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Brain First Business: The ADHD Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success
A practical and inspiring guide that helps ADHD entrepreneurs harness their unique brains to build a thriving business."Honest, practical, and deeply empowering. It will change how you work and how you lead.” —Gino Wickman, author of
Traction
and
Shine
For entrepreneurs with ADHD, some traits, such as creativity, hyper-focus, and risk-taking—are rocket fuel for launching a new venture. Others, such as trouble with attention to detail and time management, can make running a business feel impossibly overwhelming. Traditional business advice, designed for neurotypical brains, doesn’t help—it can even intensify stress and self-doubt, leading to burnout.That’s why serial entrepreneur and ADHDer Amanda Perry wrote Brain First Business: a groundbreaking guide that rewrites the rules of entrepreneurship for neurodivergent minds. With her Brain First method, she blends lived experience and neuroscience to help founders with ADHD reach their goals without compromising their sanity. By redesigning their approach and adopting proven techniques that work with their brains and not against them, they’ll unlock a sustainable path to building a productive and profitable business.
300 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 27, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
The Founder Who Borrows From Tomorrow
What Amanda Perry’s “Brain First Business” Understands About Ambition, Exhaustion and the Future Self Who Has to Pay the Bill
Perry’s guide to ADHD entrepreneurship is most perceptive when it treats attention, energy and recovery as resources a company can overspend just as surely as cash.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 14th, 2026
Perry works at one end of a long table while her commitments advance toward the empty chair of a future self, turning God Mode into a business problem of who gets to spend tomorrow’s capacity.
During what Amanda Perry calls “God Mode,” an entrepreneur with ADHD may feel briefly overcapitalized: ideas connect, work accelerates, and the calendar looks less like a limit than an invitation to misbehave. The bill arrives later. Perry remembers commitments made by an incandescent version of herself that a depleted version then had to honor, cancel or survive. Her eventual rule is wonderfully unromantic: treat God Mode as an energy loan. Recovery is repayment. “Brain First Business: The ADHD Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success” is most original when it asks why companies forecast cash, staffing and time while treating the person running them as infinitely renewable.
Earlier, Perry rereads childhood school reports after receiving an ADHD diagnosis in 2020. Their refrain is painfully familiar: Amanda has great potential, if only she could focus, concentrate, stop distracting people, stop being the class clown. The cruelty resides in the conditional. Nothing is supposedly wrong with the potential; only the form in which it arrives. Great visionary, if only she could love spreadsheets; great leader, if only her energy arrived in neat weekly installments. Beneath the business advice sits a more intimate argument about what happens when ability is considered legitimate only after it learns to look convenient.
Adult Perry rereads the school reports that praised her potential only on condition that it become easier to manage, letting an empty child-sized chair hold the distance between ability and the rules used to measure it.
Much of Perry’s authority comes from learning this distinction expensively. She left corporate work in 2007 to start a cupcake company, grew it to seven shops and more than 100 employees, then watched burnout and bankruptcy end the enterprise. Later she built a 40-person marketing agency. After diagnosis, she could finally name why a company that looked successful from outside felt punishing from within: noise, relentless switching, the strain of executive tasks, the effort of performing competence in a form her brain found costly. She eventually sold the agency, describing what she had built as a mental and physical prison. Growth can enlarge the machinery exhausting the person expected to operate it.
Even the book’s architecture begins with Perry’s suspicion that the obvious remedy may be aimed at the wrong problem. “Awareness” asks readers to understand ADHD and the shame or compensatory habits gathered around it. “Alignment” turns toward the company itself. Only then does “Action” tackle planning, procrastination, burnout and the other recurring points of drag. Perry withholds the hacks until the reader has had a chance to question the goal. A better calendar is no help if what fills it should never have been there.
The traits that help somebody start a business are not necessarily the traits that help sustain one. Perry is admirably unsentimental about qualities often sold as ADHD “superpowers.” Creativity, appetite for risk, rapid ideation and hyperfocus can help someone leap from idea to enterprise; they do not reconcile accounts or guarantee yesterday’s pace tomorrow. Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters’s “Rocket Fuel,” with its visionary-and-integrator pairing, helped Perry stop treating this mismatch as inferiority. Her question is more personal: what kind of company can the visionary inhabit without slowly vanishing into it?
A growing business interior expands across the page even as the usable space around Perry narrows, making visible the book’s warning that scale can look like success while becoming enclosure from inside.
Reading Perry is rather like being coached by someone who has already spotted your escape route from the advice she is about to give. Her prose is oral, conspiratorial and impatient with managerial solemnity. Parentheses interrupt; capitals supply vocal stress; bullets break up exposition. She likes portable names: “burnout-by-bullying,” “scroll hole,” “cognitive quicksand,” “now/not now,” “God Mode.” These are not decorative metaphors. They are handles, meant to survive the Wednesday afternoon when the reader cannot remember a paragraph but can still remember what the problem is called.
In Perry’s vocabulary, familiar accusations begin losing their authority. “Lazy” becomes task resistance worth examining. “Inconsistent” becomes a warning that usable energy varies. “Bad at planning” becomes a question about which kind of plan anyone will actually reopen. She does not use explanation to erase consequence, either. Bankruptcy happened. Impulsive choices mattered. Her dysregulation sometimes hurt people around her. The humane move is not absolution. It is to stop prescribing shame as though shame had ever proved especially good at bookkeeping.
Part III even tries to spare its reader from failing at the book. Its shorter chapters form a “pick’n’mix” shelf of recurring problems rather than a sequence that must be completed correctly. That choice suits an audience Perry has spent two sections telling us may struggle to retain and operationalize long streams of information. It also creates a pacing problem. Read straight through, the later chapters repeatedly travel from recognition to lowered shame to environmental adjustment. Used six months later when a particular difficulty has returned, the repetition may feel less like repetition than a useful place to re-enter.
A client Perry calls Claire wants monthly revenue to rise from £17,000 to £20,000 largely because £20,000 has acquired the glow of the next correct number. Perry keeps asking what the additional money would change. Claire realizes it would probably require another employee costing roughly the increase, more work from her and no better family life. The arithmetic is almost comic: growth eats the benefit of growth. The revealing question is not whether Claire can reach £20,000, but why the extra £3,000 received moral authority before anyone asked what it was for.
[image error]
Between £17,000 and £20,000, an extra chair and the paperwork needed to support it quietly consume the gain, turning a growth target into Perry’s sharper question: what is the larger number for?
Put in accounting terms, Perry wants entrepreneurs to forecast the founder. A decision does not cost only money or hours. It can consume attention, recovery, tolerance for interruption and tomorrow’s ability to make another decent decision. God Mode makes the error visible because the founder feels rich in capacity and starts spending accordingly. Perry learns to restrict the sprint, store side ideas, clear space afterward and use unusually productive periods to build systems for “future-you.” Financial planning accepts limits on future cash. Why spend against a future self as though no repayment date exists?
At scale, Perry’s own companies become cautionary versions of the same ledger. The cupcake business could grow while she deteriorated. The agency could employ dozens while its environment overwhelmed her. Revenue and headcount are therefore incomplete evidence that a company is working. Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks” distrusts the fantasy that finitude can be beaten with a superior schedule; Perry brings that suspicion into the founder’s office and makes it operational. Does the company keep converting one person’s extraordinary Tuesday into everyone’s assumption about Friday?
Diagnosis does not solve that problem so much as alter Perry’s interpretation of it. She describes relief mixed with grief, a retrospective montage in which school reports, financial mistakes, burnout and strained relationships acquire another possible explanation. Bankruptcy returns as evidence about risk and identity. Diagnosis begins as liberation, then complicates into “skill regression” as old compensatory habits become harder to sustain. Nothing suspenseful is being withheld. What changes is the meaning of what we already know happened.
Information about the self has to reach the calendar before it means much. If meetings reliably destroy the founder’s afternoon, schedule differently. If delegated work requires so much explanation that delegation becomes its own tax, fix the handoff. If criticism reliably produces dysregulation, insert time between receiving the email and answering it. This is where Perry moves beyond the softer instruction to “work with your brain.” Self-knowledge becomes a meeting canceled, a role reassigned, a buffer protected.
More refreshing still, Perry does not insist that every difficulty contain a flattering secret. Risk tolerance can create the company and endanger it. Hyperfocus can produce extraordinary work and teach a team to expect an unsustainable pace. Sensitivity can deepen empathy and make an ambiguous message feel like an emergency. The same trait changes value with the task, the environment, the support available and the length of time for which it is being asked to perform. Sometimes it manages to be an asset and a liability before lunch.
It is easy to agree that a pointless meeting should die. Perry’s larger slogan, that “business standards are neurotypical standards,” is harder to sustain intact. A company contains more than one nervous system. Employees have plans built around promises. Clients have deadlines because their own work continues after delivery. Some requirements are relics of managerial custom; others exist because coordination is impossible without somebody being able to count on somebody else.
That distinction is present in Perry’s practical advice more often than in her rhetoric. Responsibility does not disappear from her examples. She recommends delegation, automation, complementary talent and systems that catch what the founder drops. The work still has to get done; the variable is who should do it, when and by what route. Michael E. Gerber’s “The E-Myth Revisited” asks owners to build systems less dependent on them. Perry supplies a useful correction: the system should not require the owner to impersonate a managerial machine. She is less exact about what happens when several legitimate needs cannot all be accommodated at once.
Rules, after all, come in different species. A pointless meeting can disappear. A badly designed workday can be rearranged. A growth target borrowed from somebody else’s podcast can be abandoned without a funeral. Payroll still arrives. Tax filings have a notable immunity to self-actualization. Perry’s case would be firmer if it separated custom from coordination as consistently in principle as it often does in practice. Difficulty is evidence worth examining; it is not, by itself, proof that the requirement is illegitimate.
Work moves laterally across a shared room as responsibility passes from hand to hand, widening Perry’s Brain First logic into the review’s harder counterpoint: everybody has a Friday, and every accommodation changes a route somewhere else.
Once Perry reaches neuroscience, her gift for memorable compression becomes less dependable. She is commendably explicit that she is not a scientific specialist, yet early chapters move briskly through brain regions, networks, neurotransmitters, trauma and heredity, sometimes with more causal tidiness than those subjects warrant. A founder’s guide need not become a clinical monograph. Perry is on firmer ground when she says, in effect, “I have seen this pattern, here is what it did to my companies, and here is a workable response.” The footing is less secure when lived recognition puts on a lab coat.
Part III makes another trade plainly visible. Planning, procrastination, context switching, skill regression, rejection sensitivity, people-pleasing and burnout are different experiences, but several chapters wind up running the same route. That can weary the consecutive reader. It can also make the book more usable after the first read, when nobody is searching for an argument about neurodivergent work in general; they are searching because Tuesday has gone sideways again. For someone moving cover to cover, one strong idea owns several jackets. For someone returning in trouble, one of those jackets may be exactly where the needed tool was left.
Only after all the tools does Perry make clear what they were meant to protect. Chapter 19 treats burnout as feedback rather than proof of seriousness, and the conclusion returns from Action to acceptance and compassion. The sequence could easily have ended with better systems and greater output. Instead it loops backward. The destination is not an ADHD entrepreneur so perfectly optimized that accommodation is no longer necessary. It is a founder who can need a workaround without turning the need itself into an indictment.
Ultimately, I land at 83/100, or 4/5 stars. Perry is perceptive about variable founder capacity, credible about the shame attached to inconsistent performance and generous with ways to redesign work. The score stays out of the top range because her broadest claims sometimes outrun the distinctions her own examples demand, the science is more compressed than I would like, and the long final section can repeat an insight after it has landed. None of those weaknesses overturns the book’s best correction: a founder is not an infinitely renewable input.
Late in “Brain First Business,” the productivity machinery has almost become secondary. What matters is the price attached to work before anyone begins counting revenue. That price may include a client deadline or an employee’s need for predictability; it may also include recovery, attention and the ability to make a good decision tomorrow. Perry does not fully solve how those claims should be balanced. She does make it harder to pretend that only the costs appearing in the accounts are real.
Once the childhood reports return to mind, the book’s emotional logic looks almost embarrassingly clear: great potential, if only. Perry cannot revise the old pages, and she does not pretend diagnosis converts every former difficulty into somebody else’s mistake. What she can revise is the grammar. Potential need not remain conditional on performing a prescribed version of ease. A difficulty can become information before it becomes shame. A limitation can produce a design decision before it produces a verdict. “Brain First” occasionally grants itself too much permission, but at its best the phrase demands something harder: count the actual cost of the work.
So the image that lingers is not Perry at maximum velocity under the flattering weather of God Mode. It is the quieter figure she asks that version of herself to remember: future-you, arriving after the sprint to find whatever has been left behind. A humane business plan should have something waiting for that person besides another invoice for yesterday’s ambition. Perry’s best advice is finally an act of intertemporal courtesy: do not let your most dazzling Tuesday spend all of Friday before Friday gets here.
All-Character Human-Figure Study
Cover-Palette Proportion Study
Composition and Temporal-Light Thumbnails
First Underdrawing Study
First-Wash Visualization
Border, Lettering, and Crop-Safety Study
Archival-Paper and Figure Study
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
What Amanda Perry’s “Brain First Business” Understands About Ambition, Exhaustion and the Future Self Who Has to Pay the Bill
Perry’s guide to ADHD entrepreneurship is most perceptive when it treats attention, energy and recovery as resources a company can overspend just as surely as cash.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | August 14th, 2026
Perry works at one end of a long table while her commitments advance toward the empty chair of a future self, turning God Mode into a business problem of who gets to spend tomorrow’s capacity.
During what Amanda Perry calls “God Mode,” an entrepreneur with ADHD may feel briefly overcapitalized: ideas connect, work accelerates, and the calendar looks less like a limit than an invitation to misbehave. The bill arrives later. Perry remembers commitments made by an incandescent version of herself that a depleted version then had to honor, cancel or survive. Her eventual rule is wonderfully unromantic: treat God Mode as an energy loan. Recovery is repayment. “Brain First Business: The ADHD Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success” is most original when it asks why companies forecast cash, staffing and time while treating the person running them as infinitely renewable.
Earlier, Perry rereads childhood school reports after receiving an ADHD diagnosis in 2020. Their refrain is painfully familiar: Amanda has great potential, if only she could focus, concentrate, stop distracting people, stop being the class clown. The cruelty resides in the conditional. Nothing is supposedly wrong with the potential; only the form in which it arrives. Great visionary, if only she could love spreadsheets; great leader, if only her energy arrived in neat weekly installments. Beneath the business advice sits a more intimate argument about what happens when ability is considered legitimate only after it learns to look convenient.
Adult Perry rereads the school reports that praised her potential only on condition that it become easier to manage, letting an empty child-sized chair hold the distance between ability and the rules used to measure it.
Much of Perry’s authority comes from learning this distinction expensively. She left corporate work in 2007 to start a cupcake company, grew it to seven shops and more than 100 employees, then watched burnout and bankruptcy end the enterprise. Later she built a 40-person marketing agency. After diagnosis, she could finally name why a company that looked successful from outside felt punishing from within: noise, relentless switching, the strain of executive tasks, the effort of performing competence in a form her brain found costly. She eventually sold the agency, describing what she had built as a mental and physical prison. Growth can enlarge the machinery exhausting the person expected to operate it.
Even the book’s architecture begins with Perry’s suspicion that the obvious remedy may be aimed at the wrong problem. “Awareness” asks readers to understand ADHD and the shame or compensatory habits gathered around it. “Alignment” turns toward the company itself. Only then does “Action” tackle planning, procrastination, burnout and the other recurring points of drag. Perry withholds the hacks until the reader has had a chance to question the goal. A better calendar is no help if what fills it should never have been there.
The traits that help somebody start a business are not necessarily the traits that help sustain one. Perry is admirably unsentimental about qualities often sold as ADHD “superpowers.” Creativity, appetite for risk, rapid ideation and hyperfocus can help someone leap from idea to enterprise; they do not reconcile accounts or guarantee yesterday’s pace tomorrow. Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters’s “Rocket Fuel,” with its visionary-and-integrator pairing, helped Perry stop treating this mismatch as inferiority. Her question is more personal: what kind of company can the visionary inhabit without slowly vanishing into it?
A growing business interior expands across the page even as the usable space around Perry narrows, making visible the book’s warning that scale can look like success while becoming enclosure from inside.
Reading Perry is rather like being coached by someone who has already spotted your escape route from the advice she is about to give. Her prose is oral, conspiratorial and impatient with managerial solemnity. Parentheses interrupt; capitals supply vocal stress; bullets break up exposition. She likes portable names: “burnout-by-bullying,” “scroll hole,” “cognitive quicksand,” “now/not now,” “God Mode.” These are not decorative metaphors. They are handles, meant to survive the Wednesday afternoon when the reader cannot remember a paragraph but can still remember what the problem is called.
In Perry’s vocabulary, familiar accusations begin losing their authority. “Lazy” becomes task resistance worth examining. “Inconsistent” becomes a warning that usable energy varies. “Bad at planning” becomes a question about which kind of plan anyone will actually reopen. She does not use explanation to erase consequence, either. Bankruptcy happened. Impulsive choices mattered. Her dysregulation sometimes hurt people around her. The humane move is not absolution. It is to stop prescribing shame as though shame had ever proved especially good at bookkeeping.
Part III even tries to spare its reader from failing at the book. Its shorter chapters form a “pick’n’mix” shelf of recurring problems rather than a sequence that must be completed correctly. That choice suits an audience Perry has spent two sections telling us may struggle to retain and operationalize long streams of information. It also creates a pacing problem. Read straight through, the later chapters repeatedly travel from recognition to lowered shame to environmental adjustment. Used six months later when a particular difficulty has returned, the repetition may feel less like repetition than a useful place to re-enter.
A client Perry calls Claire wants monthly revenue to rise from £17,000 to £20,000 largely because £20,000 has acquired the glow of the next correct number. Perry keeps asking what the additional money would change. Claire realizes it would probably require another employee costing roughly the increase, more work from her and no better family life. The arithmetic is almost comic: growth eats the benefit of growth. The revealing question is not whether Claire can reach £20,000, but why the extra £3,000 received moral authority before anyone asked what it was for.
[image error]
Between £17,000 and £20,000, an extra chair and the paperwork needed to support it quietly consume the gain, turning a growth target into Perry’s sharper question: what is the larger number for?
Put in accounting terms, Perry wants entrepreneurs to forecast the founder. A decision does not cost only money or hours. It can consume attention, recovery, tolerance for interruption and tomorrow’s ability to make another decent decision. God Mode makes the error visible because the founder feels rich in capacity and starts spending accordingly. Perry learns to restrict the sprint, store side ideas, clear space afterward and use unusually productive periods to build systems for “future-you.” Financial planning accepts limits on future cash. Why spend against a future self as though no repayment date exists?
At scale, Perry’s own companies become cautionary versions of the same ledger. The cupcake business could grow while she deteriorated. The agency could employ dozens while its environment overwhelmed her. Revenue and headcount are therefore incomplete evidence that a company is working. Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks” distrusts the fantasy that finitude can be beaten with a superior schedule; Perry brings that suspicion into the founder’s office and makes it operational. Does the company keep converting one person’s extraordinary Tuesday into everyone’s assumption about Friday?
Diagnosis does not solve that problem so much as alter Perry’s interpretation of it. She describes relief mixed with grief, a retrospective montage in which school reports, financial mistakes, burnout and strained relationships acquire another possible explanation. Bankruptcy returns as evidence about risk and identity. Diagnosis begins as liberation, then complicates into “skill regression” as old compensatory habits become harder to sustain. Nothing suspenseful is being withheld. What changes is the meaning of what we already know happened.
Information about the self has to reach the calendar before it means much. If meetings reliably destroy the founder’s afternoon, schedule differently. If delegated work requires so much explanation that delegation becomes its own tax, fix the handoff. If criticism reliably produces dysregulation, insert time between receiving the email and answering it. This is where Perry moves beyond the softer instruction to “work with your brain.” Self-knowledge becomes a meeting canceled, a role reassigned, a buffer protected.
More refreshing still, Perry does not insist that every difficulty contain a flattering secret. Risk tolerance can create the company and endanger it. Hyperfocus can produce extraordinary work and teach a team to expect an unsustainable pace. Sensitivity can deepen empathy and make an ambiguous message feel like an emergency. The same trait changes value with the task, the environment, the support available and the length of time for which it is being asked to perform. Sometimes it manages to be an asset and a liability before lunch.
It is easy to agree that a pointless meeting should die. Perry’s larger slogan, that “business standards are neurotypical standards,” is harder to sustain intact. A company contains more than one nervous system. Employees have plans built around promises. Clients have deadlines because their own work continues after delivery. Some requirements are relics of managerial custom; others exist because coordination is impossible without somebody being able to count on somebody else.
That distinction is present in Perry’s practical advice more often than in her rhetoric. Responsibility does not disappear from her examples. She recommends delegation, automation, complementary talent and systems that catch what the founder drops. The work still has to get done; the variable is who should do it, when and by what route. Michael E. Gerber’s “The E-Myth Revisited” asks owners to build systems less dependent on them. Perry supplies a useful correction: the system should not require the owner to impersonate a managerial machine. She is less exact about what happens when several legitimate needs cannot all be accommodated at once.
Rules, after all, come in different species. A pointless meeting can disappear. A badly designed workday can be rearranged. A growth target borrowed from somebody else’s podcast can be abandoned without a funeral. Payroll still arrives. Tax filings have a notable immunity to self-actualization. Perry’s case would be firmer if it separated custom from coordination as consistently in principle as it often does in practice. Difficulty is evidence worth examining; it is not, by itself, proof that the requirement is illegitimate.
Work moves laterally across a shared room as responsibility passes from hand to hand, widening Perry’s Brain First logic into the review’s harder counterpoint: everybody has a Friday, and every accommodation changes a route somewhere else.
Once Perry reaches neuroscience, her gift for memorable compression becomes less dependable. She is commendably explicit that she is not a scientific specialist, yet early chapters move briskly through brain regions, networks, neurotransmitters, trauma and heredity, sometimes with more causal tidiness than those subjects warrant. A founder’s guide need not become a clinical monograph. Perry is on firmer ground when she says, in effect, “I have seen this pattern, here is what it did to my companies, and here is a workable response.” The footing is less secure when lived recognition puts on a lab coat.
Part III makes another trade plainly visible. Planning, procrastination, context switching, skill regression, rejection sensitivity, people-pleasing and burnout are different experiences, but several chapters wind up running the same route. That can weary the consecutive reader. It can also make the book more usable after the first read, when nobody is searching for an argument about neurodivergent work in general; they are searching because Tuesday has gone sideways again. For someone moving cover to cover, one strong idea owns several jackets. For someone returning in trouble, one of those jackets may be exactly where the needed tool was left.
Only after all the tools does Perry make clear what they were meant to protect. Chapter 19 treats burnout as feedback rather than proof of seriousness, and the conclusion returns from Action to acceptance and compassion. The sequence could easily have ended with better systems and greater output. Instead it loops backward. The destination is not an ADHD entrepreneur so perfectly optimized that accommodation is no longer necessary. It is a founder who can need a workaround without turning the need itself into an indictment.
Ultimately, I land at 83/100, or 4/5 stars. Perry is perceptive about variable founder capacity, credible about the shame attached to inconsistent performance and generous with ways to redesign work. The score stays out of the top range because her broadest claims sometimes outrun the distinctions her own examples demand, the science is more compressed than I would like, and the long final section can repeat an insight after it has landed. None of those weaknesses overturns the book’s best correction: a founder is not an infinitely renewable input.
Late in “Brain First Business,” the productivity machinery has almost become secondary. What matters is the price attached to work before anyone begins counting revenue. That price may include a client deadline or an employee’s need for predictability; it may also include recovery, attention and the ability to make a good decision tomorrow. Perry does not fully solve how those claims should be balanced. She does make it harder to pretend that only the costs appearing in the accounts are real.
Once the childhood reports return to mind, the book’s emotional logic looks almost embarrassingly clear: great potential, if only. Perry cannot revise the old pages, and she does not pretend diagnosis converts every former difficulty into somebody else’s mistake. What she can revise is the grammar. Potential need not remain conditional on performing a prescribed version of ease. A difficulty can become information before it becomes shame. A limitation can produce a design decision before it produces a verdict. “Brain First” occasionally grants itself too much permission, but at its best the phrase demands something harder: count the actual cost of the work.
So the image that lingers is not Perry at maximum velocity under the flattering weather of God Mode. It is the quieter figure she asks that version of herself to remember: future-you, arriving after the sprint to find whatever has been left behind. A humane business plan should have something waiting for that person besides another invoice for yesterday’s ambition. Perry’s best advice is finally an act of intertemporal courtesy: do not let your most dazzling Tuesday spend all of Friday before Friday gets here.
All-Character Human-Figure Study
Cover-Palette Proportion Study
Composition and Temporal-Light Thumbnails
First Underdrawing Study
First-Wash Visualization
Border, Lettering, and Crop-Safety Study
Archival-Paper and Figure Study
All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. All art and opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Brain First Business is a detailed guide in how to set up your business as an entrepreneur with ADHD in a way that allows you to customize what you need to your specific flavor of neurodivergence, and to learn about how best you work and how to use that knowledge to actually run a sustainable, successful business. I think if I had found this book 5+ years ago it would have been life-changing - there is so much that I tried to do in the early days of my business over a decade ago that was wildly unsustainable and a recipe for procrastination and burnout. The author addresses a lot of the reasons why those things happen, particularly for ADHD folks, and how to build strategies around them instead of recreating business models that were never designed for your brain to begin with. At this point in my life I understand my own brain, nervous system, and capacity well enough that not a lot of this information felt new or groundbreaking to me, but like I said - if I were new to my diagnosis, new to running a business, or some combination of the two, this book would be a game changer. I'll definitely be recommending it to folks looking for resources to better support themselves!
May 15, 2026
Amanda Perry is a successful entrepreneur who has found strength and challenges from having diagnosed ADHD.
This book is a readable study into the impacts of ADHD on success at work - and how to use ADHD as a strength rather than trying to mask it. While it’s focused on a business application, it easily relates to all aspects of life and relationships.
It’s split into themes focused on awareness, tips and tricks on how the author has managed her ADHD and how to put these into practice. I particularly enjoyed the case studies.
It was very readable, relatable and focuses on the strengths of living, and succeeding with ADHD. I’d recommend it to anyone who recognises ADHD in themselves and wants to develop some tools for life.
Thanks to Amanda Perry, Basic Books and NetGalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.
This book is a readable study into the impacts of ADHD on success at work - and how to use ADHD as a strength rather than trying to mask it. While it’s focused on a business application, it easily relates to all aspects of life and relationships.
It’s split into themes focused on awareness, tips and tricks on how the author has managed her ADHD and how to put these into practice. I particularly enjoyed the case studies.
It was very readable, relatable and focuses on the strengths of living, and succeeding with ADHD. I’d recommend it to anyone who recognises ADHD in themselves and wants to develop some tools for life.
Thanks to Amanda Perry, Basic Books and NetGalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.
October 29, 2026
Most business advice assumes a neurotypical brain, and this book takes the opposite approach. Perry is a serial entrepreneur with ADHD who has built and sold four businesses, and she writes from the experience of burning out on the standard playbook. Her “Brain First” method is practical, and the tone is encouraging without being fluffy. That said, it’s aimed squarely at founders and business owners, so if you’re not running something yourself, some of it won’t apply. For ADHD entrepreneurs, though, it’s validating and useful.
Thank you to NetGalley and Basic Venture for the ARC!
Thank you to NetGalley and Basic Venture for the ARC!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Brain First Business advises structuring tasks around the INCU framework (Interest, Novelty, Challenge, and Urgency) to align with ADHD dopamine needs. Another core strategy involves reducing demand avoidance by reframing strict to do lists as choices, alongside utilizing body doubling to maintain focus
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews