Need advice: A precarious situation in my polymath career

4 points by adhdpolymath ↗ HN
Fellow hackers,

Ola from a neurodivergent, ADHD polymath. I am in need of some advice, or crowd sourced ideas on what I can be doing or should be doing with my skills & experience in life. I will quickly lay down some of the things I have worked on:

- 5X founder: Education, Organic Farming, Startup Festivals + Media, Outdoor travel, Virtual venture education (micro-accelerators). None of them have given me an exit still or any sort of reasonable financial return. Some of them are active but COVID mostly has made it hard to see it yielding any results in the near future.

15yrs of startup ecosystem building experience in developing & developed economies. Things i have built & part of: - Ran the office creating mentoring, funding & market development activities for startups at a time when there were 2 VCs operating, now is a thriving ecosystem (probably 4th largest in the world) - Developed entrepreneurships events at the intersection of disciplines (art+tech, Media+Finance etc) was a huge hit but financially not viable in the part of the world I come from, so shut it down - Public policy work to develop startup ecosystems - Various committees & think tanks & advisory work for various communities working in entrepreneurship - Launched and ran angel syndicates, accelerator programs etc.. as consulting gigs.

Now. I am 41 and have had the greatest opportunity to work on some diverse and impactful projects in my life. I am skilled to manage a board instead of teams, I am killer in strategies not operations. I can work on things that come to fruition in the long run instead of immediate gratification.

I just got diagnosed ADHD, which explains why I am the way I am. :-P. I have come to the cross roads of my life, I need to pick something that keeps me in the world of entrepreneurship & innovation because I am such a fan & a cheer leader & truly believe in the power it has to change people's lives (I have witnessed that in my country from the work we have done).

Anybody here been in this place before, have any ideas or inputs on how you creatively solved this? :-)

Please send me all you can think of what I can do, I am waiting :-) .

3 comments

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The prototypical HN poster.. this site sucks nowadays
Nobody can answer what you should do because you haven't mentioned what motivates you.

You say you're good at managing and strategy but have founded five businesses that are at best treading water. Are you perhaps "teaching the birds to fly" and should return to the basics in order to speak from authority? Find a technical co-founder and bootstrap a business focusing on growth and profit metrics?

How many boards have you managed so far?