Making It – Episode 147
ADHD as a Superpower (Taki Moore)
Taki Moore: Hey, there. I’m Taki Moore and you’re listening to Making It. I run a coaching company called Million Dollar Coach. We help business coaches get to a million bucks. When I was a kid, over the primary and high school, there’s probably three things I wanted to be at various stages. I wanted to be a fireman because ambulance guys saw too much blood, and I don’t like blood. I wanted to be a pilot at one stage. I still would love to fly seaplanes, like landing on water, that would be amazing.
But the thing that I got closest to actually doing before I veered off in this path was my uncle Rolf was a hero, a huge hero of mine growing up. He’s an industrial designer, so I wanted to design and make stuff. I got into college for it, so a designer, I think, is where it could have gone. Pilot is about freedom and adventure, fireman is about helping people, and designer is about elegant solutions and creation. And I think those three things ring true for the work we do right now.
I always used to joke that, yeah, I’ve probably got ADHD, and then I got diagnosed and kind of off the charts. When I got the news, two things happened. There was a huge sense of relief, like, oh, this explains so many things. And then there was a huge sense of grief, like, oh, my God, imagine what I could have done if my brain worked properly. The way you turn it into a superpower, at least what’s worked for me is two things, all of the crazy compensation strategies that I’ve been running for ages have really helped. Like, I. I don’t type kind of anything at work. I take photos and send them to people. Like, a great workday for me is.
I chat with someone cool and I draw and I take photos and I send it and they go do magic things. The great bits of sort of hyper focus are amazing. And the downsides are really real, too, unless you can mitigate them. And I’ve mitigated them with, like, frankly, with good help. My EA, Michelle, we sit down and we plan out the next week. Super great. I’m not responsible for any projects myself because we want them to actually finish, but I’m responsible for a lot of the shaping of the projects, like seeing the problem, co creating an idea, bringing it to the team, and then I’m a resource to all of the people who are running projects. And so that’s just about knowing where I can add value and where I am bit of a liability. I think it is a superpower, and I think if you don’t have some things in place, like some support system around you, then it can be really freaking hard.
I’m not particularly goal driven in the traditional sense. Like, I don’t have a vision board. I haven’t got a number that we need to hit in order for daddy to love me or something like that. What keeps me going is working on projects that excite me with people I love to jam with to help people we really care about. And, like, I could do that for the rest of my life until I’m very dead. I’m probably going to die one day on Zoom, teaching a workshop to our clients.
I just love figuring out what our audience needs help with and trying to find better, faster, easier, more templated, more expressive ways of having them do it. And I don’t think I’m ever going to run out of projects.
Some people are very good at seeing into the future, and they’re very clear about, like, okay, in five years we’re going to be here and it’s going to look exactly like that. And so are they reverse engineer. I’ve never done that. Some people are goal setters and some people are problem solvers. And if you’re a problem solver, when you do the goal setting process, it probably doesn’t resonate very much with you, which was my experience.
But you’re definitely going to have lows, and I think if you knew upfront all of the hard times you’d go through, and that’s all you knew, you probably wouldn’t do it. Just to be super clear, I’m not saying don’t do it. The highs are super worth it, and the growth you get through the hard times is extraordinary. The real goal of entrepreneurship is to help you become the person you’re meant to become. Your mojo is the most important resource in the business. And so anything that takes away mojo is an automatic no. And anything that adds mojo is an automatic yes.
A friend of mine said something once that I kind of grabbed onto, and I’ll never let it go. It’s fix nervous with service. So if you’re ever nervous about the staff or talking to the people, it’s because you’re kind of thinking about you. And if you go, actually, this isn’t about me. It’s about the person who’s going to watch the video and how I can help them, or it’s about the person that I’m going to go talk to and come up with a plan that’s going to help them grow. If I get into service, then my nerves go away because I’m focused on the other person. I think that’s a biggie.
Another thing that’s been really helpful for us, a lot of companies do, like quarterly planning. That’s fine. I’ve got ADHD. I find 90 days is a really long period of time, but I find six weeks is a little bit magic. So we run on six-week cycles, so we get six cycles a year with a little bit of kind of, a couple of weeks of cool down in between. And six weeks is long enough to get something real done, shipped out there in the world. You can make, you can change anything in six weeks, but it’s also short enough that you start with the clock already ticking and you can’t mess around, if that makes sense. And so that’s a big lesson for me, is like working in six-week sprints.
You know, there’s this product, I’ve never actually seen one, but I think the idea is entertaining. So I use it as a metaphor. It’s called Spanx. It’s like compression pants. So if you get Spanx on your calendar, you go, hey, there’s seven days in a week and there’s 24 hours in a day. If you work for yourself, it’s easy to get into the track where you’re always working or always thinking about work. And I think there’s a place for hustle, especially early on. It’s really, really important. But I’ve gone, you know, what, four days a week, Tuesday to Friday. That feels good to me. And so that’s a horizontal Spanx and then vertical Spanx.
So I’m going to go morning till lunchtime, and after that I’m going to work out with my trainer Andy. And then in the afternoon I’m free to do whatever I want. There’s something about chronic ADHD that, like, I can’t do anything by myself. Like, very little. Like, I’ve got a great gym just on the other side of this door. It’s amazing. If I didn’t have Andy four times a week on the Internet at a specific time, I would never use it. And it’s just about knowing yourself. Like, that’s not everybody, but if, like, the discipline of showing up consistently is hard for you, then get some help.
Favorite mistake on the journey is I got really good at marketing because I was terrified of selling, terrified of asking for money. I do a bunch of work for people, they would say yes, and I wouldn’t submit an invoice for three months because I was too scared of just taking, terrified of asking for money. And then eventually Kiri Marie, my wife, would be like, babe, we need to pay the bills. And I’m like, all right, so I’ll send the freaking invoices. And I’d send the invoices. And then meanwhile, the poor client who could have paid it once a month happily, now has three months’ worth of stuff, and they don’t have the cash, and it just made everything worse.
So I’m significantly better about that stuff now. But I think in the early days, my solution was, if I can get really good at marketing and having people come to me, then I don’t have to sell. And so I got quite good at marketing because of, if I can generate demand and have them ask me, then I don’t have to ask them. And I’ve probably been too slow to hire for help because you’re in that well, I could do it myself, and I don’t have the money, and da da da da. And just seeing what’s possible with a team of amazing people around you is kind of extraordinary. Like, I can do things now that I couldn’t running this solo.
But the hardest part about letting things go to others, it depends if I love the activity or not. I’ve got a very low tolerance for things I don’t enjoy, but other stuff. The hardest part is being okay with. It’s going to be sort of 80% good enough, and that’s okay. 80% done by someone else is 100% fucking awesome. And I think that’s a really good frame. Big mistakes that entrepreneurs make on the way to making it, I think early on, there’s, like, I’ve got to get it just right before I can go. That’s huge. So a bit of perfectionism.
I think another one is believing everything you read about how you’re supposed to run a business, and yet there’s definitely secrets and shortcuts and if you’re just getting started, it’s certainly going to be easier to, like, follow a recipe than to invent one. But if something doesn’t feel right for you, I think full permission to do something different I think is great.
I think making it could be taken two ways, and I think I’m more interested in the second way. Making it the first way is, oh, look, they’ve made it. You know, they’ve hit the big time. I don’t love it. It sounds like there’s a destination. I don’t know that there is. I feel just like, yes, we’re in a very different place than we were when we got started. I like actually making it with my hands. And I love the process of, like, seeing a problem of an opportunity, like figuring out a solution, a fix, a product or something, and then actually making it and then launching it into the world and having people go through the stuff that was just an idea that then became on paper. Then they got turned into something more formal.
So I think that’s the kind of making it that I really love. Have we made it? I hope not. Because if we have, then maybe we have to stop. I mean, I’ve made it repeatedly. Every six weeks, we make something new. I think there’s always more. It’s not, oh, we really need more. Cause it’s so bad. I think it’s a. I don’t know what I would do with myself if we stopped. So I don’t think I’ve made it, but I’m progressively making it by actually making it.
I’m Taki Moore and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find out more about me milliondollarcoach.com or just find me on Instagram @takimoore.
Cassandra Topperwein: Making it is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as Just Between Coaches and Once Upon a Business. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making It, please follow us on YouTube or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.