(Try) to stop chasing the shiny new thing

A few months ago, I got a wave of replies to one of my newsletters. "You should put these on Substack." "Have you thought about monetizing this?"

I got excited. Maybe there was a new way to share my work that I hadn’t thought of. Maybe I could avoid the hard work of actually building a business! Then I realized I’d been here before (womp, womp). I’d thought about Substack and the pattern was the same. 

When I'm doing the parts of the business I don't love, my brain goes looking for the exciting new thing. The one that will “fix” everything. (What am I fixing? Who knows.) But Substack! That's it. A new platform to learn and build, five figures a month, passive income, a whole new audience.

But this time, I thought, let’s do a real analysis. So, I asked Claude. I opened up my Business Strategy project, where I have told it all the things I want to do and accomplish, and said “I’m thinking about going on Substack.” The response was essentially what I already knew: Substack is a platform like any other. It will take 6-12 months to build. You’d be starting from zero and abandoning what’s already working. Focus on what you are doing. 

The child in me wanted to scream, “But I want something new and shiny to work on!” While the business strategist in me knew Claude was right. 

I've been thinking about this pattern a lot lately. Partly because of a LinkedIn Live I co-hosted recently on neurodivergent entrepreneurship. Partly because it comes up a lot with the clients I work with. Partly because I love a shiny, new object.

Here is what might be helpful to know:

In a corporate environment, there are structures that contain you whether you like them or not: deadlines, meetings rhythms, your manager, set working hours. For people with ADHD tendencies, those containers aren't just administrative, they're cognitive scaffolding. They regulate attention, provide external accountability, and create the mild urgency (meeting in 10 min!) that activates focus.

When you go solo, the scaffolding disappears. And suddenly every exciting new idea is equally viable, equally urgent, and equally easy to start and equally hard to finish.

In a corporate environment, there are structures that contain you whether you like them or not: deadlines, meeting rhythms, your manager, set working hours. For people with ADHD tendencies, those containers aren't just administrative, they're cognitive scaffolding. They regulate attention, provide external accountability, and create the mild urgency that activates focus.

When you go solo, the scaffolding disappears. And suddenly every exciting new idea is equally viable, equally urgent, and equally easy to start and equally hard to finish.

Part of why this happens is that ADHD brains are wired toward novelty (I wrote about that here.) The unsolved problem, the new platform, the untested idea… these activate the brain in a way that repetition and steady implementation don't. Once you've figured something out, or once it requires doing the same thing again and waiting for results, the pull disappears. It’s just how many ADHD brains are built.

This is where your favorite LLM of choice can be really useful. 

I've set up a Business Strategy project in Claude that knows my goals, my offer, my ICP, and what I'm working on. When I bring it a new idea, it doesn't just help me think it through. It holds the context of everything I've already decided. So when I said "I'm thinking about Substack," it was responding with everything else I’m building as context.

It’s an accountability buddy.  

If you want to set this up yourself, the key is the context you give it upfront. Tell it what you're building, what your goals are, what you're focused on for the next 90 days, and what kinds of ideas you want it to push back on. Then when the new shiny thing comes along, bring it there first.

You can do this with a friend or accountabiltity group too, but they won't always answer your messages with the urgency you might want them to.

This technique is great whether you have an ADHD diagnosis, suspect you might, or just recognise the pattern. The corporate scaffolding masked it for a lot of us. Going solo just made it visible.