You have ADHD. Should you become an entrepreneur?
We know people with ADHD are often excited by entrepreneurship and take up the challenge at a higher rate than people without it, but our ADHD symptoms can really be a mixed bag. So what makes some of us more likely to succeed than others?
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
In my first post on this topic, we talked about entrepreneurial intention, ie how intrigued by entrepreneurship someone is and how likely they are to actually pursue it. It turns out, across multiple large studies, people with ADHD are much more likely, even twice as likely according to one study, to want to pursue entrepreneurship. If you’d like to go back and read a bit more about the reasons why, hit the link up top to take a look at that video.
However, just because someone is interested in going into entrepreneurship, it doesn’t mean they’ll actually be successful in their entrepreneurial endeavours. Entrepreneurship is hard, I can tell you that one first hand, and so in last week’s post we pivoted instead to asking whether people with ADHD were any better or worse than the general population when it comes to being an entrepreneur.
The results were pretty mixed. There was a lot of conversation about our ADHD impulsivity and risk-taking and that we are likely to take many risks and most entrepreneurial ventures fail, but given entrepreneurship is a bit of a numbers game, picking back up again and trying again could lead to that ultimate success.
One of the papers we looked at concerned entrepreneurial orientation, and suggested that ADHD traits associated with hyperactivity and impulsivity were correlated to the traits of entrepreneurial orientation, and that entrepreneurial orientation was positively correlated with success, therefore by transience hyperactive/impulsive ADHD traits could lead to performing well in entrepreneurship. There was no correlation with inattention traits.
Another paper argued that looking as entrepreneurship as a whole is too simplistic and that entrepreneurship in the early stages of a business looks very different to entrepreneurship in a middle or late stage of a business, and so when we look at person-environment fit, ie whether the environment is the right fit for a person, we need to look at this at each stage in the entrepreneurial process, instead of just considering the fit of entrepreneurship as a whole.
The paper suggested that those of us with ADHD tend to be better at initiating behaviours, rather than structuring behaviours and that might suggest that ADHD can be a benefit in the early stages and less of a win in the later stages. However, delving deeper into the analysis they acknowledge that it’s not that simple.
They call ADHD symptoms two sides of the same coin; that they’re neither good, nor bad, it just depends on the situation. The traits that enable us to perform well in some circumstances or certain stages of the entrepreneurial lifecycle may hurt us in others and so the way in which ADHD affects entrepreneurial success depends on the circumstances of the journey itself.
Some days the coin metaphor is apt and it feels like how our ADHD symptoms will present on a particular day is like a coin flip.
So this leads to the conclusion that yes, ADHD can be a benefit to entrepreneurship, but it’s not the complete answer. As much as I’d love it to be, ADHD isn’t some magic ingredient that makes endless entrepreneurial success flow your way the moment you set foot into the world of business. So if ADHD isn’t the make or break ingredient, what else are we missing?
This is where today’s paper comes in. This paper is pretty recent, coming out in 2021 and is called “ADHD symptoms, entrepreneurial passion, and entrepreneurial performance” and posits that entrepreneurial passion is the missing ingredient.
At first you might be a bit confused, because we’ve already established that ADHDers are much more interested in entrepreneurship than others and wouldn’t that suggest they have entrepreneurial passion? But actually this study looks at specific areas of passion within entrepreneurship and uses that definition to analyse entrepreneurial passion among ADHDers.
Before we get into the details, I do need to acknowledge that like many of these studies, this was actually done according to ADHD symptoms, rather than ADHD diagnoses. There are many reasons why this might be the case such as differing accessibility of diagnoses in different countries and the fact that ADHD symptoms are continuous and so it can be hard to draw the line of who does and doesn’t count as “ADHD”-enough. This is pretty typical in a lot of the research but does need to be acknowledged as it may well affect interpretation of the results. But with that in mind, let’s dive in.
The definition of entrepreneurial passion they begin with is “consciously accessible, intense positive feelings for activities that are central and meaningful to an entrepreneur” (Cardon et al., 2009) and I think the language is important because it highlights the activities that are central and meaningful to an entrepreneur. So we’re not talking about the appeal of being your own boss or setting your own hours. We’re talking about the actual activities that entrepreneurs take part in.
These activities are split into three categories: Passion for developing which relates to growing and expanding the business. This is where someone particularly enjoys increasing sales, finding new employees or finding external investors.
ADHDers tend to be passionate people anyway, in fact many of us end up calling ourselves multi-passionate people long before we learn of our ADHD.
The next is passion for founding, which is defined as activities related to bringing together the necessary financial, human and social resources to create and sustain the venture. This is bringing the right people and resources together to get started at the very beginning of a new venture.
Third and final is passion for inventing, building out new products and services, finding new opportunities and working with new prototypes. This one is all about being innovative and finding new ways to move forward in the business.
In the paper they bring in the broaden-and-build theory, which suggests that positive emotions broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoire and that this in turn enables them to build their capabilities and resources. So if you like networking, you’re more likely to go out there and network. If you enjoy writing code, you’re more likely to develop your programming skills.
We can generalise this to if you enjoy these entrepreneurial passions, you’re more likely to devote your blood, sweat and tears to them. Thus passion improves our physical, intellectual, social and psychological resources and those resources are positively related to entrepreneurial performance.
In particular, passion for developing means someone is more likely to be able to focus on developing their business, which has a positive influence on entrepreneurial performance. Passion for founding makes for someone who is perseverent, someone who continues to engage in founding activities and doesn’t give up too early. Passion for inventing is related to creativity, finding new patterns of information and combining them with existing knowledge for creative solutions.
Some of these sound more in line with ADHD than others. For a start, one of the hallmarks of ADHD is challenges with focus. We struggle to focus on things that don’t interest us and so the paper argues that by being passionate about developing, we mitigate those focus issues and mean we can continue to grow and develop our businesses.
When it comes to passion for founding, there is a lot of literature out there that concludes that people with ADHD aren’t very resilient. Interestingly enough there’s also literature out there that says we are very resilient because of all the challenges of being neurodivergent in this world. I’m not here to debate that point either way, but in this paper it suggests that this passion for founding could counteract a lack of resilience with ADHD and therefore push an ADHDer to keep trying where they would have previously given up.
Finally, they suggest that a passion for inventing might actually not be beneficial for ADHD entrepreneurs for two reasons, one is that it doesn’t mitigate a weakness of ADHD and the second is that it actually compounds on the strength we have of creativity and novelty seeking that push us towards innovating and new ideas already. In this case this could lead us to “overplaying our strength”, something I’m going to talk a lot about in a future video and chasing too many new ideas without ever knuckling down on one and seeing it through.
I’ll talk about this a bit more next week, but a strength overplayed is when something like healthy competition that pushes you to try your best becomes hypercompetitiveness that ruins your and others’ enjoyment or wellbeing.
So they suggest that it’s a combination of ADHD and passion in both founding and developing, but not inventing, that leads to success for ADHD entrepreneurs.
What’s also interesting is that they suggest that passions for both founding and developing must be present for an ADHD entrepreneur to be successful because with just one passion we can spend too much time hyperfocusing on the thing we enjoy, and not progressing other important activities for success.
The paper actually puts this theory to the test as well, using a survey of 2401 Dutch entrepreneurial ventures that had been in business for 10 years or less and had at least one employee. They found that their results actually supported their theory with one additional caveat: low levels of passion for inventing also needed to exist as well, they couldn’t completely hate inventing or it would be a detriment.
What is also interesting is that they also looked at this configuration under people without ADHD and found that entrepreneurial performance was actually more likely when highly passionate for inventing and founding, and not so much for developing activities. They suggest that a passion for developing could lead to them missing out on identifying new opportunities that ADHDers are more likely to pick up.
I love that they performed this analysis on non-ADHDers as well because it reinforces a point that when we treat everyone as if they are neurotypical then some people will miss out on opportunities to succeed. Business advice tailored to a non-ADHD entrepreneur might end up being damaging for an ADHD entrepreneur because it can send them off in a direction that actively hurts them, instead of enabling them to embrace their brain and use it in a way that works for them.
Having said all this, just because the study says that you’re more likely to be successful under a particular combination of neurotype and passions, doesn’t mean that’s your destiny. And while having information can be useful, it can also be limiting. I know I’ve been put in boxes, and probably even put myself in boxes because I carry the label ADHD and the generalisations that go with it.
So if you are someone with ADHD who wants to become an entrepreneur and you have a passion for inventing, who am I to tell you no? Who’s to say that you won’t use your creativity to find a way to make things work. Who’s to say you won’t find a non-ADHD cofounder who balances out your novelty seeking and brings you to a happy middle that enables you to be successful.
Our diagnoses and the things we supposedly can and can’t, or should and shouldn’t do are not our destiny and we can find ways forward that work for us. And I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t wholeheartedly believe that.
And thus this concludes our three part series on ADHD and entrepreneurship. I hope this has been helpful for contextualising the relationship between ADHD and entrepreneurship as it currently stands based on the research. This is definitely an area of continued study however, so I’m sure we I will have opportunity to readdress this topic as more information comes out.
References:
The nature and experience of entrepreneurial passion (Cardon et al., 2009)
ADHD symptoms, entrepreneurial passion, and entrepreneurial performance (Hatak et al., 2020)
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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