Over twenty years ago, on one of our first dates, my wife looked at me from the passenger seat and said, “Would you just stop?” I was heartbroken. I thought the date was going great. We were just driving, and I was on fire, sharing one idea after another. She explained, “You’re overwhelming me. You’re on idea number nine, and I’m still stuck on idea number one, trying to figure out how to make it happen.” Ideas two through eight were already lost in the dust.
For anyone with a brain that moves at the speed of light, that moment is painfully familiar. It’s the moment you realize your greatest strength—the ability to generate endless ideas—can also be a huge source of frustration for you and the people around you. Twelve years ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD, and it put a name to the engine that was always running in my head. AI has always been a helpful tool for me as an entrepreneur, but the new wave of agentic AI has completely changed the game. Now, that firehose of ideas doesn’t have to overwhelm anyone. I can take those rapid-fire thoughts, hand them to an AI agent, and it can move from idea to implementation, only checking in with me for a thumbs-up. This isn’t just about managing a condition; it’s about turning what often feels like a bug into a powerful feature.
Key Takeaways
- ADHD Idea Overload is Real: Many entrepreneurs, especially those with ADHD, generate ideas faster than they or their teams can act on them, leading to frustration and lost opportunities.
- AI Has Evolved: Artificial intelligence has moved beyond being a simple assistant. New agentic AI tools act as builders and executors, not just information sources.
- From Idea to Implementation: Agentic AI can take a stream of consciousness and turn it into finished products, like documents, marketing campaigns, or even software, with minimal hand-holding.
- A Real-World Example: In a single afternoon, I used an AI agent to turn a flurry of ideas into over 200 tangible deliverables, including training programs, content series, and product requirement documents.
- This is a Tool for Everyone: While especially powerful for ADHD entrepreneurs, agentic AI is a solution for any business leader who has more ideas than execution capacity.
- Build Systems, Not Tasks: This new technology aligns perfectly with the principle of building systems to handle tasks. The AI becomes the system that executes on your vision, freeing you up to do what you do best: create.
The Pain of the Idea Machine
That car ride with my wife wasn’t a one-time thing. It was a pattern. My brain is a non-stop idea factory. It connects dots that don’t seem related, it sees opportunities everywhere, and it operates at a pace that can be exhilarating for me but exhausting for others. For years, I saw this as a personal failing. Why couldn’t I just slow down? Why couldn’t I focus on one thing and see it through before jumping to the next ten?
When I was diagnosed with ADHD, it was a relief. It wasn’t a moral failing; my brain was just wired differently. But the diagnosis didn’t solve the practical problem. As an entrepreneur, my job is to have ideas. But ideas are worthless without execution. For every idea that made it to the finish line, there was a graveyard of a hundred others that died on the vine. They were good ideas, too. They just got lost in the shuffle, buried under the next wave of inspiration. It’s a unique kind of frustration to know you’re sitting on a goldmine of potential but you can’t figure out how to dig it up fast enough.
This isn’t just my story. It’s the story of so many entrepreneurs and creators. We are the ones who see the future, who see a better way of doing things. But we are often bottlenecked by the slow, methodical work of turning that vision into reality. We try to hire people to keep up, but it’s hard to delegate a thought that’s still forming. We try to build systems, but the systems themselves can’t adapt as quickly as our minds do.
From Helper to Builder: The AI Shift No One is Talking About
When most people think of AI, they think of a super-smart search engine or a chatbot. You ask it a question, it gives you an answer. You ask it to write an email, it spits out a draft. This is helpful, but it doesn’t change the game. It’s like having a very knowledgeable intern. You still have to manage the intern, give them specific instructions for every little thing, and then take their work and integrate it into the larger project.
Agentic AI is different. It’s not an intern; it’s a team of builders. You don’t give it a task; you give it a goal. You don’t ask it for information; you give it a blueprint and tell it to start construction. An “agent” is simply an AI that can make its own plan and take actions to achieve a goal. It can write code, create files, browse the web, and use other tools to get the job done. It doesn’t just give you the ten steps to complete a project; it does the ten steps for you.
Imagine you have an idea for a new marketing campaign. The old way with AI would be to ask it, “What are some good ideas for a marketing campaign for my product?” You’d get a list. Then you’d have to ask it, “Okay, write a blog post for the first idea.” Then, “Now write a Facebook post.” Then, “Create an image for the post.” Each step would require your direct input.
The new way, with an agentic AI, is to say, “Create a full marketing campaign for my new product. I want a blog post, three social media posts for Facebook and LinkedIn, a video script, and a 4-day email sequence. Here is the information about my product and my target audience. Go.” And it goes. It creates all the files, writes all the content, and presents you with a finished package, only asking you for clarification or approval when needed.
This is the shift. AI is no longer just a tool for thought; it’s a tool for action.
A Real-World Example: From Idea Stream to 200+ Deliverables
This might sound like science fiction, but it’s what I did just the other day. I sat down with an AI agent for a few hours. I didn’t have a plan. I just had a lot of thoughts swirling in my head—ideas for content, new training programs, ways to improve my business, and solutions for my clients.
I started talking. I just let the ideas flow, one after another, in a stream of consciousness. In the past, I would have tried to capture these in a notebook, and maybe one or two would have eventually seen the light of day. This time, I gave them to my agent.
As I was talking, the agent was working. It wasn’t just taking notes; it was building. That firehose of ideas was being channeled into productive output in real time.
By the time I was done, just a few hours later, we had created over 200 individual deliverables. This wasn’t just a list of ideas. This was finished work. Things like:
- A complete 4-day AI onboarding curriculum for new employees.
- A department-by-department AI playbook for a client, which included identifying 45 specific custom GPTs to build.
- The full Product Requirement Documents (PRDs) for all 45 of those GPTs.
- All 45 of those PRDs converted into the specific file formats needed to build them as skills for an AI agent.
- A full content series on “AI-proofing your business,” including blog posts, social media fables, and video scripts.
- A comprehensive guide on making a company’s website friendly for AI search engines.
While my brain was jumping from the employee onboarding plan to the AI playbook, the agent was finishing the first task and starting the next. While I was coming up with the idea for the “AI-proofing” content, the agent was writing the documentation for the 45 GPTs. The bottleneck was gone. My ADHD-powered brain was no longer overwhelming the system; it was fueling it. Each idea was captured, developed, and turned into a production-ready business asset while I was already on to the next one.
“How Do You Handle All The Ideas?”
Recently, I gave a keynote speech to a few hundred professional photographers. After I was done, a man came up to me. He said, “I have ADHD too. I loved your talk, but my question is, how do you effectively use AI to help deal with all of the ideas you have?”
He had the same haunted look I used to have. The look of someone who knows they have something valuable inside them but can’t get it out into the world fast enough. The answer to his question is what this article is about. The answer is agentic AI.
For people like us, these tools are more than just a productivity hack. They are a release valve. They are a way to finally bridge the gap between the speed of our thoughts and the speed of the real world. It means our ideas don’t have to die in a notebook. It means we don’t have to be the bottleneck to our own success. It means we can spend our time doing what we do best—creating, strategizing, and dreaming up what’s next—while our agentic partners handle the heavy lifting of execution.
This Isn’t Just an ADHD Thing
While this new reality is life-changing for someone with an ADHD brain, the implications are universal. You don’t need a diagnosis to relate to the feeling of having more ideas than you have time or staff to execute them. Every successful entrepreneur, every visionary leader, every creative professional faces this problem.
Execution is the great separator in business. Everyone has ideas. The people who win are the ones who can turn those ideas into reality the fastest and most effectively. Agentic AI fundamentally changes the economics of execution. It lowers the cost and time required to test an idea, launch a new product, or create a new campaign. It allows a single person or a small team to have the output of a much larger organization.
If your business is struggling to keep up with the pace of change, or if your to-do list of great ideas is only getting longer, this is a tool for you. It’s a way to amplify your impact and finally get all of those brilliant “someday” ideas out of your head and into the world.
Building Systems, Not Just Doing Tasks (Principle 8)
One of my core First Principles is “Build Systems, Not Tasks.” The goal is to create repeatable processes that produce a desired outcome without requiring your constant manual intervention. This is the only way to scale yourself and your business.
Agentic AI is the ultimate system-building tool. You can literally take a process that’s in your head and embed it into an AI agent. The agent becomes the system. It doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t forget a step, and it can execute the process a thousand times faster than a human could.
That session where I created over 200 deliverables wasn’t just about getting a lot of tasks done. It was about building systems. We created a system for onboarding new employees with AI. We created a system for developing custom AI tools for clients. We created a system for generating entire content campaigns from a single idea. Now, those systems can be run again and again, by me or by my team, with the push of a button.
This is how you escape the trap of being the hero who has to do everything. You pour your genius into designing the system, and then you let the system do the work. Agentic AI allows you to do this at a scale and speed that was never before possible.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: What exactly is an “agentic AI”?
A: Think of it this way: a regular AI is a calculator. You have to punch in the numbers and the operation (+, -, *, /) to get a result. An agentic AI is like an accountant. You can just give them your shoebox of receipts and say, “Do my taxes.” They will figure out all the steps—sorting receipts, filling out forms, finding deductions—and get the job done on their own, only asking you for a signature at the end.
Q: Is this hard to set up? Do I need to be a programmer?
A: Not anymore. While the underlying technology is complex, new tools are making it very accessible. Platforms like Manus and the latest versions of models like Claude are designed to be used by regular people. If you can describe what you want in plain English, you can use an agentic AI.
Q: Is the AI going to take my job?
A: It’s going to change your job. It will automate the tedious, repetitive parts of your job, freeing you up to focus on the high-level, creative, strategic parts. People who learn to use these tools will have a massive advantage over those who don’t. The choice isn’t between you and an AI; it’s between you and a person who is using AI to be ten times more productive than you.
Q: This sounds expensive. Is it only for big companies?
A: The cost of these tools is dropping dramatically. Many are available for a relatively low monthly subscription, similar to other software you already use. When you consider the cost of hiring a person to do the same work, or the opportunity cost of letting good ideas die, the return on investment is incredibly high.
Final Thoughts
For twenty years, that question has echoed in my mind: “Would you just stop?” It was a loving plea from someone I adore, but it was also a reflection of a world that wasn’t built for the way my brain works. I spent a lot of time trying to learn how to “stop,” how to slow down, how to fit into a world that moves one step at a time.
Now, I don’t have to. The world has changed. Technology has finally caught up to the speed of thought. That firehose of ideas is no longer a problem to be managed; it’s a strategic asset to be deployed. The question is no longer, “Would you just stop?”
Now, the question is, “What will we build next?”
