Entrepreneurship is an innovative and creative way of doing business. It works against rigid guidelines of the corporate environment and provides a way forward for creatives and innovative risk-takers to forge their own paths and set new standards.
Recent studies into entrepreneurship have identified some contributing factors to a person's success with starting their own business including risk-taking, resilience, persistence, creative thinking and an adaptive approach to working. Do those characteristics sound familiar? Well, probably, and here is why:
Risk-Taking On The Regular
Just going for it is a regular day-to-day behavior for many people with ADHD. Whether you knew you were taking a risk or not, your impulsivity may have brought you experiences that many others would never allow themselves to have out of fear or over-thinking. You know how to take a leap and roll with the punches.
Resilience & Persistence Through Adversity
Living a life with ADHD often means you have been faced with a lot of setbacks and adversity from a young age. Working through these setbacks and obstacles as you have, builds in you a level of resilience and self-awareness. You have built that resilience as a result of what you have gone through, whether you full acknowledge that or not, it has made you strong. As you got through all that and kept going, you showed an incredible level of persistence.
Creativity In Daily Life
Growing up through school, you may not have solved problems exactly the way they were being taught and created your own methods. These new and creative approaches have built within you a naturally creative problem solving machine. No one could approach a problem in the same way you do.
The Evidence Is There, Do You Believe It?
Plenty of successful founders have attributed their success to their ADHD including Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, and Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, the list is actually quite long.
Individuals with ADHD have been seen to have more entrepreneurial and self-employment tendencies. There could be many reason for this, for instance living in a society that doesn't understand your needs and how you get things done so they try to fit you in a box. Thankfully we live in a world where it is becoming more and more easy to make your own box and become your own boss.
So How Can You Start Thinking Like An Entrepreneur?
To give you an intro to the entrepreneurial world there are two modalities of thinking when you approach a new business idea; divergent and convergent thinking.
Divergent thinking is a no holds barred creative generation of all the possible ideas and tangents that exist around your idea. In this method, you should quite literally think of everything you can and judge none of the ideas.
It's time for convergent thinking, once you have undergone a stage of divergent thinking, research and learning. Looking at the ideas and possibilities you have generated, your goal is to choose which stands out and hone it into a singular idea and think, research, learn about and develop it.
These two types of thinking can and should be done in a cycle. After the first stage of convergence, you can diverge again around that smaller more focused idea. Entrepreneurship provides an endless loop of fun and creative thinking to hone down to an idea that sticks. Try this when you approach your next idea!
