The Neurodivergent Enterpreneur

How (Not) To Start a Business When You Have ADHD

A practical way to keep track of your ideas

Helen Olivier (AuDHD)
ArtfullyAutistic
Published in
5 min readJan 16, 2023

--

A drawing of flowers in soft pastel tones, with the text “My Busines Idea Garden” written over them in equally soft pastel greem color.
Image credit: Author

Like most people with ADHD, I have no problem coming up with an idea (or a few hundred) for a business. I come up with a new idea every few days. But the problem is how to choose the right one that I want to stick with in the long run — which is definitely not easy for someone with ADHD.

I want to start an online business. It’s my dream, even if I have a long way to go yet. But I wasn't able to finish anything. I started to work on dozens of ideas, then abandoned them as I realized they aren’t something that I really want to do. Or I just got bored with working on them. It doesn’t help that I’m a perfectionist and I try every product I work on be the maximum possible product, not the minimum viable product. I had to realize this and force myself to change my approach. But it still wasn’t enough.

You need to keep all the ideas in the same place

After a year or so flailing around the internets and attempting to do ten things at once, I’ve finally realized that I need to write all of these ideas down, not on a million little sticky notes that I file away somewhere and never find again. Otherwise, I will 1) forget about them soon, and 2) my mind will be overflowing with new ones, stopping my brain from functioning properly. There goes the last shred of my concentration!

Later, I realized that I also need to write down (and follow) a process by which I can implement the ideas, step by step. And no, I really can’t skip researching if an idea is viable before I jump into it with enthusiasm.

Tonight I came back from a friend’s place, where I got my mind off this topic for a few hours and obviously it gave my brain some space to process. Suddenly, it dawned on me. I picked up one page of notes filled with various ideas, and a second page on how to go about implementing the ideas. I put a third, blank page on the top and I simply wrote:

You don’t have to do things just because they’re possible!

Heureka! ADHD Heureka. It’s kind of obvious to other people, I guess.

--

--

Helen Olivier (AuDHD)
ArtfullyAutistic

Neurodivergent, curious, overthinker, overfeeler. Find my thoughts, love letters to life, freebies and other stuff: https://linktr.ee/helenolivier 🧡