In this episode, I’m sitting down with my good friend, business strategist, consultant and author, Jessica Lackey, for a candid conversation about what it really takes to build a sustainable business—especially when you have an ADHD-ish brain. 

Jessica shares her journey from Harvard, McKinsey, and Nike to the wild world of entrepreneurship, revealing how even with such impressive credentials, she found herself trapped in the endless loop of online business tactics, quick fixes, and shiny promises.

Drawing on her upcoming book, Leaving the Casino: Stop Betting on Tactics, and Start Building a Business That Works, Jessica explains why so many of us end up gambling away our sanity (and savings) on the latest tactics, instead of building actual strategies that work for our lives and brains. 

Get ready for frameworks, real talk about defining your own version of success, and practical advice on bringing more intentionality and enoughness into your business (and life). It’s time to leave the casino behind—and reclaim your agency.

Top Takeaways from this Episode:

Start with Strategy, Not Tactics: 

The endless cycle of purchasing the latest digital course or marketing hack often leads to overwhelm, wasted resources, and lost confidence. Sustainable businesses are built on strategy and thoughtful decision-making, not reactive, one-size-fits-all tactics.

Ask Yourself the Big Questions: 

Before chasing the next big thing, get clarity on key fundamentals:

• What type of business do you really want to run?
• What stage are you in?
• What is the right pace and amount for your life and brain?
• What level of responsibility and commitment matches your reality?
• What does “enough” look like for you? These questions ground your business in reality instead of fantasy.

Don’t Compare Your Solo Journey to the Big Players: 

The polished marketers often have large teams and structures flattening out the chaos. If you’re a team of one (especially with an ADHD-ish brain), your output and path will—and should—look different.

There’s power in slowing down, cutting through the noise, and building a business that fits you—not a casino of empty promises.

About Jessica Lackey 

Jessica Lackey is the founder of Deeper Foundations, a consulting and training firm that helps expertise-based business owners grow and scale sustainable companies rooted in stronger business foundations. She brings a unique blend of corporate expertise and soulful business building, drawing on an MBA from Harvard Business School, a coaching certification from iPEC, and experience at McKinsey & Company and Nike, Inc. Jessica has supported over 200 entrepreneurs through her programs, blending systems thinking, operational rigor, and deep values alignment. She lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with her husband.

Jessica can be reached at https://deeperfoundations.com/

Buy the book, or get a free chapter: Leaving the Casino by Jessica Lackey

Mentioned during this episode:

• Digital Course Academy - Amy Porterfield
• Gary V - Gary Vaynerchuk
• Codie Sanchez
• Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass
• Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic 

Want to share this episode with a friend who's still in the entrepreneurial casino? https://bit.ly/episode-blog-290 



© 2025 ADHD-ish Podcast. Intro music by Ishan Dincer / Melody Loops  / Outro music by Vladimir /  Bobi Music / All rights reserved. 

H: So, Jessica, we are going to dig into topics of mutual interest, maybe even on the level of obsession. And that is the fact that so many business owners get started cobbling together a bunch of tactics. Some things they've learned for free, some things they paid for, maybe they got some feedback in a Facebook group. But what they really need to have a sustainable business that doesn't make them crazy is not tactics, it is strategy. And you, of all the people I know who are also neurodivergent entrepreneurs, coaches, and consultants, you understand that better than most. So much so that you are publishing a book with a very fascinating title. And I would like to start with why you chose that title, it is Leaving The Casino: Stop Betting on Tactics, Start Building a Business That Works. What's the backstory?

G: So, a little bit about my history, I worked at McKinsey Company in consulting. I went to Harvard Business School. I worked at Nike so I had all of the, you know, the business background that everyone says you need to have in order to be successful, P.S. you don't. But I wanted to become a life coach. I paid, hit a wall, hit, you can listen to my prior podcast interview on that topic but I thought I wanted to become a life coach. And so I started investing in programs and I started taking sales training and social media training. When I actually left out full time to build my business, I stopped wanting to be a life coach and started wanting to being a fractional chief operating officer. And so I started taking different programs and different masterminds. And like a year into it, I looked around and I was wondering what I was learning, who I was learning from, none of the strategies that I was learning. You know, I bought a digital course academy.

H: Oh, that sounds familiar.

G: Yes, in order to sell digital courses to the list I didn't have because the people I was selling to didn't buy fractional coo. They didn't actually buy life coaching courses either right because they wanted a coach and not a course. So I was looking at how much money was going out the door and realizing that I'm just spending so much on all these tactics, and the only people making money on this grift are the people selling you the solutions. And I realize that, you know, it was like a casino. I felt like I was betting on tactics. I had walked into this overwhelming sea of solutions and tactics and quick wins, and I felt like I had lost my shirt. I felt like the only people making money in this environment was the house, and that was where the leaving the casino metaphor. I felt like I'd walked into a casino, all my agency was gone. It was normalized to spend this kind of money on stuff I did not need for the possibility of going viral and hitting it big. And I was like, oh, this is it's just like gambling. I'm gambling on tactics and that's where the metaphor of the entrepreneurial casino was born.

H: I am so grateful that you are speaking to this issue because you are a highly educated woman. I mean, because we're friends, I can say this easily and share it with the listeners. When we were both part of a membership community and I heard about you and I saw your profile, I was like, oh, no. I normally like to reach out to new people in the community, but I was like, straight up intimidated by your credentials. And I'm like, Harvard MBA, McKinsey executive at Nike, I'm like, oh, fuck no. Like, I'm not gonna be able to talk to her and we've since then become really good friends. And I think one of the reasons is in spite of the fact that you're a very smart cookie, you're also really honest about your own experience. And I think there's so many people, even some listening, who feel like such an asshat because they spent so much money on their business.

Some people have even lost their marriages over this because they thought, I just need to keep buying every course and I keep needing to try every tactic, and sooner or later, I'm going to win. Just like dumping all those silver dollars into the one-armed bandit. And if it can happen to you, Jessica Lackey, then nobody listening should feel any kind of shame that it happened to them and by the way, it happened to me, too. I lost two years of my life and five figures, large five figures, on stuff I most certainly did not need and the shame is real.

So we are now going to leave the fricking casino. We are going to come back to our senses. Remember that we have critical thinking skills, that we have agency, and then we actually knew a thing or two before we started this entrepreneurial journey. So let's start talking about, like, just the way you set up the book. It's very reassuring to know that there are certain questions we need to ask of ourselves as we're starting a business. And you call them the big questions and then we have big decisions. And just focusing on those two things simplifies and grounds us in a really great way. Where should we start with that?

G: Well, I'll give a little context about how the book started because I think that'll inform like the book structure. So one of the first bad experiences I had with the entrepreneurial casino was on marketing. And I swear, you can't log on to social media without being assaulted by the reels telling you you need to have a real strategy. The LinkedIn people telling you to have a LinkedIn strategy, the DMs that are like, do you want 10 appointments every week and I'm like, ah, no, I do not. And the ones telling you, and some of this is not terrible advice, like, you should have a weekly newsletter. I know, maybe you should have a weekly newsletter. You need to do call outreach. There's just so many things you are bombarded with and I literally call it the casino.

It's like bombarding, right? And it's like, you know, I called it the followers and you know, the followers and funnels fallacy with just the casino telling you just keep pulling the lever of social media and you'll eventually get one viral seven, seven, seven and you know you'll get the jackpot, right? So as I was looking at, okay, all this advice, and a lot of this advice is contradictory depending on which floor of the casino you are on. Because you might be on the LinkedIn floor, you might be on the YouTube floor, you might be on the B2B Bro Marketers floor, you might be on the Instagram life coach girlies floor. Because that's where I started, like all the different floors, like it looks very different in there. And I was really struck by say, okay, there's all this advice, some of these tropes, they're not all wrong, right?

They're contradictory, they're oversimplified, but they're not all wrong. So what would inform the decisions that you need to make about how to market and that's where the big questions came from. So that was the, like I started with, what are all the things we're told to do and what are all the things you need to know about your business before you choose which marketing strategy you should pick? And that's the same for the big decisions are pricing, marketing and we taught pricing we'll talk about that. But like charge worth double your prices.

It's not pricing strategy, hiring, you know, hire before you're ready. If you don't have a VA, you are the VA. Time management, you know, a very famous entrepreneur, just as we are recording went had a huge launch over the weekend and he says he never went to his kids wedding or friend’s weddings when he was in his 20s and I'm like, that's a choice. But you know, is that a choice you want? And then passive income, like, that's a whole promise in and of itself. So those were all the decisions. So then we have to turn to the questions and this was the more philosophical part of the book is like, what type of business are you really running and what's it supposed to do in and for your life?

H: Well, I think so many of us don't really consider those things when we're just getting started. And like you said, and as I'm just thinking about the analogy of a casino and as a neurodivergent person, that is both really exciting and way overstimulating. Like, we tend to be impulsive. I'll speak for myself, I tend to be impulsive. So every shiny thing that comes along, especially when it's coupled with that message, you need this. And I assume, well, if they say so, and I'm not a stupid person, but it's like you don't know what you don't know.

And even if, like you're coming from a management consulting background, you're coming from an executive in a big corporation background, you know more than you think you do. But when you get started in business, it's like you forget all that. And especially as a neurodivergent person, you are attracted to every shiny thing and to everything that we're being told. We need this so I'm just thinking of the overstimulation and the over saturation and if you're anywhere on the autism spectrum, the literal sensory bombardment. I think it's damaging for us even to be in the casino, much less. I mean, I think it'll probably delay us figuring out what the big questions and the big decisions are, because just being in the casino itself is damaging to people who are ADHD-ish or neurodivergent in any other way right?

G: It is designed to short circuit your analysis. It's designed to get you put down your credit card with psychological triggers before you stop and think. One, can I implement this? Two, does it make sense for my business? Three do I have the time? It's designed to do that. It's designed to short circuit your analysis and make you think that someone else has all the answers. So that's, you know, that's why it's so challenging for everybody. I mean, we're all getting our attention sucked away by kind of social media. I think it's like particularly impacting ADHD-ish population.

H: No, I think that's exactly right and unfortunately, we blame ourselves. We blame ourselves because it appears that somebody has it figured out. It appears that the people that are selling the big courses and who are promoting other people who are selling the big things, it's like, well, they have it figured out, so we can trust them and we can follow them. But I don't want Amy Porterfield's business. I don't want to be giving away 40% of my income in affiliate commissions. I do not want an ad spend of 10 grand plus every month and I don't want to manage a team of a dozen people.

So I think that's one of the reasons why once we've gotten in the casino, once we've gotten the overstimulation and the excitement and the bombardment of all of the messages, we literally forget that we have critical thinking abilities because no one's asking us questions. No one's saying, hey, what do you want? What kind of business do you want? What is your capacity? What stage of life are you? What obligations and other commitments do you have that limit the time you can spend on the business? How much money do you actually need to make with this business? Because guess what, five years ago, we were all told six figures. Six figures is what you need to make, you gotta make six figures. You can't even consider yourself a real entrepreneur if you're not making six figures and then somehow it morphed into seven figures.

And so when you meet a new business owner and you ask them, how much money do you want to make from this business, six figures, they'll say it automatically. Why? Why that number or seven figures? They don't even know why. You're right, we bypass our critical thinking. So your entire consulting model and the structure of this book is reorienting people to the fact that they do have critical thinking, and when they tap into it, they can make decisions for their business that are right for their business, that are right for their brain and that are right for the people that they're going to work with.

G: Exactly. And you just laid out like all those questions you were asking, those are in bucketed form, the big questions. So the five big questions I ask in the book are what business are you running? So are you running a coaching business? Are you running a giant courses business? Are you, you know, doing VA work for somebody else, doing bookkeeping those are all different businesses. The second question is what stage of business you are you in? Because again, what works for someone who is a seven-figure entrepreneur is definitely not the strategies that you should be doing when you are just starting. What's the impact you want to have? There's this narrative that, well, you must need to be a household name in order for you to have impact. But I know you and your work I call this the intimate impact model.

You in your coaching work, you work deeply with individuals, right? You know their names and you know their stories and you see the impact you have on your work you might not be a household name? Not yet, but does that mean you're not having impact? No, it's just, it's a different profile. There's the question of what's the responsibility you want to carry and again, this is very much like do you want a team? Do you want long term client commitments? Do you want to be stewarding a community? And what does that change about what the responsibility is in your business? And then the fifth question is what is enough? And that is talking about, okay, on these trade-offs of money and time and schedule flexibility and creative autonomy, what's enough, what's sometimes too little and what's too much in some cases.

I think everyone sold the dream again the casino sells the dream that you can have all the money in the world and all the time in the world and all the schedule flexibility in the world and all the creative autonomy in the world. And at some point I don't but like until you kind of work through it in your business, like maybe the super big ones have all of that. But they've gone through seven years of seven to 15 years of trade-offs that I think we have to really be thoughtful to say to your point, what are the commitments I have in my life? Yeah, I could grind it out and make a ton of money, but maybe that's not healthy for my brain. It's not what's required for my family. I don't need to make seven figures because that's actually like counterintuitive the life I want to lead.

Those are the five questions that all the strategies and the tactics and everything on the, you know, in the casino, it's predicated that you know the answers to these questions before you make any kind of decisions. And these are not the questions that anyone, like, ever has, of course you need a team. I don't know, do you want a team because that means something. Do you want, like, recurring revenue from a community? I don't know, that is a choice, right? If you are, if you're an entrepreneur that, like, if you love short term things, if you love working in first, if you get bored super fast, then maybe a community isn't the right business model and, you know, maybe having a signature course isn't the right business model. Those are all questions that the tactics presume you have the answers to. But no one stops to ask the questions because again, if we ask the questions, guess what we don't do? We don't buy their stuff.

H: Anybody feel seen right now besides me? I'll tell you, Jessica, and maybe this conversation between you and I and folks listening to it would land very differently if this had not been the overarching experience of at least the last five years, if not the last decade. Like, we are so saturated in marketing messages and in the selling of quick fixes. I mean, hey, it's made the diet industry and the beauty industry billions of dollars for many years. Even if a part of us knows, oh, this is probably just hype, but on the case that it might not be, I'm going to plunk down my credit card just in case. It's the one thing, it's the one supplement, you know, it's the one face cream, it's the one diet pill. But in truth, we know better and yet we are constantly being told we don't.

One of the things I respect so hard about you is that you sell them what they need. You don't sell them anything other than that. You don't say, hey, you know, six weeks to six figures. And then once you lure them in, you're going, listen you, we got to talk about business fundamentals and foundations. You're like, no, I'm speaking to the people who have been burned but haven't given up yet. They know by now there's a better way. They may be a little battle weary, but they're ready for the real deal and that's what you're going to give them. And I'd love to know from your perspective and your experience which of these questions is the hardest one for most business owners to answer for themselves. I have a suspicion but I'd love to know what your experience is.

G: I think there's the ones that is most ignored versus the hardest. So most ignored is the stage of business. Because a lot of what we're sold and what we see modeled is we see the people who are at a scale stage and we don't want to admit, I think to ourselves that there's the seed stage, the sprout stage, the shrinking stage, and those are all stages you kind of have to sit in and work through before you get to scale. So I think there's a total, you know, the industry's lying to you about how fast it'll be, right? So people want to move to the funnels, they want to move to the systems, they want to move to things that are like in the strengthen and scale stage without really parking themselves in the seed stage and being like, I'm going to plant some seeds here and I'm going to go get a part time job while I do it.

They're like, go all in. If you aren't all in, then are you really an entrepreneur, I'm like, please don't go all in. Please have a bridge job or something I did, right? I think there's very little transparency. It took me three years to be able to support myself fully on things I booked through my book of business, right. Like I was doing contract consulting gigs and I would say kind of like doing hands on work for businesses. For the first three years before my business was able to support myself through coaching and you know, advisory and courses. It took a lot, it took a long time and I think I'm good at this right?

So there's what we don't want to ignore or want to ignore is I should actually embrace my stage and pace a business and stop doing things that are like, for more advanced people because I'm just going to waste time and money and not actually plant good seeds. And I think there's this belief we don't actually stop to ask the questions, what do I need this business to do in my life? What role does it play in my life? What accommodations do I need to build into my business model because of how my life and my brain works and those, those change over time. Like, it's not static. It's like, okay, well I spent the first three years of my business working my tail off, so I didn't have a whole lot of time. But now I'm getting to the point where it's like, okay, well, I have more choices now.

I have a bigger audience. I could keep trying to do it all, but is that what I want anymore? And would I rather have maybe less money, but more creative autonomy? Like this book project this year I had to actually wind down one of my retainer clients that was 25% of my monthly income in order to have the time to finish the book and promote the book because I wasn't willing to let that intrude on the rest of my life. And so those were some trade-off choices that I made that we don't talk about. Everyone's like, you're gonna have a down year. I'm like, yes, I did it on purpose because I needed the space because I would otherwise have burned myself a little crispy if I try to keep doing it all, all at the same time. Even though that's, a down year, what? Yeah, I'm having a down year on purpose.

H: I think this notion of the intentional constraint that you're talking about, it's so contrary to what we're being fed a steady diet of from all the Internet gurus that it really takes, I think, a level of self-awareness and self-acceptance to be able to say, this is what's right for me. I know I could do X, Y, Z. I choose not to and these are my reasons and I feel good about these being my reasons. Like I think that just takes the ability to look in and the willingness to look in and to sit with your own discomfort and to sit with your own uncertainty and to sit with your own self-doubt and say, you know, in spite of what the, the casino is promoting, that you can do very little and win. It's kind of a matter of luck and just just keep on pumping in those quarters, which are actually thousands and thousands of dollars. Sooner or later you're gonna win.

I'll tell you, I built an audience on Instagram and Facebook that took several years and was, you know, past the 10,000 mark and I lost it overnight to a hacker who took my accounts down and then tried to sell me an access code to get them back. Now I could have thought, okay, I'm going to pay the blackmailer, the extortionist, whatever, the terrorist, whatever we want to call them and get my thing back because I put so much time and energy into it and I can't afford to do without it. But it really forced me into a situation where I had to think very critically. Am I willing to give up this money knowing they could crash it again and come back and ask for more the next time, or am I willing to let it go and do I have the energy to build it over again from scratch maybe this is a blessing in disguise.

That was a decision that I had to make based on knowledge of who I am, my capacity, whether the Instagram and Facebook accounts were bringing me anything other than vanity metrics. I could not point to a single client who hired me because they saw my Instagram posts. So I think it's that, you know, I think especially if you work with a lot of women, the level of self-acceptance and self-awareness and confidence in our own decisions. I think that that's hard to come by for so many of us.

And I'd love it if you speak to that because I think knowing that tactics are never going to get you where you want to go, you need actual strategy. And even if you're several years into the game, it's not too late. You can start building in those business foundations that you teach, building in the strategy, even if you're five years in, but having the confidence to trust yourself and your own critical thinking and your own decision making and your own ability to make those discerning choices and those trade-offs, like, I think that's a place that a lot of women really struggle.

G: So I have two parts to this response. Part one is having confidence in what I want to do became a whole lot easier when I wasn't on Instagram anymore as a consumer, like, I have a static 9 grid. And again, if you're on social media for whatever are your reasons, personal, professional, like you do you. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and that's become like a bit of a, you know, AI slot fest these days. But the newsletters I was subscribed to were very, a lot of them were like, I downloaded some freebies and gone to some summits and they were all just like, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell things and I'm like, so I unsubscribed from all those.

I stopped being on Instagram. So the minute I stopped being surrounded by the cookie cutter web celeb entrepreneur casino gurus, the minute like it got much easier to like reclaim my own discernment. So I'm just like, I'm like, you're over here, I blocked some people for a while. Not because, like they didn't even know who I was. I blocked people who I did not want to go like spend time on their accounts, like reading their stuff, I'm like, this is not good for me. Let me just like, I never got into TikTok.

I don't like, I'm like, my brain could not handle that. So like part of it was like a big information diet but then I think there's a bit of confidence. And I think where the second part of the book comes in is it can be really challenging to have confidence without a framework for decision making because. A lot of these skills, pricing, for example, this is a one where it's like, how, how are you supposed to have confidence in pricing when you have never. No one teaches how to price like, there's no approach or no framework. It's charge your vibe and if you know, say what feels good in your body, those are not terrible like that. Like, don't say something that you know is going to put you in a nervous system freak out. But that's not a philosophy, it's not an approach that's a it's a little too vibesy for me.

So I think part of how I want to close the confidence gap is giving people frameworks for decision making that are based in first principles. If we stay on the pricing chapter for a minute, I give in the book five approaches to pricing, I say, how do you calculate your effective hourly rate and what does that mean for your offer price? How do you look at the value of your offer? How do you look at the audience size and base you have and then that informs your pricing? How do you look at the market and how you are priced based to your competitors peers and getting outside of your online ecosystem bubble? I was in that and then justice pricing.

What happens if the price you want to charge is not applicable to your ideal client and you look across all of those and then you say, okay, now I have a zone of ranges. And what you often find a lot of newer entrepreneurs are like this is that actually the prices you might need to charge to be sustainable from an hourly perspective are out of line with what your market can pay. So it's not change your mindset about money. It might be, go find a different market, change your offer structure. If you are underpriced compared to your mentors, it might not be just feel better about it. It might be you actually need more social proof. You might need, you know, more practice in how you deliver so that you can have a more codified process that raises your value.

H: I think the framework is really, really helpful because we know for a fact that when human beings have too many options, they choose nothing. They either try to choose everything, which is what happens in the casino. They're playing all the machines and they don't even know what they're or they choose nothing because they're literally so overwhelmed by the choices that they can't. And you've heard the expression when you confuse, you lose. And I've learned to limit the number of options I give people because if I love options, but it is undeniable, especially if you're neurodivergent, that as much as we might love the idea of options. Once we have too many of them, we have much more difficulty choosing. And I think having the frameworks and you know, I love threes. So you're like three of this and I love the odd numbers. Like three of this and five of this is like it's leading people through a structure that has a point.

You're not interrogating them, you're not asking them to ask all these questions of themselves just for the sake of asking questions. It's that there's a methodology here that creates clarity, it creates confidence, it creates courage, it creates focus, it creates direction. You know what you need to do, in what order, you know what your priorities are. And for ADHD-ish folks that may sound so fucking neurotypical that they want to stab themselves in the eye with a fork, and yet we need structure, we need intentional constraint, and we need the ability to focus our brain on what we need to do first and what we need to do next and why we're doing any of it, which is exactly what you provide. Do you ever find with some neurodivergent clients that they feel like it's too structured, too highly structured, that like, I just want to go with my passion and just wing it.

G: Yes and that's part of, goes back to my framework on enoughness. I think there's a trade off to be made with just working with your now just working with your passion like there's a trade off. Okay, well, I actually give like a couple of more frameworks about like. Okay, do you, can you, I don't say cordon off your passion, but can you say like in my garden of my business, the passion area, it's designated, it has a bit of a size to it. That's like free reign over here but I need to make sure I don't mess up the thing that makes me money.

If this business is designed to make you money, right, like, you know, it's like when you think about our business as a garden, you don't have to be Robin Wall Kimmerer. She wrote the book Braiding Sweetgrass, I love that book. She has this, you know, talks about the three sisters planting approach, which is you plant corns, beans and squash in the same pile and that helps the whole, the whole harvest grow better right. A lot of what we're taught in the online, you know, the entrepreneurial casino is what she would be analogous to industrial farming.

One signature offer. One type of marketing, it's kind of like it's you put pesticides on it to make sure that because it's like susceptible to disease versus this more messy, multifaceted approach to growing your business or growing your food. And so I think like we have to again those intentional constraints if you don't want to do anything repeatable ever again. One, I'm not the right business consultant because I believe that you have to, there's got to be some repeatability in some way you're getting better at your craft which comes through repetition and practice.

H: Yes.

G: But you can't if you need creative novelty, how do you build that into your business and how do you build that into your life and practice in a way that honors what you're trying to do in the role your business in this particular, you know, novelty seeking activity. How does that work for you? And so there's a trade-off and balance to be made. There's also, okay, well then maybe you need, you do want to hire a person in your business to help be the counterpoint for you that changes the responsibility that you pick up. And maybe that's something you're like, yeah, like I need to, I will take a little less money home so I can have someone in my business that can be the ballast that helps me stay focused and on track. So those are the trade-offs right that we would need to make about our businesses. So, I am too structured for some, but I believe that there is a minimum amount of structure that's required in order to make a business be a business.

H: I agree. And you know what I think a lot of people will say, especially the really creative types. I'm always concerned about the ones who identify as a multi passionate or a multi potential. It because to me they're signaling I don't want to do anything on a regular basis. And it's like if you're making bank and you have time to rest and sleep and you're generally happy, like hey, rock on your bad self. But in general businesses that are just wildly creative with multiple offers, each of those offers has to be marketed. Each of those offers has to be maintained. Each of those offers has to fit somewhere. I'm neurodivergent and I help people with these things. We agree that creativity needs structure so that it meets its goals and that there's a profit attached.

I think one of the things that's challenging is balancing for neurodivergence in particular, balancing passion and purpose with profit. A lot of people think it can be done you and I are living proof that it can. And I think at the risk of feeling like, oh, there's too many decisions to make, too many hard choices. I have to use too much executive functioning to figure this out and to engage my critical thinking. If you slow down your pace a little bit and take it like one chunk at a time, this is guaranteed to pay off. I don't think anything in the casino has a guaranteed payoff. I notice all the big course creators do not have money back guarantees.

G: The only thing that's just like in the casino, if you have enough money and capital and time, like the big card counting teams or, you know, Gary Vee and Cody Sanchez right. You can outwit, outlast the algorithm right, you can beat the house. Although the question, like, are they the house are they just participating like, that is a question about the free lesson. But if you have enough capital, you can play the game and win on the house's terms. But I don't think you're like that, I don't think I'm like that and so we can't play their game. We have to leave the games altogether. And I think going back to the multi passionate thing also, like, I don't think we have to always monetize.

I love cooking and I love crocheting, and I love those things and I don't have to monetize them. I can be like, all right my business is business consulting, and my passions and hobbies are things that can just be for fun and not be something that I need to like, that's over. I got my business garden, and then I got my life garden. And I can go, leave, make the business garden a little more orderly. My life garden is, you know, like, throw things over there and see what happens and I don't have to combine the two.

I can be like this over here a little more structure, a little more repeatability, a little more focus this over here, like, whatever. I got like a jump rope in my garage and my husband's got roller blades. And we think we want to do these things and I buy them and, you know, I wish I would use them a little bit more, but we don't have to, I think that we don't have to combine it all into a for profit money making venture. Which gets to again the point of like what is the business you are trying to build and what is the role it plays in your life and what else do you want to do that's not this. And you know, a lot of people maybe need a part time job. I keep saying that to all of people, my people is like…

H: A lot of people do.

G: Maybe you want this to be a hobby. It's, it is meant to be a side hustle and you don't have to go all in. You know, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in her book Big Magic, you don't need your art to pay, don't make your art pay the bills if it's meant to be art. Like go find something that pays the bills and let your art be art. And maybe one day your art will pay the bills and maybe it won't. But like let's not suck the joy out of life by trying to over monetize it in a way that that's not meant for it to do.

H: And I think that's a piece of neurodivergent wisdom that most folks would not expect to hear from a business consultant. But it really lands because you're right, everything doesn't have to make money. And if you have enough structure in your business so that you can kind of keep that contained and not take over your whole life, you actually have more time, energy and joy to experience the rest, which does not have to be monetized and does not have to be highly structured. So that is a wonderful, wonderful piece of advice. And can you give one more piece of advice for, specifically for ADHD-ish business owners, that should be common wisdom, but they're probably not going to hear it from anybody but you.

G: So when you look at the pace of production of these bigger entrepreneurs, these bigger organizations, I always like to remember that they are teams and the diversity of how all the individual brains work in that organization is flattened out by the structure. So when they look like they're perfect, like they're posting their YouTube once a week and they're, you know, it's all on a structured cadence. That's because it's not one person, it's a team of five to 12 and it's all of the diversity is flattened out there because they have to operate with a consistent structure because it's a team. So when we compare our output to their output we literally can't compare because we are not a flattened organization.

H: And we can't clone ourselves at least not at the time of this recording. And I'm still butt hurt about the whole Dolly experiment because there's nothing I would have liked better than being cloned. But actually, I need to collaborate with people that think differently than me, not just more of the same.