When everything feels broken at once, it’s hard to know where to even begin.

I’ve had 61 ADHD founders take my execution assessment, and 23 of them scored high challenge on all three parts of execution: Deciding, Doing and Sustaining. Eight of them maxed out on every part. In this episode I dig into what that means, why it feels like you have to fix everything at the same time, and why Doing is usually the best place to start. When follow-through keeps letting you down, every decision gets heavier, and that can look a lot like a prioritizing problem.

Key points:

• Russell Barkley’s line that ADHD is a performance disorder: we know what to do, we have trouble doing what we know
• Doing was the biggest challenge in the assessment more often than any other area (22 outright, 36 counting ties)
• Why a Magnetic North is the one piece of Deciding worth setting first
• A one-hour move for this week: pick the thing you already know you should do, and do it with support

Free live Game Plan workshop: Thursday, October 22, 10am PT / 1pm ET (90 minutes).

Register: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/gameplan-live

Resources mentioned:

ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com

Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard

Contact Steve: steve@steveaugustcoaching.com

ADHD brains can spin on an idea for years, trying to think their way to the right answer. Steve has been doing exactly that with his own messaging, and this week he's finally handing the decision to someone else: the market.

For two years Steve has had two ways of describing what makes business hard for ADHD entrepreneurs. One is the three skills of Decide, Do, and Sustain. The other is the lived experience: the scattered week that starts strong on Monday and ends with you surveying the wreckage on Friday, the dopamine desert between intense interest and urgent consequence, and the inevitable drift once something stops feeling new. Both have resonated with people, and as he works on bringing more people into the AEX community, he's gone around and around on which one to lead with.

That spin is familiar to most ADHD entrepreneurs. Because we're good at thinking and problem-solving, we try to solve it in our heads, and new ideas keep showing up while we do. Steve explains why that's an impossible task when the question is what will resonate with the people you serve, since they're the ones who decide. He shares the Facebook Ads campaign he's launching this week, built to test his different framings against each other, and the relief that comes from giving your brain a clearer job description.

Key points:

• Why ADHD entrepreneurs try to think their way out of the idea spin, and why it keeps the spin going
• Why your customers, not your own sense of what's elegant, decide what resonates
• How Steve is using a Facebook Ads campaign to test two years of competing framings
• Two ways to get real input fast: 10 to 20 conversations, or a small ad spend

Join Steve live: The monthly ADHD Entrepreneur Game Plan Workshop is coming up this month: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/gameplan-live?utm_source=rss

Resources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com

Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard

Contact Steve: steve@steveaugustcoaching.com

It took Steve three quizzes to get one that worked. The first two failed pretty badly, and if he'd judged quizzes by them, he would have written the whole channel off as dead.

That's the kind of verdict your feed hands out every day. LinkedIn reach has collapsed, ad costs are rising, outreach is dead, and AI just killed whatever's next, while the shiny objects promise that the right quiz, webinar, or AI tool will make sales happen on their own. After years of using almost all of them, Steve's lesson is that they all work and they all don't. His first 2 quizzes flopped, and then the 3rd was a hit, with basically the same mechanics all three times. The difference was finding the thing that actually connected with the audience he was serving.

Steve breaks down the two requirements for any channel to work, a compelling offer that solves a real need and being bad at it long enough to get good, and then walks through how ADHD trips up each part of execution: deciding (every new promise feels urgent), doing (rejection sensitivity and the dopamine desert), and sustaining (the drift toward whatever's shinier). He closes with a practical plan for picking one channel and sticking with it.

Key points:

• Why every marketing channel works for some people and fails for others
• What Steve learned from two failed quizzes before the Founder Type Quiz took off
• How ADHD gets in the way of deciding, doing, and sustaining your marketing
• Picking a channel that fits how you like to talk to customers, and committing to it for three months

Free training: Find out whether deciding, doing, or sustaining is most in your way, with an optional two-minute audit and game plan for $5: https://adhd-accelerator.com/gameplan

Resources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: steve@steveaugustcoaching.com

Steve was diagnosed with ADHD at 54, tried medication, and found it didn't work for him. So he went back through every chapter of his entrepreneurial life and started seeing how ADHD had shaped each one. Four years later, he's distilled what he's learned into nine operating principles for ADHD entrepreneurs.

This week he walks through all nine. The first is the foundation for everything else: supporting your ADHD is supporting your business, because a business takes on the energy of its founder. From there Steve covers execution as three separate skills (deciding, doing, and sustaining), why progress beats productivity, why slow and messy progress still counts, and why the week works better than the quarter or the day as a container for ADHD brains. He then gets into environment over discipline and willpower, emotional and nervous system regulation, why bringing yourself back after you drift is the greatest skill, and why it takes a whole ecosystem of system, tools, and community to make it all hold.

Key points:

• Why supporting your ADHD is the most direct way to support your business
• Execution as three skills: decide, do, and sustain
• Why the week is the best container of progress for ADHD brains
• Why bringing yourself back after you lose focus matters more than the initial focus

Resources mentioned:

ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com

Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard

Contact Steve: steve@steveaugustcoaching.com

You've got too many good ideas and no way to tell which one the market actually wants, and that's exactly the theme that came up most when Steve surveyed 60 ADHD entrepreneurs last month.

Steve ran a live Game Plan Session and had attendees fill out an assessment beforehand on what's actually blocking them in their business. The biggest theme, by far: too many directions, too many good ideas, and no way to choose between them. That came from people just starting out, people pivoting after something changed, and people sitting on a pile of ideas they were excited about with no way to tell which one would work.

On the surface this looks like a deciding problem, and it partly is. ADHD brains make everything feel equally urgent and equally exciting, at least for a while, and the moment we think of something we expect ourselves to finish it about as fast as we thought it. But the real fix isn't more thinking. Steve walks through why you can't decide your way out of this by spinning ideas in your own head, because the market, not your own excitement, determines whether something is a good business or just a good idea. The way to find that out is conversations, and once you commit to having them, too many options turns into a doing problem: a real list of tasks that gets you the information you actually need. Steve also gets into what he calls the dopamine desert, and why doing needs just as much support as deciding does.

Key points:

• Why too many good ideas looks like a deciding problem but is often really a doing problem
• Why the market, not your own excitement, decides whether an idea is a good business
• What "conversations are the currency" actually means and what it looks like as a task list
• The dopamine desert, and why doing needs real support to happen at all

Over the next six weeks, Steve is working with 10 ADHD entrepreneurs to define and execute a real plan, with daily coworking and accountability behind it. If that's you, email steve@steveaugustcoaching.com and he'll set up a time to talk.

Resources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: steve@steveaugustcoaching.com

You spent years succeeding on energy, interest, and effort alone. Then you hit a wall, and what you lost wasn't just your output. It was your trust in yourself.

Steve digs into something he thinks doesn't get acknowledged enough in late-diagnosed ADHD entrepreneurs. Before diagnosis, most people succeed anyway, working harder than everyone around them without knowing why. Then midlife arrives, sometimes a hormonal shift, sometimes just years of accumulation, and the coping mechanisms that used to work stop working. Burnout shows up, or the wins keep coming at a real cost. Diagnosis explains the wiring, but it doesn't repair what actually breaks when you hit that wall: the belief that you can decide, that you can do the thing you know you're capable of, and that you can sustain it.

Steve makes the case that self-trust, not productivity, is the real thing on the line, and shares what happens in AEX co-working sessions when members watch themselves finally do the thing they'd been avoiding for months, in twenty minutes flat. He closes with two stories: a member who nearly gave up on her business and ended up turning her garage into an art studio, and a songwriter who finally recorded his own album.

Key points:

• What actually breaks when a late-diagnosed ADHD entrepreneur hits the wall, and why it isn't just burnout
• The three things self-trust covers: deciding, doing, and sustaining
• What AEX co-working sessions reveal about how fast "impossible" tasks actually are once you sit down and do them
• How rebuilding self-trust in the business ripples out into the rest of life

Resources mentioned:

ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com

Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard

Contact Steve: steve@steveaugustcoaching.com

Your ADHD brain thinks every idea deserves to happen right now, and that's exactly what makes deciding what to work on so hard.

This week Steve breaks down why deciding, one of the three core challenges for ADHD entrepreneurs alongside doing and sustaining, is so cognitively expensive. ADHD brains don't rank ideas, they flatten them: everything feels equally urgent and equally important, all at once. The moment you think of something, part of you expects it done, because thinking it and finishing it feel like they should take the same amount of time. They don't, and Steve tells the story of thinking he'd redo his website "this afternoon," only to discover how much copy, design, layout, and programming it actually takes.

Steve also unpacks something Alex Hormozi said in an interview: asked what his biggest skill was, Hormozi didn't say marketing or offers, he said opportunity identification, finding the idea most worth his time because it can actually succeed in the market. For ADHD entrepreneurs, that's the hard part. We chase what's interesting first, and the business only works when that interest actually meets what the market wants. Steve closes with the fix he uses with his own clients: treating ideas as a portfolio with seasons (generate, evaluate, test) instead of trying to build everything at once, anchored to what he calls your "magnetic north," the vision of the impact you want to make and how you want your life to look week to week.

Key points:

• Why ADHD brains treat every idea as equally urgent, and what that costs you as a founder
• Alex Hormozi's answer for his biggest skill: opportunity identification, not marketing or offers
• Why "I'm interested in this" and "this is a good business" are two different questions
• The three-season system (generate, evaluate, test) and the "magnetic north" anchor that makes deciding easier

Resources mentioned: ADHD Entrepreneur Accelerator (AEX): https://adhd-accelerator.com Free Weekly ADHD Dashboard: https://go.steveaugustcoaching.com/adhd-dashboard Contact Steve: steve@steveaugustcoaching.com