One of the most defining traits of the ADHD brain is the hunger for novelty.

Not distraction — hunger. That pull toward the new, the unknown, the thing that hasn’t become ordinary yet. It’s the reason so many of us are remarkable starters. We launch with a kind of electricity that other people spend years trying to manufacture.

But here’s what nobody tells you about that gift: it has an expiration date.

The novelty wears off. It always does. And when it does, the ADHD brain doesn’t quietly settle in — it starts scanning the horizon for the next thing. The next idea, the next project, the next version of a life that still feels possible. We call it the shiny object. We say it like it’s a character flaw. But really it’s just a brain doing what it was built to do — seek stimulation, avoid flatness, stay alive to possibility.

The problem isn’t the seeking. The problem is that we abandon ship right before we arrive.

In our Now What series, we’re asking a different question. What if instead of leaving the boat, you learned to look deeper into the water you’re already in? What if the new novel thing wasn’t out there on another horizon — but right here, underneath what you’ve already committed to?

That’s not settling. That’s a skill. And it might be the most important one an ADHD brain can develop.

TARYN

I don’t know if any of you followed this woman named Taryn Smith. She’s 25 years old, from Omaha, Nebraska — the most landlocked state in America — and in January she became the first American woman to ever solo row across the Atlantic Ocean. Three thousand miles, 46 days, completely alone, in a 24-foot boat called an R25. She departed from the Canary Islands off the coast of Spain on December 14th and arrived in Antigua on January 29th. She rowed 10 to 12 hours a day. She burned 5,000 calories a day surviving on backpacking meals, protein bars, and — this detail I love — copious amounts of Nutella. She went through 70-foot waves. She got hives from sun exposure. A marlin stalked her boat for miles. And she did all of it alone.

She started following her on Instagram randomly in January, right at the beginning of her trip. She just came across my feed and I thought — that’s extraordinary. I want to watch every single moment of this. And I did.

She also did it having never been on a rowboat in her life before she signed up. She read an article in Vogue about a team of women who rowed from San Francisco to Hawaii, and she thought: I want to do something like that. So she signed up, trained for three years, spent seven weeks literally living on her boat in England to prepare, and then went and did it. She raised over $36,000 for Girls on the Run along the way. She now has 630,000 Instagram followers. And she said — from the middle of the Atlantic, completely alone — “I have never felt less alone in my entire life.”

I want to interview her for this podcast. But before I do that, I want to tell you why she’s been living in my head. Because sitting here today looking out at this flat, glassy ocean — completely calm after the storm, as far as the eye can see in 180 degrees, not a cloud in the sky — I finally understood what her story is actually about.

THE OCEAN

There is something about looking out at the ocean that does something specific to my ADHD brain. The vastness. The expansion. The unknown. From the shore it looks so calm, so possible, so inviting. We all know there’s a lot happening underneath, and certainly once you get out there there are storms and swells and things that want to capsize you. But from the shore? It looks like a horizon worth chasing.

And that is exactly what ADHD feels like. That lure of the horizon. That pull toward the next thing, the shiny object, the adventure that hasn’t become ordinary yet. I get it. I feel it every single time I sit here.

THE MIDDLE

But here’s what I’ve been thinking about. The embarkment phase — the departure, the excitement, the feeling that you are finally doing the thing — that probably lasts about ten or fifteen days. And then something shifts. You’ve gone far enough that going back is no longer obviously easier than going forward. You look around and it’s water as far as you can see in every direction. Both shores have disappeared. And it’s only you and your own mind and whatever you brought with you out there.

That’s where I am with my business right now. I launched. I went out there. The shore is behind me and the destination isn’t visible yet. And the question of that middle — the real question, the one that doesn’t have a motivational poster answer — is what do you do when the novelty has worn off and it’s just you, alone, deciding whether to keep rowing?

Because here’s what happens in the middle. The physical challenge — the logistics, the setup, the building — that’s still real. You still have to eat at certain times and do certain things. But the battle becomes internal. It shifts from a physical adventure into an emotional one. And that emotional depth — that stamina of character you have to develop when nobody is watching and nobody is going to rescue you — that’s the part nobody talks about when they talk about starting something.

ADHD IN THE MIDDLE

For an ADHD brain, the middle is the hardest place to be. Because the ADHD brain is wired for the beginning — for novelty, for high stakes, for the dopamine rush of something new and exciting and not yet known. The middle has none of that. The middle is just the work. The same work, again, without the reward of arrival yet.

And this is where so many of us hop. This is the moment we start looking around for the next horizon. Because the horizon we chose is no longer a horizon — it’s just the ocean we’re sitting in. So the ADHD brain starts whispering: what about that other thing? What about that new idea? What if we just — and we’ve done it before, haven’t we? We’ve left the boat before it reached shore.

What I love about Taryn’s story is that she figured out — she had to figure out — how to find the shiny object within the confines of what she’d already committed to. She couldn’t leave the boat. So instead she found the dolphin. She found the bird that flew alongside her for days. She found the Nutella. She found the novelty inside the commitment instead of outside it. And that, I think, is the skill. That’s the whole skill for an ADHD brain that wants to build something that lasts.

THE PERMISSION

She also said something that I keep coming back to. On one of the hardest days — day 27, when she had hives and hadn’t slept and was terrified the boat would capsize — she called her mom and cried. She didn’t perform okay. She didn’t pretend she had it together. She was alone in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and she cried, and then she kept rowing.

Nobody’s gonna see you cry out there. Nobody’s gonna hear you scream. It’s only up to you what you do with those emotions in the middle. And maybe that’s actually the gift of the middle. You get to fall apart honestly, without an audience, and then decide to keep going anyway. Not because someone’s watching. Because you respect yourself enough to finish what you started.

Before We Say Goodbye. . .

I’m going to reach out to Taryn Smith and see if she’ll come on this podcast. Because I have so many questions I want to ask her — not about the rowing, but about the middle. About what you do when both shores have disappeared. About whether she thinks you have to be a little bit ADHD to want to row an ocean in the first place.

Until then, wherever you are in your own ocean — whether you’re still on shore, or just departed, or deep in the middle wondering if you made a terrible mistake — I just want to say: keep rowing. The Antigua of your life is out there. You just can’t see it yet.

Thank you for Reading.

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Painting By Libby Andrew