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For most of my life, I’ve been told—sometimes politely, sometimes not—that I should settle down, pick a lane, and stop reinventing the wheel. The implication is always the same: stability is maturity, predictability is virtue, and sticking with one thing long enough is proof that you’re doing life correctly.

And yet, every meaningful thing I’ve ever built came not from settling into a stable system, but from deliberately destabilizing my own world.

I’ve started seven businesses from scratch, five that were quite successful. An advertising agency. An international wholesale travel business. A media company. A nonprofit community for abused kids. A few others that never quite fit neatly on a résumé.

None of them emerged from carefully optimizing an existing career path. Every one of them came from stepping into uncertainty, feeling around in the dark, and adapting faster than the environment around me could harden.

Only recently did I realize that there’s a formal name for this difference in how people move through the world. Cognitive scientists call it the “explore versus exploit” tradeoff.

Exploration is what you do when your environment is uncertain and changing: you scan widely, test options, follow hunches, abandon paths quickly, and tolerate failure as information. Exploitation is what you do when your environment is stable: you optimize, refine, repeat, standardize, and squeeze efficiency out of what already works.

In other words, Hunters explore. Farmers exploit.

This isn’t pop psychology; it’s a well-established framework in behavioral economics and neuroscience. A growing body of research shows that people reliably differ in how much they favor exploration versus exploitation, and that these differences are stable traits, not character flaws.

Studies published in peer-reviewed journals have demonstrated that high-exploration strategies can outperform optimization strategies when resources are uncertain, moving, or poorly mapped. What looks inefficient or impulsive in a stable setting becomes adaptive when the environment changes quickly.

This helps explain why traits often labeled as ADHD-related deficits look less like disorders and more like classic Hunter cognition when viewed as a mismatch between brains evolved for uncertainty and institutions built for control.

Neither strategy is morally superior; both are ecological responses. If you live in a world where the rules don’t change much and tomorrow looks like yesterday, exploitation wins. If you live in a world where conditions shift, resources move, and yesterday’s map is useless, exploration keeps you alive.

Modern civilization is built almost entirely around Farmer “exploitation” logic. Schools reward sitting still, following instructions, and demonstrating mastery of a fixed curriculum. Corporations reward specialization, predictability, and obedience to process. Bureaucracies reward compliance and risk avoidance. The message is clear: stop exploring, start exploiting, and don’t make waves.

But some of us can’t exploit a stable environment for very long without our minds turning to rust. Put us ADHD Hunters in a rigid system and we don’t become efficient: we become bored, restless, depressed, and eventually disruptive. Not because we’re broken, but because we’re running the wrong cognitive algorithm for the terrain we’re standing on.

Looking back, I see that my so-called “serial entrepreneurship” wasn’t a personality quirk or a midlife indulgence. It was a survival strategy.

I learned early in my teenage years (I started my first successful business, a radio/TV repair shop across the street from MSU when I was 17) that if the world around me was going to demand Farmer behavior, I’d have to create my own destabilized environments where exploration was not only allowed but required.

Starting a business from scratch is the purest form of Hunter exploration. There is no map. There is no syllabus. You learn by doing, failing, adjusting, and trying again before the window closes.

Each time I built something new, I recreated the conditions where my brain works best. High uncertainty. Fast feedback. Real consequences. Constant novelty. The same traits that get pathologized in classrooms and corporate cubicles—novelty-seeking, risk tolerance, impatience with routine—suddenly became assets instead of liabilities.

That last part matters more than ever. We’re today living through a period of accelerating instability: technological disruption, climate shocks, political volatility, economic whiplash.

The world Farmers optimized for is dissolving in real time. And yet our institutions are doubling down on Farmer values, punishing deviation, tightening norms, and treating exploration as a threat rather than a resource.

This is where the Hunter versus Farmer divide stops being a metaphor and starts being a diagnosis. When societies feel threatened, they reward conformity and control. They elevate rule-followers and sideline question-askers. Hunters get labeled unreliable, impulsive, or dangerous. But history suggests that when environments destabilize, it’s the explorers who find the next viable path forward.

I’ve watched this play out not just in business, but in community building, media, and activism. Every meaningful innovation I’ve seen came from people willing to leave the map behind and tolerate ambiguity long enough to learn something new. None of it came from committees optimizing yesterday’s assumptions.

The tragedy is that we don’t lack Hunters: we’re surrounded by them. We just keep forcing them into Farmer systems and then acting surprised when they fail, rebel, or burn out. We call it a “disorder,” prescribe conformity, and medicate curiosity. And in doing so, we strip ourselves of the very cognitive diversity that makes adaptation possible.

The solution isn’t to abolish Farmers. Civilization needs granaries and calendars and routines. But it also needs scouts. Pathfinders. People who are comfortable being temporarily wrong in order to eventually be right. People who create destabilized worlds on purpose because that’s where they think most clearly.

For me, entrepreneurship wasn’t about money or ego. It was about building environments where my mind could do what it evolved to do: explore. The irony is that what looked like chaos from the outside was, internally, the most stable way I know to live.

We don’t all need to become Hunters. But we desperately need to stop pretending that Farmer logic is the only adult way to be human.

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Jokes about procrastination abound. The Procrastinators Society issued, in January 1995, its predictions for the year 1994: they were uncannily accurate, of course, implying some odd upside to procrasti­nation. On the other hand, the society has never successfully had an annual national meeting, because everybody puts off their planning of attending the thing to the last minute, by which time it’s already over or been canceled.

In small doses, procrastination can be cute. It can even be useful. One of the time management strategies that’s often taught to businesspeople is to only read your mail once or twice a week, and then answer it all at once. A similar strategy is to never return a call the first time, or never to take calls when they come in, but to batch them together for a day or two. Then, like the mail, allocate an hour or two to return them all at once.

The rationale for the former strategy is that most calls are about “problems” that will simply go away if they’re ignored, and the latter is a way of concentrating effort on one thing at a time.

But chronic procrastination, the type that permeates every part of our lives, is a different thing and can be very destructive. It’s part of the suggested diagnostic criteria for ADHD in adults proposed by Drs. Hallowell and Ratey, and is a constant source of difficulty for virtually every Hunter I’ve ever met.

■ Why do we procrastinate?

One of the more widely-accepted theses about ADHD is that the hyperactivity often associated with it is not the result of the person being in an over-aroused state. While that’s what it looks like from the outside, as noted earlier, more and more scientists are now postulating that the person is under-aroused, that they feel like they’re slipping away, drifting off, and having a hard time focusing on the events or details of the moment. They possibly even may feel like they’re drifting away from experiencing living at that moment.

In response to this under-arousal of the brain, they behave the same way a non-buoyant swimmer would: they periodically lurch up through the surface of arousal to gasp a deep breath of air.

These lurches up through the surface of arousal we see as hyperactive behavior: the person makes an inappropriate remark, jumps up and paces around, starts a fight, provokes someone, makes a joke, speaks out of turn, or somehow creates a crisis.

But none of it’s coming from their being over-stimulated in the first place—instead, it’s the result of their being under-stimulated. These eruptive behaviors are attempts to bring on an adrenaline surge that will shock the brain into awareness, wake them up, and give them the few moments of focus that’s necessary to re-orient them.

This also may explain why so many children and adults with ADHD are sugar junkies. Sugar gives the brain a jolt, since it’s the raw material that the brain runs on. That jolt pushes them up and through the arousal surface that they feel just above their heads. The unfortunate part is that sugar jolting usually leads to sugar crashing, as the blood sugar is re-balanced by the pancreas and drops back to normal (or, often, even slightly below normal) levels.

It also explains an oddity I noticed when collecting personal stories from Hunters for this and previous ADHD projects. A surprising number of people (usually requesting anonymity) commented that they were con­cerned that perhaps they were sex addicts. One woman commented that she masturbates, on average, three to five times a day. Others told tales of promiscuity that they felt helpless to control. And few had any psychological or historical reason to explain it. They weren’t sexually abused as children, and felt themselves to be largely normal in most other facets of their lives.

But if an orgasm produces a burst of adrenaline and therefore brings the person to awareness and consciousness, then this, again, confirms this hypothesis. The sexual experience is just another form of stimulation that brings them to a feeling of aliveness. In fact, one police officer and Vietnam veteran wrote that, “I feel most alive when I’m making love: the only other thing that even comes close is when I’m in a firefight.”

Joseph Campbell wrote, in The Power of Myth (1988):

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking 1 think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

So if all this is symptomatic of a person being chronically under­aroused, then procrastinating as a way of life makes perfect sense. If we put off things until they’re a crisis, then that crisis itself provides the adrenaline, the panic, the rush that brings us to awareness and aliveness and allows us to do the work, often in an extraordinary fashion.

This also fits in well with the Hunter/Farmer theory of ADHD. The reason the Hunter is out in the woods in the first place is because he’s bored and under-aroused: he wants something to hunt in order to get the juices flowing. When confronted by prey, or a predator, he then experi­ences that moment of aliveness and shifts into a state of hyperfocus to pursue the game. The “attentional deficit” vanishes, and is replaced by an attentional surplus, as he races through the forest or jungle, spear in hand, chasing after his lunch.

The cat is a good analogy from the animal kingdom that most people can relate to, although just about any of the predatory animals will do. A young housecat roams around the house, bored silly, looking for something to play with. It chases things, pokes into corners, and gets into everything. (Remember the cliche, “Curiosity killed the cat.”)

But if you’ve ever seen a cat that’s found game, standing stock still near a mouse hole or moving slowly through the grass, you are seeing a totally different attentional state. The cat has shifted from being highly distractible, in an open awareness state, to a state of total focus and concentration so intense that if you make a noise she will completely ignore you.

■ Overcoming procrastination

So, assuming for a moment that procrastination is a type of self- medication, a way of pumping up our brain’s neurotransmitters, then how do we overcome it? While it’s occasionally useful, most people would agree that living in a state of constant deadline panic is less than desirable. It often leads to substandard work because we don’t have the time to go back and do the proofreading or double-checking or careful thinking that might have produced a better product or project had we built in enough time to do the job right.

One solution is to stick with a line of work that provides the constant adrenaline jolt, and doesn’t require procrastination to bring it about. Emergency room personnel in hospitals, for example, often describe how much they love the atmosphere of crisis that surrounds “incoming wounded.” Every patient is new and different, and everyone is in crisis, be it a gunshot wound, an accident, an overdose, or an unknown problem that’s life-threatening

Combat personnel have described the near ecstasy that they expe­rience when in a fire-fight: Hemingway wrote about it, as have hundreds of others over the centuries. War correspondents for news organizations have a special glow in their eyes when they’re on the TV screen describ­ing the incoming missiles that we hear exploding in the background.

An old pilot’s cliche is that flying means hours of boredom punctu­ated by moments of sheer terror. If you pick up any of the popular magazines for and about pilots, though, you’ll see that the majority of the first-person stories dwell on those moments of terror. That’s where the juice is—where the aliveness in being a pilot is found. And when the subject of ADHD was brought up in a pilot’s discussion on CompuServe, there was a virtual avalanche of pilots self-diagnosing, and then arguing about whether it was a liability or an asset in the cockpit.

Wilson Harrell, founder of the Formula 409 Corporation and for­mer publisher of Inc. Magazine, enthusiastically and proudly points out that he’s a Hunter. When I asked him how he dealt with procrastination, he said that he’d organized his life so that the things that he’d normally procrastinate about—the paperwork and taxes and correspondence— were done by other people.

“That’s why you hire assistants and secretaries,” he told me.

And then he’s free to make his living writing (which he says gives him that high-stim jolt..as it does me), giving speeches (another good source of adrenaline), and, then in his late 70’s, flying around the world as a consul­tant to businesses with his “Total Quality Entrepreneurship” program.

Like the people in the emergency room, or those who volunteer for the riskiest combat missions, or the cops who walk the beat in the worst parts of town, Harrell has organized his life and his work to keep his stimulation level high.

After all, if you love your work and are stimulated by it, why would you ever procrastinate?

So much procrastination is caused by simple mismatches, people taking on responsibilities that they really aren’t suited for. They assume job that require farmer-type mentalities, and then find themselves in life situations that lack the regular stimulation to keep their heads above water. They procrastinate to avoid failure.

■ Find a coach to hold you to deadlines

Thomas Edison was a brilliant inventor, but he probably qualifies as one of the world’s worst businessmen. He kept poor records, made impulsive decisions, and hated the details of business. In his day there was only the tiniest fraction of the red tape that modern business people must wade through, but even that was enough to drive him to take in a series of business partners to handle the details while he went back to his beloved inventing.

This demonstrates the value of having a preceptor or coach.

When you consider the Catch-22 nature of procrastination and its possible solutions, the value of a preceptor becomes obvious. Consider:

• The situation is not yet a crisis, so it’s not interesting.
• Because it’s not interesting, we can’t build up enough enthusiasm to want to dive into it.
• So we put it off until it’s a crisis, and then we do it at the last minute.
• But when it’s done at the last minute, it’s often (usually!) not done as well as it could be.

While this strategy may work for hunting, combat, or emergency room surgery, where there are few other options than to react to things as they happen, it’s a lousy way to do the taxes, write a report, or design a sales presentation. And even the surgeon in the ER would tell you that she might have done things differently—and perhaps better — if she wasn’t under the deadline of the patient’s drifting near death.

So many solutions to procrastination fall under the umbrella of creating stimulation now, rather than later.

■ Creating short jobs

A final strategy for overcoming procrastination is to break big jobs into little pieces.

In the stories from individuals who’ve achieved success with ADHD I’ll be profiling here in future articles on this Hunter in a Farmer’s World site, you’ll find several examples of this, from writing books to doing homework. If you know that after about fifteen minutes on a boring job you begin to drift off, for example, then take that two-hour job and break it into eight parts.

Then do each part at a different time.

While this is counterintuitive to the binge-at-the-last-minute-to-get-the-rush and hyperfocus strategy that many Hunters have lived their lives by, it can be learned and is a powerful way to overcome procrastination.

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Last month, I wrote here about how one of the most common challenges I’ve heard from the literally hundreds of children and adults with ADHD I’ve interviewed (mostly for my books) or worked with over the years is that they can’t parse time in a meaningful manner.

I can relate because this has been a lifelong challenge for me, too.

There’s “Now” and “Some Other Time.” The difference between a week from now or a month from now is almost meaningless: it’s all “some other time.”

This makes it a real challenge to both plan and get things done in a timely (no pun intended) fashion.

The self-help industry is littered with books that purport to teach people how to take on procrastination. Most boil down to bromides:

— Break big jobs into little pieces,
— Do it now!
— Define milestones and deadlines, then give yourself rewards when they’re reached,
— Use lists, and
— Resist the temptation to multitask.

For normal people — Farmers — these are self-evident or easy to use. They’re sometimes useful for Hunters, too, although most have tried them repeatedly and failed.

Few self-help suggestions, however, start with the assumption that the people reading or hearing them have a totally confused relationship to time itself. That’s where I’m beginning with this article.

There’s a simple NLP* exercise that illustrates how people understand and relate to time, to past and future.

Imagine something that you know you will be doing in a week or two (it can be something routine, like showing up at work, although a specific event like going to a party or play generally produces a clearer result). Now extend your dominant arm and point with your index finger to where you “see” that imagination.

Try it for a moment right now before you read on.

Most people who have a normal relationship to time point more-or-less directly in front of themselves. It can be a few inches, a few feet, or dozens of feet ahead of you, but it’s generally in a very specific “place.”

Now think of two things that you believe will happen some time before and after that event you just identified and point to them. People with a highly functional timeline will locate the one that will happen before much closer to their bodies, and the one that will happen later will be farther away than the other two.

People with a confused timeline, though, will spot these events all over the place, often seemingly in random places.

The situation becomes even more challenging when you try to point to past events and sort them by recency or distance, time-wise.

With a highly functional timeline, the past is generally directly behind us, with a knowable distance representing how far away in time the memory of those events are.

But some people will place the past off to their left (or right) and the future way off to the right (or left) — all in front of them. I’ve seen this dozens of times, and the problem it creates is that the past is always visible. If that past is problematic or troubling, it continuously haunts the person with a timeline organized like this because it’s “always there” in front of them.

From having done this work and taught NLP for over 40 years, I’m convinced most timeline dysfunction in Hunters is the result of the general chaos of life itself, combined with a Hunter’s natural inclination to “be here now” at all times (except when worrying, which is another article altogether).

Farmers had to learn to parse time to be able to know when to plant, weed, and harvest crops. Those farmers who were incompetent at that got weeded out of the gene pool; those good at it survived to pass their genes along to future generations of farmers. As a result, their timelines typically easily handle at least one year’s growing season.  

Hunters, on the other hand, wake up hungry, go out and find food, and go to sleep with a full belly — all in a single day. At the most, their game will last them or their community a few days, so through the millennia that time-parsing skill never really got well developed and passed along to future generations.

In his Ishmael books, author Dan Quinn describes these early hunter-gatherer societies as “living in the hand of god.” They lived in food-rich environments and their food-acquiring efforts were limited to a few hours a day or a few days a week. No need to think of time in long cycles.

With a worldwide human population that never exceeded a few tens of million people until the agricultural revolution, even in northern or seasonally changing climates, there was almost always an abundance of food.

So, to get control of your timeline, try simply visualizing it and — mentally — move it to go from front to back, in front of you for the future, behind you for the past. It typically takes a few tries, sometimes repeated every day for a few days, to get there.

Some people actually reach out physically with their hands and “grab ahold” of their timeline, then pull or move it into place.

Then, when considering tasks that need to be done, place them on the timeline in their appropriate location. You’ll discover your internal, unconscious systems will help you accomplish them.

(A variation on this is taught by Dale Carnegie and others in the self-help movement that involves imagining yourself doing the job you’ve been procrastinating around and putting that visual image out in front of yourself.)

Finally, I’m fond of another technique that comes out of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) called the “Five Minute Rule.” It’s pretty simple: just start into the task you’ve been avoiding with a commitment to yourself to spend just 5 minutes on it and then re-evaluate if you want to continue or pick up with another five minutes tomorrow or abandon it altogether.

It’s derived from an old NLP technique called “breaking the logjam” and the very act of taking an action — even one limited to 5 minutes — often gets around all the internal chatter, rationalizations, fears, and complications around whatever it is we’re putting off.

Good luck and get started on that project you’ve been avoiding! ;)

*If you’re not familiar with NLP, it stands for NeuroLinguistic Programming, and is a collection of perspectives and techniques developed back in the 1960s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder to explain, understand, and modify people’s behavior, heal psychological wounds, and get control of emotions and life in general. The best books on the topic are by Bandler, Grinder, and Andreas, and great training courses are available at PureNLP.com. I’ve written three books based in NLP: Walking Your Blues Away (about working with trauma), Cracking The Code (about political messaging), and Living With ADHD (forward by Dr. Richard Bandler).