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When we were making the documentary ADD & LOVING IT?!, we spoke with Thom Hartmann who has his own talk show on Air America and he was saying that his ADHD really was an asset in starting a business, and a deterement once it was up and running. Lemme see if I can find the transcript of it from his interview.
FOUND IT!
That took way less time that I thought
Here’s what he said:
HARTMANN: “And in the early days when I was in my teens and early 20s, I built two very successful businesses and then managed to kill them. And looking back on it and I’ve seen this in so many entrepreneurs. In fact, I wrote a book just for adults with ADD on how to be a successful entrepreneur based on this kind of retrospective. What happens is that in the early stages of an entrepreneurial company, a brand new company, it’s entirely hunter driven, you know.
You know, you’re the salesman, you’re the leader, you’re pulling people together, you’re making things happen, you’re developing the product, you’re testing the market, you’re figuring out the competition, you’re doing a little bit of everything. And it’s just you know, and you’re spinning 16 plates at the same time and just loving it. And then after two or three years and 10 or 20 employees, the company no longer needs leadership, it needs management.
And I would try to be that manager and I would try to do the spreadsheets and the budgets and the books and the 12 hour or the 3 hour evening meetings, you know, with the staff and what not. I couldn’t do it. And I really harmed or diminished the potential of a couple of businesses by not being able do that and thinking that I had to. And so when I got this well, actually, the business before the two businesses before this, what had happened was I had reached that point and at that point I handed the business off to somebody who, you know, basically hired somebody to be the president of the business.
In one case it was my wife, who is a very good manager, and in another case it was an external person we brought in that we ended up selling the business too. And, you know, I just said I can’t do everything, I can’t do this, you can do that. Now I know why. And that was, you know, kind of a relief and an empowerment actually.”
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