The key points in 30 seconds:
→ The impulsive, impatient side of ADHD drives entrepreneurial behavior — but guarantees no success. The environment decides success (Tran et al., 2025).
→ 15–20% of the workforce is neurodivergent. The good ones hold out for a while — then they leave.
→ Turnover costs 1–2× the annual salary. Per person.
→ Disorder or natural variation? The research says: both. What counts is fit.
A mustang in a corset
I knew early on: I have to become self-employed. Actually: I had to. Because I clashed everywhere. Too fast. Too direct. Too impatient for processes that made no sense – but are "the norm," because that's "how it's done."
For a long time I saw it as a flaw. Today I know: it was my emergency exit.
A different brain culture
ADHD often gives me an advantage. I connect ideas at rocket speed, see things differently – and often reach better results. And I'm empathetic. Almost everyone with ADHD I know is. Because you know what it's like to be in the wrong movie. A different brain culture. You can translate, after all. I do too.
What the research shows
A new meta-analysis by Tran et al. (2025) — 298 effects from 47 studies — shows two sides of one coin:
Drive
Exactly the impulsive, impatient side of ADHD drives entrepreneurial behavior. You're more likely to start a business. More likely to launch. Courage. Power. Motivation.
Success
And unfortunately no one says this: it guarantees no success. The power, the motivation is there. The environment decides success.
People like me rarely leave companies because something's wrong with them. They leave because the environment doesn't fit. Because it's held against them. And permanent employment as we know it is, in my view, a relic of the industrial age. There's real room to optimize. It doesn't always have to be exactly like this.
15–20% are neurodivergent — and they leave
15–20% of the workforce is neurodivergent. ADHD. Autism. Dyslexia. You surely know someone. People just don't say it, out of worry. (I do. Getting ahead of it.) The good ones hold out for a while. Then they leave. Or are let go with far higher probability than others.
Turnover costs 1–2× the annual salary. Per person. You didn't lose a difficult employee. You probably lost a good one – to a system that wasn't built for the person. In another quarter, it happens again.
Disorder or natural variation?
The research leans toward: disorder. The neurodivergence movement says: only variation, the environment should adapt – and in doing so talks away the real suffering. The hard sides. The current research on this: both. Disorder and variation within the human spectrum. Also the most likely answer.
Which label ends up on it? I don't care. What counts is fit. More performance.
How many people who tick differently has your organization already lost – without realizing that they weren't the problem, the environment was?
Sources
Bölte, S. (2025). Social cognition in autism and ADHD. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 169, Article 106022.
Doyle, N. (2020). Neurodiversity at work: A biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults. British Medical Bulletin, 135(1), 108–125.
Tran, M. H., Wiklund, J., Antshel, K., Jhawar, N., & Montgomery, C. (2025). Entrepreneurship and ADHD: A meta-analytical assessment of the state-of-the-art and suggestions for the future. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10422587251392498
Where does your organization stand?
30 minutes, no sales pitch. You tell me where it's stuck. I listen. Straight talk. Or start with the free NRI self-test — 7 minutes, anonymous.