John SmallMtn (00:01:49)

Welcome to another episode of Founders Growth. My name is John Hill. I’m the founder of Adapted Growth. Today, we have Steve August on the show. Steve is a founder-turned-coach who helps ADHD entrepreneurs trade overwhelm for progress. He founded and exited the research tech company Revelation, which was acquired back in 2014, and later served as a CMO for a $100 million private equity-backed company. Today, he runs the ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator and is the creator of Your Weekly OS.

I’m excited to talk to him because I know a lot of people in the founding role, and also in sales roles, who have ADHD. Some of them struggle with it, and some people turn it into their superpower. I’m excited to dive into this with you because I think a lot of people are struggling without knowing that they have some of these things, and it’s leading them to struggle more than they need to.

Can we start there, Steve? Because when we were talking before the show, you told me you got your diagnosis pretty late in life, right? How old were you when this came up, or when you got your diagnosis? Because I imagine you had probably been finding ways to deal with it before that.

Steve August (00:02:50)

Yeah, I was 54 when I finally got a diagnosis. I had been living my whole life with it, and I didn’t even realize it mostly because I was never hyper, right? Everybody thinks of ADHD as that kid bouncing off the wall who can’t stay still in class. I was never that kid. It turns out that ADHD is a very poorly named disorder—and disorder in air quotes, because I really think of it more as a brain type than a disorder.

It’s just a brain. It has strengths and challenges, like other brain types, and we have to work with them. But the name ADHD is kind of interesting because it’s Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The thing is, it’s not really a deficit of attention. It’s almost a surplus. You pay attention to everything. It’s about being able to control that attention and put that attention where you want to put it, when you want to put it.

On the hyperactivity side of things, there are three different ways it expresses. They call it the hyperactive way, the inattentive way—which is what I had, which was just more dreaming and daydreaming—and then there’s the combined way where you’re doing both. So, yeah, I was actually dealing with it for my whole life. I’m 57 now, so three years ago I got the diagnosis. Somebody that I recently met—I forget exactly who said this—put it perfectly: getting a diagnosis was like getting the blueprints to the house I lived in my whole life.

John SmallMtn (00:04:43)

What a statement, honestly. The thing that I think I’m most curious about: before you got the diagnosis, what made you even go look? You have some pretty big stuff in your background, right? You’re 50, you obviously know how to get some stuff done, and everything. What were you feeling? What were you experiencing? What was happening to even make you open to the idea that this is something you should go get checked out? Because it’s very easy to tell ourselves that it’s not a real problem, that we should be better, and that we’re going to be better tomorrow. What was getting you to think about it differently?

Steve August (00:05:23)

There is sort of a stigma. I was in this camp for most of my life too, thinking it’s just an excuse, that we’re all a little distracted. We’re in a social media world or an algorithm-driven world where the richest companies are hiring the best, most talented people to do nothing but really hack your attention and monetize that, right? That’s the world we live in, and that’s the business model that’s emerged.

So I was very resistant to exploring it. Then what happened was I got into my 50s and I started a new business. It was a cool little art-meets-IoT-meets-finance product called “The Market.” It was a brass and wood sculpture of a bull and a bear on a seesaw, and it would tilt in real time to whatever the stock market was doing.

John SmallMtn (00:06:22)

That’s dope. I love that.

Steve August (00:06:23)

Yeah, it was really cool. We did the first run of that and sold them for like a thousand bucks a pop. Excuse me. We were about to do our second run, and COVID hit. So everything got jammed up.

I was bootstrapping it and keeping it really lean, so it was really challenging to continue on with that. At the same time, my kiddo got really seriously ill. There was all this stuff that was piling up with everything that was going on.

I had a full coaching practice, and I got to the point a few years later where I was still succeeding, but the cost was immense in terms of making progress with what they call the “ADHD tax,” right? We pay a tax because it takes us—it’s harder for us—to figure out what’s the most important thing. Our brains are going to make everything feel equally important and equally urgent. That gets pretty overwhelming, and we have to plow through that, along with just being able to task-initiate and actually start stuff.

It got to the point where I realized I couldn’t finish the first sentence of an email before my brain would take me off someplace else to YouTube. I was like, “Okay, I think we’re beyond just being a little distracted.” So maybe there is a case here to be made to just get an assessment and see what it says. So I did that, and the doctor looked at it and was like, “Yeah.”

John SmallMtn (00:08:00)

Was it one of those like, “How did you not know?”

Steve August (00:08:03)

A little bit, right? But there were things that I didn’t realize were ADHD traits, like these insatiable impulses to interrupt people to finish their sentences because you know where they’re going, or you think you know where they’re going. I always thought, “I’m just kind of awkward socially,” but it was also that my brain wants to jump in.

All these different things that I didn’t really know about were part of the ADHD experience. All of a sudden, things started to make sense, right? Things started—oh, I understand why I’d hit these behavioral patterns, why there were all these piles of really brilliant ideas half-done, whatever they were, right? Suddenly, it really opened my eyes to, “Okay, this is interesting in the sense that I’ve been living my life like this and I’ve been succeeding even with it. But imagine now that I have the blueprint of the brain I have. Now I can actually work with it if I can figure out what are the tools and systems that are actually going to work for me.”

John SmallMtn (00:09:14)

When you hit that plane of awareness and were like, “I’m going to go check this out,” did you have a moment before that of like, “I just need some productivity stuff. I just need to go read Getting Things Done or The Checklist Manifesto“? Did you try to solve it through regular productivity thinking, tips, hacks, and stuff?

Steve August (00:09:35)

Absolutely. Yeah. I went through all of it. The productivity industry is really good at selling you on that, like Notion, GTD, Todoist, Evernote, all these things, Atomic Habits. It’s all good stuff, but I found that, in retrospect, these things didn’t work, right? Or they would work for a little while, and then they wouldn’t work.

Here’s what I subsequently learned was going on: some of these tools are just tools and not systems. Notion is a tool, right? It will help you do anything, but it’s not a system in itself, right? It’s kind of sold that way, like, “This will get you organized.” It’s like, no, this is a place where you can put stuff, but it’s not actually a system per se.

On the flip side, there are systems like GTD and Atomic Habits, and they are systems, but they don’t necessarily all recognize or acknowledge that with an ADHD brain, the things that may be pretty straightforward to do for a more neurotypical brain are different. I always laugh now when I read a productivity article and they say, “Okay, first, brain dump everything in your mind, then prioritize it, then make a to-do list.” It’s like, woah, woah, woah, back up! That prioritization step is cognitively really expensive for an ADHD brain, right? Because it’s essentially more about executive function than it is about attention. I love what Dr. Russell Barkley said about it: it’s more of a performance disorder than an attention disorder. We know what to do; we have trouble doing what we know.

John SmallMtn (00:11:23)

That’s interesting. You said this thing just a second ago that I’m fascinated by: you said that prioritization is expensive, cognitively, right?

Steve August (00:11:35)

Cognitively, yes. Yeah.

John SmallMtn (00:11:38)

Right, so when I hear that, is the mode like, “Okay, get better at spending more money”? Or should you work in a way that you don’t have to spend the capital in those high-value areas? How should people who are thinking about this take action to test and see if they can cause an impact?

Steve August (00:12:03)

Yeah. So the thing is, with ADHD brains, there are a few things that are really key to know, right? One is that decision-making and prioritization are challenging. Our brains will make everything equally urgent, and we have something called time blindness—we have a very interesting relationship with time.

John SmallMtn (00:12:24)

Yeah, we’re bad at it. We’re real bad.

Steve August (00:12:29)

We’re bad at it, right? That works on so many different levels. One of the things is putting things in a sequence; we’re horrible at that in terms of when this thing should happen. So if everything is equally urgent and everything is equally important, it creates what I call a “wall of everything now.”

You’re staring up at this wall like everything has to be done right now, so you’re hopelessly behind and overwhelmed. That puts us into a paralyzing mode because our brain can’t unstack this wall and put things in order. That’s part of what I teach in my course: how do we do that given we know that this is what our brain is going to do? It’s going to always be adding new stuff in, and it’s going to be really, really bad at taking stuff out.

One of the first things that I help people with is, in order to be able to prioritize, we have to be really clear on where we want to go and how we want our lives to look, right? The thing is, that can easily slip out of our minds because another little quirk of ADHD is a lower working memory. Working memory is the thing that keeps out-of-sight things in mind. If it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. That makes it really easy to lose sight of where we want to go.

If we don’t have that in clear sight, then it’s hard to make decisions because every decision has to be held up to that and broken down. Okay, given that’s where we want to go, here are the different things we have to do. Let’s break this down into steps. So, what’s the waypoint between where we are now and where we want to go? What’s the next waypoint? It could be halfway there, a quarter way there, whatever. Okay, so if that’s where we want to go next, what’s in our way? That’s what we work on. We come at it from a totally different thing. Rather than having a list of everything, we figure out what’s most in our way and look at it that way, because we’re probably pretty good at figuring out what’s in our way. It’s a matter of approaching it that way.

John SmallMtn (00:14:46)

I’m having an interesting moment here, Steve, hearing you talk about some of these things. I come to this lane of sales coaching and training like a fish out of water because personality-wise, I’m not really meant to be in sales. I had a coach who did DiSC with me and showed me who I was on DiSC. It was probably as impactful as you getting your diagnosis from your doctor because it showed me why some of these things were difficult for me. But leaning into my greatness is kind of how I got to here.

One of the things that I often run into is a lot of people who are pushing to thrive in scramble mode as opposed to being disciplined and having things locked down—because salespeople have to have it locked down, right? If you’re going to be a founder who is still in the sales seat, you need to have the sales side locked down from activities and different things like that. It’s a very common struggle for most of my clients to struggle with that idea.

Personality-wise, they’re also kind of that visionary entrepreneur who likes that scattered chaos of the day-to-day. As a sales trainer, how can I do a better job of knowing if I’m dealing with someone who hasn’t ever been in a disciplined environment and has to be very thoughtful and look for feedback loops—and they’re just resistant to it—versus someone who might be neurodiverse and this is actually harder for them? It’s not avoidance or reluctance; it’s something else. How can I do a better job of finding that? Or how can any sales leader who has a mixed team try to find that in their people?

Steve August (00:16:18)

Yeah, I think it’s a really good question when you’re managing people and you have a neurodiverse team. You’ve got different kinds of brains that you’re working with, and they have different strengths. You’re right, sales is often about showing up, getting your reps in, getting your outreaches done, and tracking what your activity level is, because those are all the leading indicators that are going to show you if you’re likely to succeed. That’s what fills our pipelines.

To me, if it’s a neurodiverse person, often they’re already working really, really hard to make it happen, right? Because the whole figuring out what’s the most important thing, task-initiating on those things, and then ADHD coming in with another thing called Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria—which means being more sensitive to rejection—is hard. That’s an interesting thing, especially in sales where the more rejection you get, probably the better salesperson you are, because that means you’re actually doing the reps, you’re out there, and you’re doing it.

Whenever I look at a person—I’ve coached people inside of organizations with ADHD—I can tell the difference because it’s somebody who really wants to improve versus somebody who might be using it as a little bit of an excuse, right?

John SmallMtn (00:17:47)

God, I was that guy for the first ten years. Not like an excuse, but I just always had an excuse about why I didn’t need to try harder. I was just kind of stuck for a while thinking, “Well, I shouldn’t have to try that hard. Eventually, when I grow up and get out of sales, then I’ll have a job I can care about.” I kind of had to fix all of that stuff.

What I’m going to nerd out with you for just a second: how do you tell the difference between perfunctory, performative, “Yeah, I’m super busy, I’m just busy, busy, busy, busy,” and someone who is stuck in busy? Is that kind of the shakeout—they’re enabling it versus being stuck in it?

Steve August (00:18:44)

I judge it by whether they take advantage of the resources offered. In all my programs, I offer co-working sessions, sometimes called body doubling. It’s one of the things that really helps ADHD brains stop, get out of procrastination, and do stuff. It’s this weird kind of magic: you show up with people on Zoom or in person, you tell the other people what you’re going to do, you set a timer, and you go do it. It doesn’t seem like it should work or make a difference, but it does. Somehow, it totally does.

I had two people I was coaching. They’re both senior team members. One took to that and said, “That is just awesome. That is exactly what I need,” and took to the coaching, showed up for the sessions, and booked sessions with me. The other person didn’t. Eventually, that person spun out of the company, and the other person succeeded.

To me, it’s about whether they take the help that’s offered, if it’s the right help, and whether they try that. Generally, the people who I see who succeed and keep growing are like, “Yeah, I’ve got ADHD and it’s not going to stop me, but boy, I really need this support in order to do it, and I’m going to take advantage of it.” They just come at it. I think that’s true whether it’s an ADHD brain or even a regular team member who is neurotypical and it’s their first sales gig—they haven’t developed the discipline or the habits yet. Do they take the help?

John SmallMtn (00:20:24)

Well, this is fascinating because sales has often been taught and trained by osmosis, right? You have these big groups of people, they’re all doing the same thing, and you have syncs and meetings where you’re all on top of each other. This was back before COVID and everything. You would just have some osmosis effect: you’re around other people, and you hear their talking points. I started in retail, so I would hear talking points, and then I would go try them. That wash-over effect is very interesting.

In the early days of running this business, I would actually do those co-working sessions over Zoom just because a friend had an idea: “Does this make us more productive?” A good friend of mine actually talked about this and went kind of viral. He hired someone to sit at a coffee table with him in a coffee shop, and anytime he tabbed away from the emails or the blogs he was supposed to be writing, they were supposed to reach across and slap him! There are videos of him getting knocked in the middle of a coffee shop.

It’s weird because part of me—the sales coach in me—wants to say that everybody needs accountability. Everybody needs people to model and look toward, especially if you’re not going to go into training and develop your people the right way. Salespeople are also notoriously resistant to asking for help and coming to calls.

Steve August (00:22:13)

Sure, because every call is like, “I should be dialing. The meetings are just taking away from my dialing, my mailing, and my follow-ups.”

John SmallMtn (00:22:18)

Yes, exactly. That is fascinating.

Steve August (00:22:24)

Yeah, I mean, it’s a tradeoff too, right? As a sales leader or sales manager, you’re also thinking, “I want these guys doing the activities that move the needle, but we also have to be smart and coordinated about it.” So, yeah, I’ve been in those situations, and it’s just fascinating to see. But it really is about…

John SmallMtn (00:22:40)

100%. Yeah.

Steve August (00:22:49)

One of the things that I learned about ADHD is there are really only two things that get an ADHD brain moving a lot of times: intense interest—like super interested in a subject, hyperfocus, going to research it for days—and intense, urgent consequences, right? I’m up against it. Deadlines, right? You know activity goes up at the end of the quarter sales-wise, doesn’t it, generally?

John SmallMtn (00:23:08)

Deadlines, yeah.

If they’re not paying attention to what I’m teaching them, yes, that’s often how it goes. Hearing you talk about these friction points, I deal with some of these, right? Largely, I’ve gotten better at not letting the need for such clear expectations stop me. But I also know most salespeople who want to be in sales kind of thrive in that “I’m just out here doing whatever I want to do, and it’s going to be okay because I’m going to hit the goal” mindset.

Every high-performing salesperson is doing some version of an “apple a day” kind of thing—chop wood, carry water, do a little bit every day so you don’t ever have to make a giant day of it, and all of those trade-offs. As a coach, and especially for founders, I’ll push these ideas of, “Just do a little bit every day. Chop wood, carry water, make it a daily thing.” I might be putting it into a package that makes it impossible for them to use.

Steve August (00:24:26)

Yeah, it may or may not. I call it the “dopamine desert” in between the intense interest and the urgent deadline. We all as humans experience that—we’re all given toward procrastination a little bit. It’s just that ADHD brains have it 10x more.

It’s about creating interest where you can. A lot of things I talk about are rituals versus routines. How do you imbue things to make them more interesting and more meaningful? Whether it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to do my first ten reach-outs, and I have my favorite mug, my favorite coffee, my favorite snack, and that’s my ritual.” It’s a way to do it so that it becomes something you almost look forward to, because it’s part of what creates progress over time.

It’s fascinating, especially in sales, because consistency is the game, and consistency tends to beat intensity over time in all aspects of life.

John SmallMtn (00:25:34)

100%.

You said a second ago—and correct me if I’m wrong—that you were already doing some coaching when you got your diagnosis, right? Were you coaching around performance and focus, or was it something else? Then you learned this about yourself and said, “This is the impact I want to make.” How did you get to where you are?

Steve August (00:26:02)

When I left the company that bought my company—which was flipped to another private equity company—I was fairly burnt out at that point. This was 2017. So I spun out and was like, “Okay, what now?”

People started coming to me and saying, “Steve, you seem to have learned a few things about this. Can I get your opinion or advice on this?” There were a lot of founders. So I just started coaching startup founders, with a real specialty in seed to Series A. To me, that was the place that was really challenging for an early-stage founder, because that was where you really had to go from founder to CEO.

Founder is a title that you get to keep forever just by starting something; nobody can ever take that away from you. The CEO title has to be re-earned at each level. Once you get into those first bits of getting 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 team members, the game changes. You have to go from being a founder to asking, “What is a CEO? What is the leadership journey in that?”

That was something really eye-opening for me when I did my startup. When we go into it the first time, we all have this image of how it’s going to be from the press or Silicon Valley, and it’s usually a very different journey inside. It’s a journey that happens on two levels: there’s the entrepreneurial level, where you’re growing, learning to manage a team, learning to communicate, and learning to scale sales beyond founder-led sales.

John SmallMtn (00:27:56)

That’s a huge shift, yeah.

Steve August (00:28:19)

Yeah, when you’re realizing, “I have to bring in salespeople, but they’re never going to sell it as well as the evangelist founder.” You’re going to cap your growth if you don’t figure out a way to make that happen.

So it’s happening at that level—what you are learning about running a business. But in order for that to happen, you’re also on a different journey, what I call the “bigger game.” We’re playing the game at two levels: the entrepreneurial level—the business level and all the stuff that happens there—and the bigger game, which is the inner transformation we have to make to become the person who is able to step into those roles.

Now we’re in charge of people, and people are going to speak to us differently when we’re a 20-, 40-, or 50-person company than they did when we were just three guys hanging out in a room trying to make something happen. You are the same person, but you have to change and step into these roles.

The beautiful thing about the bigger game is that you can’t lose it. It’s a game you can only win. Anything that happens at the entrepreneurial level is pushing you forward in that bigger game—all the good, the bad, and the ugly. It gives you the opportunity to grow. In terms of personal development platforms, entrepreneurship and being a founder is second only to parenthood when it comes to growing as a person. Entrepreneurship is going to push all your buttons, triggers, traumas, and everything in your wiring. It puts you in a position where those things get triggered, which is actually a great service so that we can grow into those things or deal with them.

That’s the kind of coaching I was doing before I got my ADHD diagnosis. Folks were doing well—one company raised a $70 million Series A, and there were a few great exits with really fascinating names and cool brands. I even started to lead founder retreats; a VC hired me to facilitate their founder retreat in Portugal, which was great.

Then 2022 turned into 2023 and 2024, and the financial world started to shift. Money wasn’t free anymore, right? Remember, money was free for a very long time.

John SmallMtn (00:30:40)

A very long time, yeah. If you had users and a decent idea, absolutely.

Steve August (00:30:45)

Yeah. A lot of the seed-stage folks I was coaching ran out of runway. Some of them took off and did great, but others struggled because valuations were artificially high. Valuations came down, but their previous valuation was set before that. In order for them to raise, there was either a down round or no round, so it was really interesting to see that.

At the same time, I started to hit the point in my story where I got my ADHD diagnosis. I was like, “Wait a minute, I see where these intersect.” We have to deal with the whole person. I succeeded from the outside, but I know what the cost was internally to go through that without knowing how to work with my brain, paying the ADHD tax the whole time. I thought, “That’s the place.” I have that lived experience, I’ve developed systems to help me push forward, and I can create a space that is super welcoming to all brains. That’s what I started doing.

John SmallMtn (00:32:09)

I’m curious to know the timeline between getting your diagnosis and shifting in this direction. Was it one of those things where you were like, “This is it, I want to go make an impact here because this is too big of a thing”? Did you have any imposter syndrome about whether you could help or if you knew enough, since you just found this out about yourself? What was the timeline for shifting to helping people with this and taking a more holistic approach?

Steve August (00:32:32)

That’s a great question. The funny thing about the US—and I’ve found other medical systems are similar—is they’re very much “diagnose and prescribe.” It’s like, “You have ADHD, here’s your Adderall, off you go. Fixed.” It’s not so simple, right?

I got my diagnosis in 2023. I remember being on that retreat in Portugal and having Adderall. Adderall was working at that point, and then it stopped working. I was like, “Okay, so what now?”

I got an ADHD coach that somebody recommended because I did a personal retreat for myself and asked, “What is the root challenge that, if I solve or make progress on, is going to make everything else faster or better?” If I could work better with my ADHD brain, focus, do stuff, prioritize better, and task-initiate, everything would move forward in a different way.

I got my first ADHD coach, and that’s when things started to unlock. Doctors don’t tell you about time blindness, rejection sensitivity, working memory deficits, or all these other traits that come with ADHD. It was just, “Here’s your assessment, here’s your Adderall, off you go. Let’s see if you can focus.”

Once I started to understand it, it made so much sense. The thing with meds is they can be really helpful, super unhelpful, or variably helpful and unhelpful. They can work for a time and then stop working, which I experienced multiple times. What we need—the cliché is “the pills don’t teach the skills.”

John SmallMtn (00:34:37)

What a great line! “The pills don’t teach the skills.” Is that a known line inside the ADHD community? I love that. You should make that a t-shirt.

Steve August (00:34:47)

It’s a known line in the ADHD world, yeah. “The pills don’t teach the skills.” Our shirt for the accelerator is, “Not now, squirrels, I’ve got work to do.”

John SmallMtn (00:35:05)

Also epic. Very nice.

Steve August (00:35:08)

The first thing I created was called The Focus Formula. It was like, “Okay, here are the things that are working for me.” I started writing about my experiences, and people started raising their hands, saying, “How are you inside my brain? You are talking directly to my experience.”

I decided to keep sharing what was working for me, and I invited people into a workshop called The Focus Formula. That’s when I started saying, “Okay, in order to prioritize—which is a really tough thing—we have to know where we’re going and how we want our life to look.” Those are the two pieces.

We have to think about executive function like diabetics think about insulin: we’re managing our executive function because we have a limited pool. On a given day, we have a pool of executive function where we can be at peak and have a really good chance of starting and making progress on the thing we really want to do. Outside of that window, the chances decline rapidly.

I originally learned this concept from a coach named Aaron Croft about a two-hour workday: let’s go with the mindset that we have two hours of peak executive function per day, so what if we put the most important things there? The things that will actually move us forward, the things from the dopamine desert that are going to make an impact if we keep doing them.

I asked, “How do we do that?” Let’s set up co-working. I started setting up co-working and invited some friends, saying, “I’m going to co-work two hours a day.” People joined me and started doing it, and that’s when I started to make progress.

There are three things that ADHD brains have a challenge doing: deciding stuff, doing stuff, and sustaining that over time.

John SmallMtn (00:37:05)

I’m having a flooring experience because my sales coach was giving me a better distillation than a lot of other people in the same franchise model. My coach was talking about how how you do anything is how you do everything, along with really deep awareness. I was working with a business partner, and he talked about how you only get so many gumballs: once you’re out of gumballs, you can’t make hard decisions anymore.

Everything you’re talking about, Steve, I have seen and worked on in sales training: really clear goals, really clear activities to define those goals, tracking your effort, and looking back in the rearview mirror. I’m having this realization: I wonder how much of sales training is built just to help undiagnosed ADHDers. Every good sales training program emphasizes deep wells of focus.

Steve August (00:38:36)

Because ADHD brains have to work harder at it, we have to think even more explicitly about it. These are things that everybody should do. But when someone has one sense restricted, their other senses get stronger. Because we have to create these devices around us to make things happen, it emphasizes those practices. It’s not a coincidence; it’s the phenomenon that these are the things that lead to sustainable, consistent success.

Sustainable and consistent are tough things for ADHD brains. Putting more focus on how you actually create that is helpful for all brains.

The other thing that kicked in after this was the container for this to happen in. ADHD brains have a lot of challenge with time. If you have a quarterly goal or a yearly goal that is way too far out, think about what makes ADHD brains get into action: either intense interest or an urgent deadline. A year from now is not an urgent deadline. A quarter out isn’t really an urgent deadline either.

I started to realize that the week was the best container. A day is too variable—as we all know, days can blow up. A client has a situation, a life situation happens, or your computer breaks. Days are variable, quarters are too long, and months are made up of weeks.

A week is ideal. If you can figure out going into the week what a good week looks like and what the most important thing is, you can make progress on it—slow progress, messy progress, or awesome progress. As long as you’re showing up to it, it’s progress.

Then, do you meet your ADHD brain where it’s at? Changing the question to “How do I best work with my brain?” versus “How can I get everything done?” is key. From the ADHD perspective, there’s only so much we have to give on a given day or period.

What I see a lot is a real stress cycle with deadlines. We start off good, excited, and interested, and then the dopamine desert hits. The stuff that would ideally make it a lower-trauma deadline doesn’t happen. Then we get to the end, where it’s urgent, and realize, “Wait, this is going to take way longer than we thought.” We’re scrambling, using tons of executive function, and then we hit the milestone or do the best we can. Then we have a crash, because we don’t get that satisfaction when we’re doing it to escape something rather than to achieve something.

John SmallMtn (00:41:47)

Yes, okay.

Steve August (00:41:55)

Right? So it’s not like, “Yeah, team, go, go, go!” It’s like, “Holy crap.” Kind of like, “Got away with it again,” right? And then it’s a week of recovery if it’s a really hard deadline. That’s the thing that…

John SmallMtn (00:41:59)

Yeah. Make-the-best-of-it mode kind of thing? Huh, interesting.

Steve August (00:42:13)

Over time, it leads to burnout and to life getting crowded out. If you’re always in this sense of, “I’m just waiting for these consequences to hit so I can actually get into motion so that I can re-escape the consequences…”

John SmallMtn (00:42:27)

You become numb to the signal.

Steve August (00:42:29)

Yeah, right. Cortisol is always your main driver.

I always wondered this—I had my CTO come to me. We had just done—I remember this like yesterday—the team had done this amazing software release. They were celebrating, and it was a fun group of developers. I really liked them. We always had this video game marathon on Friday night of the release. We did it, it was really good, some of our best work, and everybody was celebrating and having a great time.

I would be in the pit of despair, right? Because we hit the deadline, but my brain would just flood in with everything that isn’t done, isn’t working, and could have been better. My CTO said, “Steve, why is it that we just did something really amazing and you don’t seem happy? What’s going on?”

I didn’t know at that point why that kept happening, right? Now I understand: we hit the deadline, and I had the drop—I had the dopamine drop right after. So at the point where it should have been the feeling of elation and achievement, it was just, “I escaped the latest deadline.” And you know what was in front of me? The next one, eventually, right?

That’s the challenge sometimes with an ADHD brain: it can suck a lot of joy out of things if you’re not careful.

John SmallMtn (00:44:06)

This is fascinating. This is kind of blowing my mind a little bit.

Diving into this a little bit, I’m trying to think about the best way to phrase this question without leading the witness too much. There are a lot of founders who might be seeing some of themselves in the things we’re talking about here. I’ve seen people who will take an ADHD diagnosis as a crutch and almost use it like a weapon. It’s a way for them to just have permission to not perform at the level that they want.

As someone who has to push people occasionally to go challenge themselves and do the uncomfortable things, how can a founder or someone who’s seeing themselves in these things not lean into it being a convenient excuse? How can they own all the steps?

They’re already out here running their own business, doing these things. On some level, it’s probably hugely clarifying to go through this experience and come back—just like it was super helpful for me to learn how my personality was not really built for sales, and that’s why I was having friction. How do people accept this once they become aware of it and own it, using it as opposed to it using them and lowering their probabilities of success as a founder?

Steve August (00:45:53)

I draw on what Dr. Russell Barkley said: “ADHD is an explanation, it’s not an excuse.” This is just how your brain works. You still have to perform, right? You still have to figure out how to meet your brain where it is. Some days you’re going to be able to give it everything it needs, and some days you’re not.

The reality of business life is that if you use it as an explanation, then it’s about understanding how your brain works and putting in the right kinds of supports and structures that will work with you and work for you. That’s why I call my course Your Weekly OS, with Your in italics, because it has to work for you, right? That’s your responsibility—to use your talents to their best.

Just like you do with all the people in your company, you deploy your resources, human or otherwise, to make the best impact and achieve everything you can, right? That includes you. Part of that is recognizing that your brain may work in a certain way, but that’s just an explanation. Okay, so let’s work with it. What do you need in order to perform?

That’s what I’ve seen. People in my programs take the co-working sessions that I host and say, “Yeah, we’ve actually started that in our own business. I’ve started doing it with other people around us because it helps everybody.” It’s just saying, “Okay, what are the things that help?” That’s the game, because you’re not going to get much slack just for having it.

John SmallMtn (00:47:53)

Heard, and hugely appreciated.

One of the things that is easier for me to do—and I don’t know where this comes from, maybe military and martial arts—is that my default mode is to lock in and push through. One of the things I’ve gotten better about is understanding where it doesn’t make sense to push because I don’t have enough knowledge, or maybe I’m focused on the wrong thing.

If an entrepreneur or founder has ADHD and they hit that plane of resistance where it’s just hard to focus, when should they lean into taking a break, going to find something else to do, and coming back tomorrow when they can bring their whole self, versus locking it in?

Steve August (00:48:41)

It’s an ongoing question. It’s a great question that you pose, and there’s not one answer to it, because sometimes the answer is to push through when you have no choice. But here’s the way to frame it: the question I always like to start with is, “What is my brain asking me for right now?”

It might be asking for rest. It might be asking, “Just give me a dopamine hit, just give me a dopamine hit.” I may not want to give it that, but when I think about it as “What is my brain doing right now?” versus “What do I need to do?”, there’s just enough separation to get above myself and do some self-regulation.

The other thing is, when there is a deadline or something looming—like I know I’m launching something—I know post-launch I have to schedule a lighter day, right? I used to just go, go, go, and I’d show up one day like, “I have nothing. I might as well not be sitting here because I’m getting nothing done and just feeling frustrated with myself.”

Understanding your brain helps you know that if you’re going to really draw down on executive function and dopamine, there’s going to be a dip. There’s going to be a time where your brain is going to say, “I’ve got nothing for you.”

I see this happen a few ways. One of my favorite examples from before I understood this was part of ADHD: I would work a long day, come out, and my wife would say, “Hey, we have these two choices for dinner. Which one do you want?” I would almost explode because inside I was thinking, “I don’t care! Just pick something!” I didn’t say that out loud, but I really did not want to be part of that decision.

As I understood later, my brain had gotten to the point where it had no more capacity for decisions. It was throwing a little tantrum because I had just asked it to do one more thing, and it couldn’t right now. Once I understood that, I was able to reframe that discussion and say, “Okay, my brain is a little tired right now. Pick one and go with it,” or, “My brain is just really exhausted right now. I can’t really decide. If I had to pick, I would just flip a coin, but they both look really good, and I appreciate you making dinner.”

This person is doing a really nice thing for me, and I don’t want to be the person who gets upset. Developing that awareness over time lets you realize, “If my brain is doing this, it means something. It means it’s tired, it wants rest, or it needs something. What do I need to give it right now?”

John SmallMtn (00:52:09)

Epic. Great answer, my gosh.

There are a lot of other things, right? I’m a big fan of doing some sort of awareness practice. I like DiSC a lot, but I see value in most of these things. I know that sometimes the ADHD diagnostic process with testing can be laborious or expensive. If you’re a brand new founder, you might not have insurance and stuff like that.

If someone is listening to this and hasn’t started yet, but wants to make sure they’re leading with intention and awareness, is your advice to go get tested and see if you’re neurodiverse? Or don’t worry about it until it shows up in a negative way? What’s your advice for founders?

Steve August (00:53:00)

My take is, if you suspect it, there are lots of places online where you can do initial assessments just to give you a sense. I even have a lightweight initial assessment that draws on one of the self-assessments that doctors use.

If you see the pattern in your life, try the things suggested to help it and see if they help, right? I have people in my groups who are not officially diagnosed, but when they do the things we do in their Weekly OS, co-working, or the two-hour workday, it just works for them. They’re like, “Cool, absolutely.”

John SmallMtn (00:53:36)

If it works, it works! I love that.

The concern is always, “Do I have permission to start?” A lot of people get stuck because they’re waiting for permission. Too big of a detour can lead to a loss of motivation and overthinking. I think that’s really great advice.

Steve August (00:54:14)

Yeah, if you’re procrastinating on it, that might also be a sign.

John SmallMtn (00:54:19)

One of the things I tell everybody is that the thing you don’t want to track is the thing you’re most scared of, right? Especially in sales, because if you’re not doing any outreach, it’s very easy to hide in, “I’m so busy.” But are you really?

When you think about your path as a founder, Steve, with social media, so much content, everyone pushing a message, and so many spiky opinions…

John SmallMtn (00:54:44)

I love, and also hate, folksy language, dogma, and mantras. I’m curious: what piece of dogma or advice do you appreciate now that you couldn’t really appreciate until you ran into it?

Steve August (00:55:00)

Just as a total founder experience, or specific to…

John SmallMtn (00:55:03)

Yeah, total founder experience.

Steve August (00:55:04)

God, there are a few. I mean, the thing that I come back to at the beginning—and it’s different for different stages—when you’re starting out, you’re going to fall in love with your thing. But really, it comes down to: is there an urgent, bleeding-neck pain that you’re solving for somebody? Without that urgency, there’s no sale. There’s a really cool idea, but not a business.

John SmallMtn (00:55:20)

My coach was a big believer in “no pain, no sale,” right? If the pain of staying the same is less than the pain of change, everyone is going to stay the same. I found it to be super helpful, but it’s also one of the ideas that most people hate. I think it comes down to how it’s taught about going and finding their pain and everything else. People take it off the lane that they should be on.

I love that because that’s been my experience, and I’ve had lots of arguments, especially with marketers who don’t come from sales and don’t take the calls, who say, “Well, it’s okay, you can just keep promising, promising, promising.” Improvement can wait. If it sucks bad enough, you’ll fix it today. You won’t wait for the contract term or do any of these things.

It’s a weird thing because a lot of people say, “John, I didn’t think you were one of those sales coaches.” I’m like, “I’m not telling you to go plant it; I’m telling you to go uncover it.” If it’s not coming up in that conversation, they’re not a prospect you should be continuing to spend time with. It’s a very polarizing opinion, but I love that.

For someone who’s starting today, Steve, what is your biggest word of warning? You’ve been through a very cool path, started multiple things at multiple levels, and done the big stuff and the small stuff. For someone starting today, whether they’re going to be a solopreneur or trying to be the next unicorn, what is the one piece of advice or word of warning you would want to pass on?

Steve August (00:57:09)

I would say it all comes down to: are you really helping people make a significant improvement in whatever it is you’re helping them with? One of the things that I’ve seen—and I talk to a lot of folks—is people saying, “I’ve got this amazing idea. It’s really cool. I thought about it a lot, it works for me, and I want to sell it to this group of people. They’re just using Excel, back in the ’90s or whatever.”

I just warn people that Excel is one of the hardest things to displace because it’s free, it mostly works even if it’s kludgy, and people don’t like to change. You better be coming in with something that materially moves the needle on things that are important to them.

I had to learn that with our software. It was really cool, and I could tell who really needed it and who didn’t. When I was first starting out, people would say, “That’s interesting” or “Cool,” and I thought, “Okay, I’m in.” It turns out “interesting” and “cool” is the kiss of death. If you’re hearing that, they’re just not that interested; it’s just a nice idea.

You know you’re onto something when people start asking, “When can we get this? How much does it cost?” Or some combination of those two questions, like, “What’s our next step?” Now you know. If you’re not hearing those things early on, you have to find a product-market combination where you start hearing them, because an “interesting” and “cool” business is really hard to grow.

John SmallMtn (00:58:40)

I love that. I’m lucky in the fact that I found a lane of passion that I’m really excited about, but I also don’t think everybody should be running a business based around their passion. It can get them too excited, too invested, and drinking way too much of their own Kool-Aid. But you also have to be bought in; if it’s not meaningful, you’re not going to do the hard stuff. Business is a lot of hard things, and sales is largely uncomfortable conversations, especially if you’re not practiced and don’t come from a sales background.

I love that you’re talking about that because it’s so easy to lie to ourselves. I hope everybody who hears this goes out and actually talks to those people early. Go talk to them before you build the SaaS, before you build the thing. If you’ve already got it built and you’re asking why people aren’t buying, you’re holding it like you’re the problem, or thinking, “It couldn’t be us.” You’ve already missed the mark.

Steve August (00:59:45)

There are a lot of folks in the ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator who are making the move and launching their first products. I tell them that conversations are your currency in the early days. Conversations are everything.

At the beginning, your main thing is not to get the best website, the best ad campaign, or the best social media presence; it’s to get into as many conversations as you possibly can with the people who may be the target audience for what you’re creating.

John SmallMtn (01:00:19)

I get a lot of DMs from people on LinkedIn and Facebook because I put myself out there. People will ask, “How do I even start?”

Fifteen by fifty: you have to go have 15 conversations with people you’re excited to serve. If you’re not willing to make at least 50 asks to have those 15 conversations, you’re probably not going to get through a bigger endeavor. Go test yourself in the form of a hypothesis: can you even string this action together to get these kinds of results?

Largely, as I’m sure you realize, most people just blow smoke. Then they come back and ask, “How do I get started?” I’m like, “I’ve already given you the medicine. Did you follow this?” “Well, John, it was hard.”

There is no judgment if you’re not meant to be out on your own. While I think everybody can, I don’t think everybody is supposed to, because it’s a lot of weight across a lot of lanes. Some people don’t want to put that much of themselves into their work, and that’s okay. I don’t have a problem with that. But don’t tell yourself you want more than what you’re actually going to show up and try to get.

Steve August (01:01:45)

It’s a great way to put it. I don’t judge anybody—entrepreneurship is not an easy game. There is no entrepreneur who I know or have heard of who hasn’t at one point said, “I should just freaking quit this and get a job.” We’ve all had those moments. Then you wake up and go, “Okay, no, we’re still at it.”

We’re looking for that intersection of what we’re passionate about, what we’re driven to create, and what the market needs. Once we find that intersection, that’s where the magic happens.

John SmallMtn (01:02:21)

I love that. Steve, I really appreciate your time and your willingness to come on the show to share your path and talk about how you’re helping people get past some of these same friction points. If someone wants to hang out with you, catch up with you, or learn more about what you’re doing, where should they seek you out?

Steve August (01:02:47)

LinkedIn is the main platform I’m on, along with my website, steveaugustcoaching.com. My podcast, ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator, is available on all podcast platforms and YouTube. If you want to learn more about what I do and how I do it, those are the best places to go.

John SmallMtn (01:03:08)

Perfect. Steve, I really appreciate your time and you coming on. I really think this is going to help people, turn the lights on for some, and encourage them to take action—whether they go get assessed to see who they are or start putting some of these ideas into practice. If it helps them, I hope it leads them to improved performance, because that’s really what this is about.

Being a founder, in my opinion, is like having 17 different performance lanes, and you have to perform in all of them or else it’s probably going to be tough to get anything going. Thank you so much for coming and doing this, man. I really do appreciate it. I think it’s going to help a lot of people.

Steve August (01:03:46)

I appreciate you having me. It’s been great talking with you—a great conversation. Thanks for having me.

John SmallMtn (01:03:53)

Awesome.