If ADHD was an Olympic sport, I'd be Michael

On ADHD, Elizabeth King, Herb Alpert at 90, and learning that constraints aren’t the enemy of creativity.

You know what you should be doing.

You’ve known for months. Maybe years.

Launch the thing. Finish the website. Build the system. Stop winging it.

But you keep pushing it down the list. “When I finally finish this...” becomes the thing you tell yourself every week. Every month. Every quarter.

You’re not avoiding it because you’re lazy. You’re avoiding it because the options are infinite and the process is missing.

My own website has been in maintenance mode for a year. Not because I didn’t care. But WordPress gave me too many options. Too many plugins, too many themes, too many ways to build the same thing. Infinite options with no process is just paralysis with extra steps.

This weekend, I’m moving from WordPress to Ghost after 15 years of WordPress. I asked Rosie Sherry what she thought, and if Ghost is good enough for Rosie Sherry, it’s good enough for me. 👍

So I’m moving to Ghost. It’s better - and it does less. For me, that’s the same thing.

Constraints aren’t the enemy of creativity. They’re what make creativity possible.

What I Didn’t Say Last Week

Last week, I wrote about The Gap - the distance between your taste and your ability. Ira Glass spent years trying to close it.

And in my excitement, I forgot to point out this crucial point.

The Gap doesn’t close by itself. Volume helps. But volume without process is just chaos.

I’ve been living proof of that for years.

Elizabeth King put it better than I ever could.

The Poverty of Our Intentions

“Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.”

Elizabeth King, sculptor. You will recognise her example from Seth Godin’s book The Practice: Shipping Creative Work.

The poverty of intentions. That’s the maintenance-mode year, named exactly.

Good intent isn’t enough. It never was.

The Blueprint I Didn’t Have

I’ve been living proof of this for years without fully knowing it.

I’ve been recommending Making Ideas Happen since 2011. Belsky’s core argument is that the gap between vision and reality isn’t a talent problem. It’s a system problem. That sentence has followed me around for sixteen years.

The TLDR of Belsky’s book: people who design their own system do best. One size does not fit all.

Last October, I finally got the blueprint for mine.

ADHD diagnosis.

I did the test, got on a call with Gabriella, my psychologist and had the whole thing explained to me. Found out what rejection sensitivity dysphoria is. A lot to deal with in a very short space of time.

I always knew I had something like that. I didn’t realise how much of it I had.

If ADHD were an Olympic sport, I’d be Michael Phelps.

But I’m so skilled at hiding, masking, and avoiding that I’ve developed hundreds of unconscious workarounds.

So when everyone’s flapping around online saying “ADHD is my superpower,” they can fuck off. It’s painful and inhibiting until you work out what to do with it - if you’re lucky enough to work out what to do with it.

One of the first things I did: swallow my medication and call up Helen Lindop, an ADHD coach who works with business owners

The next thing: call my mate Marcus, a FreeAgent consultant, to sort out anything in my life related to spreadsheets, banks, and invoices.

Took him two months to organise the compounded mayhem of my 20 years of self-employment. I’ve always used FreeAgent; I’ve just never pressed the right buttons!

Before diagnosis: a full day wondering what was wrong.
After: working with the actual struggles instead of the mystery of them.

I’ve been doing some form of scrum since 2013, 2014. I understood Trello - been using it since 2011. Kanban worked when I was working with other people. Working on my own, I’d just make boards and get lost.

Around the same time, I bought Things app. Very simple to-do list. I’ve used it on and off for years. Syncs beautifully between Apple devices. So well made, so simple. Doesn’t do a lot, so you don’t get lost.

As I understood my brain better, I realised how hard I’d been working because I’d been putting everything into Kanban boards instead of viciously organising in Things app.

When I got my diagnosis and understood how my brain worked - what to do with diet, how I should walk and move more - I went back to Voicenotes and Things.

By magic, last month, Voicenotes and Things connected to each other. Now I speak into VoiceNotes, say “make a task,” and it shows up in Things.

I walk around talking into my phone. Tasks appear. I organise them from there.

I’ve been working through this with Helen Lindop, my ADHD coach, and Ann Hawkins in Drive. Talking about my processes out loud - what I have and what I don’t have - has been one of the fastest ways to see which ones are real and which ones are just hope dressed up as a system.

It also makes my eyes bleed as I extract myself from my previous operating system.

The Economics of Weak Process

When you work on your own, when you’re a company of one, time is really valuable.

Something that’s helped me in the last few months - trying to get a grip on the out-of-control train that is my brain - is processes.

It’s so boring.

But doing the same thing every day, especially in the morning, and not freestyling, gets me from waking up to halfway through the morning with more done.

I’m doing everything in the same order. I tick it off in Things - even down to eating breakfast and taking medication.

By following processes for a load of stuff, I realised how much I was haemorrhaging. Redoing things. Losing things. Starting over because I couldn’t remember where I’d left off.

The economics: it takes longer to do stuff, and there’s only one of you.

I use the reflection feature in 750 Words. In February, it recommended two books based on patterns it had caught before I consciously did so: Paul Jarvis’s Company of One and The Checklist Manifesto.

I’ve had these books since they came out, and now I’m working through the recommendations. They confirmed what I was already moving towards.

I started writing down processes and making checklists. Created loads of time in my week. Which quickly filled with things I’d been ignoring for ages.

I quit everything on social media apart from YouTube, Substack, and LinkedIn. My brain is now filled with how to make podcasts and newsletters, not how to scroll Instagram.

I need a process to make the processes. It’s not a switch you flick. There is pain and grief in realising how many things I kept going because they were hidden inside a coping mechanism.

I deeply believe you can write yourself into existence. The community becomes the mirror.

The Real Instrument

I used to hear songs.

Now I’ve written millions of words, made hundreds of podcasts, produced events, and got older.

I look at people like Herb Alpert differently now.

Probably, I saw him play on TV and thought he walked on, played the trumpet, walked off again and went out for dinner.

The amount of practice and discipline it takes to keep playing. To come up with songs. To come up with collaborations.

I see the decades of systems he must have built to stay creative for 70 years.

Herb’s 90 now. Currently on a sold-out 2026 tour with the Tijuana Brass. He is absolutely not doing this for the money.

Musician, painter, sculptor. A maker in every direction.

In 1969, he had a crisis. Called the trumpet his enemy. Disbanded the Tijuana Brass. Walked away.

Then came back.

In the New York Times: “The thing in my hands is just a piece of plumbing. The real instrument is me - the emotions, not my lip, not my technique, but feelings I learned to stuff away. Since then, I’ve been continually working it out, practising religiously - and now playing better than ever.”

His music from the 1960s was sampled by Biggie in the 1990s and is still being sampled now. 60 years of cultural fingerprint.

Casino Royale is my favourite song he has ever made. Two and a half minutes of fantastic building trumpet. I first heard it with the 1967 James Bond spoof film Casino Royale, which I watched a lot in the 80s.

The song is magnificent. The way it builds throughout makes you want to order a Singapore Sling cocktail and fly Pan Am. But it’s also got the Casino Royale cast’s cheekiness - basically, a lot of friends messing around in a movie. Collaborative mayhem.

David Niven. Peter Sellers. Orson Welles. Woody Allen. Ursula Andress. Deborah Kerr. William Holden. Joanna Pettet. Charles Boyer. George Raft and Ronnie Corbett. A cast assembled as if someone lost a bet.

I’m a lifelong fan of films that are a thinly disguised excuse for mates to have fun. Cannonball Run, and especially The Blues Brothers, are great examples of collaborative mayhem.

Herb Alpert shaped the sound of an era with a trumpet and a handful of riffs. Nile Rodgers did the same with a guitar - the man who gave Bowie’s Let’s Dance its spine, who was born ten minutes from where I was standing in Contingent Works in Bromley, back in February.

Hear either Herb or Nile for three seconds, and you’re gone - transported back to a feeling you didn’t know you still carried. Not to a song. To a feeling. That’s what decades of practice actually build. Not a catalogue. A sound that lives in people’s bodies.

70 years of practice.

This is what process looks like across a lifetime.

The Pool Was Already Full

The week of Unreasonable Connection, the day before the event, I jumped on a train to Bromley.

Bromley. David Bowie was born there. And if you’ve spent any time with what Ewan is building at Contingent Works - a coworking space shaped around Bowie, The Bromley Contingent and the Blitz Club - you start to understand why this particular borough, outside the noise of central London, keeps producing people worth knowing.

Kristel Valaydon was there. We go back to TAGtribe days - fifteen years of knowing each other and only getting to meet in person every few years.

She’s a member at Contingent Works. We fell immediately into the thing we always fall into - how communication works, how PR has changed, what engagement actually means now. I never get bored with that conversation with her.

Back in 2025 Ewan mentioned that Joseph and Jijo - the brothers who built Buy Me a Coffee and Voicenotes - had become members. VoiceNotes is one of the tools that has genuinely changed how I capture ideas.

I use it every day. Meeting the people who built it, in the same coworking space where I’d come to see Kristel, felt like discovering that two separate stories were, in fact, the same story.

We walked across the road to Greener and Cleaner. Parisa Wright, part of the ACTionism citizenship community on LinkedIn, is on the Coworking Values Podcastnext week. Ewan runs Talk Club, the men’s mental health charity, out of his space. Roland, who spoke at Unreasonable Connection the next day, about how he hosted the ACTionism documentary at his Dragon Coworking space in Kent.

Everything connects. Not because anyone planned it. Because people who care about the same things keep finding each other.

In about ten weeks, coworking spaces across Europe will have the chance to show the ACTionism documentary as part of European Coworking Day. That conversation started in a room in Bromley.

I got the bus to Blue Garage in Lewisham at the end of the afternoon. Urban MBA and I set up for the event the next day.

The pool was already full. I just had to show up.