Day 2062 of running a lap of the world. 15,940.96 kilometres covered. 24,134.04 kilometres left.

ADHD and running a business. Today I reflected on whether the combination works or slowly breaks you. The honest answer is both are true, depending on what you do about it.

I'm self-diagnosed. I haven't gone for the official paperwork, mainly because I cope. High-functioning is the phrase people use for someone in my position. Life works. Businesses have worked, to varying degrees. But the more I examine my own story, the more I see a pattern worth naming.

For years I denied the ADHD label. Told myself I was driven, energetic, easily bored. All of that is accurate. It's also a fair description of someone with ADHD. The hyper-focus when something fires me up. The pace of thinking. The impatience with slow systems and conventional ways of doing things. The tendency to move on to the next opportunity once the current one stops feeling new.

All of that has given me a great deal. My drive, my ambition, the ability to move fast and spot things others miss. These things built what I have today. But they've also cost me. I've started more businesses than most people have had hot dinners. Some dissolved because the market wasn't there. Others dissolved because I got bored, shifted attention, or failed to build the infrastructure to manage how my brain operates when the pressure is on.

That's the honest version.

When I look around at business networking events I've attended over the years, I notice something consistent. The most entrepreneurial people in the room, the ones with the biggest visions and fastest thinking, often carry ADHD traits. They push boundaries. They don't follow the conventional path, partly because they never fitted it. They're restless, creative, unconventional. I see myself in them every time.

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. The business failure rate for small businesses sits at around 90%. When I look at this alongside what I understand about ADHD, the correlation makes sense. ADHD creates genuine strengths in a business context. Hyper-focus, drive, speed, pattern recognition, the ability to tolerate ambiguity and move into the unknown. But ADHD also creates weaknesses. Left unmanaged, those weaknesses are quietly catastrophic.

Getting bored before foundations are solid. Losing momentum on execution. Moving to the next idea before the current one has reached its potential. Underestimating operational complexity. Avoiding the tasks the brain finds tedious, even when those tasks are load-bearing.

If you don't know you have ADHD, or you know but haven't put anything in place to manage the downside, you're running a business with a structural blind spot. And the statistics suggest most people don't catch this in time.

The other side of this is equally true, and I believe it because I've lived it. A high-functioning person with ADHD who builds the right infrastructure around their business is genuinely formidable. Not despite the ADHD. Because of the strengths the condition brings, when those strengths are channelled and the downside is protected.

What does the right infrastructure look like? I'll go deeper over the coming weeks, but at its core: the right people around you, those who are strong where you are weak. Systems and processes that hold the structure your brain won't naturally create for itself. Data that grounds decisions rather than leaving them to instinct alone, especially when the instinct is running hot. And an honest reckoning with your own patterns, including the ones that have cost you before.

For me, building Operations Director has been partly shaped by this reality. The business exists to create the kind of operational infrastructure that lets founders run a business without the business running them into the ground. Systems that handle what the ADHD brain finds tedious. Processes that hold steady when attention moves to the next challenge. Data that keeps things honest. Not the whole story of Operations Director, but a thread running through it.

The running streak tells the same story in a different medium. 2062 consecutive days, barefoot-style, in Vibram FiveFingers, regardless of what the brain feels like on any given morning. The streak exists because I built a structure around a commitment. A non-negotiable. A daily habit the ADHD brain cannot talk itself out of, because the rules are clear and the habit is embedded. Without the structure, the streak would have ended years ago.

15,940.96 kilometres covered toward a total of 40,075. Every one of those kilometres is part of a fundraising mission to raise £1 million for children's causes, including Great Ormond Street Hospital and BBC Children in Need. The more people who find this content, the more money gets raised. That's the reason I show up every day.

If you're running a business with ADHD, diagnosed or not, this is a conversation worth having. I'll keep having it over the coming weeks. Not because I have all the answers, but because I've lived enough of the lessons to share what I know, and what I wish I'd understood much earlier.

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Day 2062 done. One more tomorrow.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/mxIlaNyqFAc