Mismatch

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.

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.