, because I guess somebody perhaps with ADHD might feel like there's a lot of inconsistency in how they show up and deliver. So how do we build consistency without relying on motivation?

Yeah, that is key, that it is not a question of motivation. So here's the framework that I give people thinking about consistency. Um, so what I offer, um, when thinking about ADHD and consistency is that consistency itself is not a skill. For folks with ADHD, it often appears as the outcome or the product of developing several related skills. And so what those skills are is if I can develop task initiation, if I can get myself into the mode where I can get out of paralysis and start, And I have time awareness. If time actually feels real, if it feels scarce, I can accurately prioritize. And I can accurately control my focus. And then I have systems around me that support me. If I have all of those things, consistency often emerges sort of as the product of having all of those things together. And you do actually need all 4. It's kind of like if we have one of those luggage tags that has a combination lock and you have 3 of them dialed in but not the 4th. If I got perfect systems, And I'm good at getting out of task paralysis, but I'm totally blind to time, the lock doesn't open, consistency doesn't open. But if you have those other things in place, consistency often emerges as the result. So I don't think it's true that folks with ADHD can't be consistent. I don't believe that in the least. I've seen too many people go through and have those types of changes. It's more that to get to that spot, we just have to work on a few different places where people with ADHD tend to have blockers.

That's awesome. Ezra, I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD. I possibly was like you many years ago thinking something's different there and perhaps I have it. So, there's a couple of things I'd love to test with you just to see if we walk through and use the system you just shared, one in my personal life and maybe one in my professional life.

Yeah.

So, if we take the work side of things, so I speak on stages 2 or 3 times a week, delivering keynotes to small audiences and large audiences. And I love it. I love being on stage, connecting with people. I love that feeling. However, before I get on a stage, about 2 weeks prior, I have to submit PowerPoint slides. And I hate doing PowerPoint slides. Love the speaking, love the audience, hate the computer slides. That's the thing I will literally procrastinate on and push aside and avoid and then go, no, it's going to take me like 3 hours. And then I do it and my partner's like, James, it took you 7 minutes. And you say this every time, it's going to take you forever. You do it so quickly. So could you possibly step me through that process that you shared a minute ago in terms of the trigger and how we might be able to systemize it a bit better?

Yeah, sure. And I don't know if you have ADHD or not, but I will share of how that might look like. For somebody with ADHD. So a common challenge would be something like time blindness. You're imagining a situation is going to take X number of hours. In fact, it was a 10-minute task. That is what— that is a classic sort of time blindness challenge. And a problem with time blindness is it makes prioritizing everything else in the world and sort of fitting it in really difficult. It's like, how could I, how could I learn to budget if I don't know the price of anything? That's one sort of challenge that if resolved, if you were accurately able to estimate how long everything took, then it can be easier sometimes to take some of those tasks. If it felt like, I know intellectually you know that if you have a presentation in 2 weeks that it's 14 days from now, but if it ever feels like it's not really real until you're right up against the deadline, if time felt more real in advance, it's sometimes easier to feel the natural pressure to do some of the work in advance. So that would be an example. If we were to walk through an element of why can you perform Incredibly in some areas, and in others it can be really hard to start. That's often because people with ADHD have an interest-based nervous system. If they're into it, into it, they can find it very easy to do the work. And that's why I don't think it's very helpful just to speak in general terms that people with ADHD struggle with focus or they struggle with task analysis, because there may be things you can hyperfocus on if you're somebody with ADHD. So what we have to then instead learn is I'm all for the sort of like leaning in and superpowers and things like that. But we do have to figure out what is— do I have particular strategies that work when the interest and novelty isn't there?

Hmm.

And if I could develop those, then you get to lean into sort of all of those tremendous off-the-chart strengths in the world and also not be— because if you're the person who your brilliant legal mind and you don't submit the bills, or you're a brilliant speaker, but I'm not saying this is just for other folks that if they're a brilliant speaker but they struggle with coordinating with the event organizers and then that leads to problems getting hired, like those things will absolutely sink you and it's a shame. But on the other hand, if you get those few like skill sets, in that particular case, time awareness and task initiation under control, then you get to show up entirely differently in the world.

That's awesome. And for me personally, I get the slides done, but it would be nice to do it with more ease. That task initiation, what might that look like for me in terms of initiating the task?

Yeah. So, at the beginning, we might be using— so, in the long run, sorry, let's start at a different place. In the long run, what we are looking to do It's really like we're just talking about neuroplasticity and that like brains have tendencies. It, in the long run, it is strengthening our ability around frustration tolerance, distress tolerance, our ability to execute. How we get there is by adopting some more sort of short-term strategies to get things going in the moment along the lines of, you know, if I'm trying to recover from knee surgery and I want to build up the strength of my knee, I might be using crutches. But I'm not using crutches so that for the rest of my life, this is how I walk around. So at the beginning, it could be figuring out different ways of sort of sequencing the task so that our brain doesn't get paralyzed in the sequencing challenges. It could be leaning on some external types of systems to make time more aware. And then often what happens, it's kind of like a question of like, How do you learn how to speak a language or conjugate verbs in a different language? There is a lot of very deliberate work at the beginning, and then just sort of fluency emerges. So I— and I know you're looking for something very specific of like, okay, yeah, yeah, but tell me, tell me what I can do to actually start. Tell me what I can do to actually start next time I sit down to work on to get the slide deck to happen effortlessly. But the answer might be, what if we worked on the underlying areas of your brain and developed those related to timewariness? and around frustration tolerance. And then what might happen is it starts to become easier and easier and easier to do those things.

It's interesting you say that. So I've never heard of the term frustration tolerance, but as soon as I heard it, I was like, oh, so there's lots of things I love doing and there's some stuff I hate doing. So let's say I have an IT problem, computer-related, internet-related. I have to go into the backend of something and hook some different systems up, I get so easily frustrated to the point where it's like, I just don't want to do it. No, I need to hire someone to do it. I just cannot be patient with that stuff. And I try all my own techniques on myself, but it's one area where I get very frustrated. So, can I build my frustration tolerance? Is that a thing that I can actually increase?

Yeah. And I know that it is because it's something that we See with people all of the time of sort of like the more so people can get into. So let's talk about frustration tolerance specifically, what creates it and then what undoes it. So for a lot of people, frustration tolerance becomes lower over time because they feel some sort of frustration in their body. They feel some sort of overwhelm in their body, and their reaction to it is to avoid the thing, is to run away from the thing. And inadvertently, and you know this about any habits, there's the positive side of habits, and there's the negative side of habits as well. Of like if we feel some sort of pain and we run away, we're. Inadvertently strengthening new patterns that almost start to feel almost like they become a command. But over time, if we can actually stick with it and increase our tolerance to frustration, eventually the power it has over us declines in the same way that somebody who might struggle with something like addiction— I can share that I've been sober for 10 years. There was a time where a craving felt like this most amazing, most painful thing in my life. I couldn't imagine anything worse. And then over time, it started to decline. The level of pain that I associate with it became smaller and smaller and smaller. My tolerance to those feelings became larger so that sobriety became less about, can I get through life gritting my teeth? And instead of, you know, can I get through life reducing the sort of the pain, the overwhelm, the frustration so everything else becomes easier? And something very similar can happen around But again, this is why, this is the earlier point of like, if there's something I really stand for, it's that there is no sort of quick hack. And I know that that message doesn't translate well into an environment where I want to say snappy things on Instagram, but it might just be the reality of doing some of this work.

No, I love that. That's just honest. That's brilliant. And congratulations on your commitment to sobriety. It's incredible and a great role model for lots of people. I'm about 6 and a half years in to my alcohol-free journey and I'm much happier. Do you think there's any correlation between ADHD and susceptibility to addiction to food, alcohol, whatever?

Yeah, huge correlation. If I look at the Venn diagram between addiction and ADHD, I'm not quite saying that that Venn diagram is a circle, but it's pretty close. It's understandable that there would be reasons that that might happen. Um, so one conception of ADHD is that it might be a deficit sort of of dopamine, the availability and processing of dopamine. And it would make sense that as a brain, you, one of us might have learned that, hey, there's things we can do to externally change that in our body. That might be a pattern that becomes quite easy. Or for a lot of people, um, we might have, we might be dealing with the shame of like, why am I like this? I keep trying everything and I'm still like this. What's going on? That shame can lead to a lot of people. to get into those patterns. And unfortunately, it also leads to a very vicious cycle where when we engage in sort of flooding our brain with external stimulus that our brain wasn't sort of evolved to take, it actually makes everything else in life feel harder. And when everything else feels harder, people's ADHD challenges get harder if we think that ADHD might be a question about dopamine. So all of those things can be quite related. It's not uncommon for people to have some sort of thing, be it Scrolling the internet, pornography, different types of things, alcohol for some.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I can kind of understand that connection. Dr. Anna Lembke wrote Dopamine Nation a year or so ago, and it was just fascinating understanding what really drives us internally. And then those neurotransmitters are just so damn powerful. It's wild.

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, but the good thing in all of this story, and I know this is probably true of your Analysis of high performers is that, you know, where we see those types of patterns, like if we're just talking about brain processes, none of this is about character. These are things that sort of we can, through deliberate work, that we can go about and change, right?

We can control and influence.

Yeah. And control. Yeah. But it becomes after we actually have to pattern patterns of success if we would want that to happen for ourselves.

Yeah, it's not going to be left to chance. It's not going to be a quick hack. It's like we're going to have to actually program these new habits and maybe prune, synaptic pruning of those old habits and then strengthening of new ones.

No doubt. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. So there's a couple other things I wanted to ask you. So you mentioned, but I've never heard this either, interest-based nervous system. That's awesome. So what's the— are there multiple? So interest-based Or is there one other or is there multiple other-based nervous systems?

Yeah, we might think that some people have more of a time-based attention system so that if you say to them, great, at 9 o'clock, you're going to wake up and you're going to do this. And then at 9:15, you're going to do this. And at 9:30, you do this. The sort of manager types of that world, I think that is amazing and there's a lot of skills and that's a really important skill set for folks. There tends to be other people who, when they go all in on things, they go all in on things. And I think that also, like, that actually, for a lot of these things, the interest-based nervous system, a lot of these things are kind of double-edged swords. So, like, that interest-based attention system, that desire to get obsessed with something, like, really, that is a very helpful quality to have in business, to get obsessed with how things are done, obsessed with the client experience, to get obsessed with the product solving interesting problems. You almost need that level of obsession. You almost need that level of, you know, I think if people people actually weighed the pros and cons of starting a business, most people shouldn't actually do it. You kind of— there are some things that do maybe predispose folks with ADHD to succeed in those areas. But that interest-based nervous system of where we do things purely based out of the sort of novelty, the enjoyment, and the interest also has the flip side, which is that if those factors aren't present, we might find it very difficult to do. So again, double-edged sword. It can mean that if we find something where we're making a dent in the world, We want to go all in in the way that's probably required to succeed in business and other people might have struggled doing. But the flip side is that when it comes to making your PowerPoint slides or filing taxes or doing the accounting, those can be things where people struggle if that's their only strategy of getting things done. That's beautiful.

What about loved ones? So someone might be listening right now going, look, I don't have ADHD. I don't think I've got it, but can we help Uncover things for our loved ones where there might be tension or you're seeing someone struggle in your life that you care about. Is there a way to look for signs there and to support them even though they might not know?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think it does impact the spouses and folks around us. For me, the thing that would often kill me is that I would say to my spouse that I was going to do something. And when I told her it, I really meant it with every fiber in my body. I wasn't just making empty promises and then something would slip and I wouldn't do it. There's a gradation of a lot of pain and frustration for her. But I think the unfortunate truth is to some extent, like any sort of major change in life, if it's about dealing with something like addiction, dealing with things like worrying about challenges around ADHD and how it's impacting us or any other type of health problem, it does start with the person deciding to take responsibility for doing something about those things in their life if it's impacting them. I would offer, we might have a lot of grace if we see that somebody's like doing their best and trying those things and working on those issues. Um, but it, it can be, it can be a challenge often of, I don't know if this is helpful for, for listeners in that space, a very common trap that people fall into is that in that world they might start suggesting to other people of like kind of how to live their life.

Hmm.

So somebody, so somebody will be, we have one of those manager types of people neurotypical person, you have somebody with ADHD, the person with ADHD might struggle with things around time blindness as an example. They're not getting things done. You know, the spouse who doesn't have ADHD might think to themself, well, I know how I get things done and how it works well. I just write it down. I write a calendar and I write a list and it works perfectly. And it's advice that they know 100% works well with them. And then they try to apply it to the spouse without ADHD and it becomes a source of a lot of frustration because how is the calendar going to work if you're time blind? And so those can lead to resentments on the other side as well. So that can be a pretty common pattern that folks can find themselves in.

That could save some relationships right there, that little nugget of advice.

That was cool.

And for the person that's curious about learning about ADHD, have you had any books that you've came across or any literature that you would suggest and say, hey, this was actually a good starting point for me?

Yeah, I can think of some very specific things in my own life that were quite helpful. So one thing that was very helpful is there, and somebody can Google this themselves, there's a great interview with Seth Godin where he talks about his own ADHD, and it's pretty rare that he speaks about his own ADHD, but it was for the first time that I heard somebody, that I was hearing them speak about it, that kind of matched the sort of like personal integrity and responsibility I felt it had and really opened my eyes up to like, ah, This is what it could look like to fully sort of both embrace who I am and take responsibility for it. So I encourage people to find that interview. I believe it's on—

We will find that.

Yeah, I can give some more context. It was on the Faster Than Normal podcast. That can be a great interview for folks who are looking for that. And another very helpful book that I know sort of opens the eyes for a lot of folks is called A Hunter In a Farmer's World by Tom Hartmann. That's often a book that also helps people, particularly business owners, reframe some of the ways that they've been thinking about what it actually means to have ADHD. And I'll just maybe more broadly say it is important to be exposed to those types of sources because I think a challenge— I wish I'd said this earlier— a challenge a lot of people have when they're early on in exploring these issues is that kind of the space of social media Just the way that the algorithm rewards attention is very dedicated to bluntly like people who have not figured this out. It's pretty easy to learn you have ADHD today and decide, you know, I'm going to be, I'm going to be a content creator. I'm going to give people advice about how to live my life and you just got to reduce all your expectations and here's all the things you can't do because you have ADHD. And a lot of it ends up being garbage. I would often— so that is part of why I would suggest that people look out for those 2 particular resources. Because I think there can be a very beautiful way of living, but it starts with finding people who've actually figured some of these things out in their own life.

Yeah, thank you so much. I've wrote those both down. I'll make sure we put it in the show notes as well. The other thing I'd like to put in the show notes is a link to ADHD Tools. You're an amazing company for people to get curious about what you do. So I'm imagining that if someone's in New Zealand, UK, United Arab Emirates, they can still work with you in some way.

Yeah, yeah, we work with, we work with, but we only so I can say who we do and don't work with. So one, we only work with adults. It's a very specific journey. We only work with people who learn about their ADHD later in life, and we only work with people who are business owners. But if you meet those three criteria and you're interested in doing the work in a serious way, yeah, we'd love to, we'd love to speak with you and love to. There's more information on our website at theadhdtools.com. about what that might actually look like specifically.

It's amazing. We'll put that in the show notes. Ezra, I just want to say a massive thank you for taking the time to step us through this. For me, I'm very curious about ADHD, and I know a lot of our listeners are too, so I deeply appreciate it. And I hope that the listener, you got lots from this. Go and check out those show notes, get the book, go and listen to that podcast, and go and check out Ezra's amazing company. Thank you so much, Ezra.

Thanks so much, James.