I don’t think every founder story is about hustle. Mine certainly isn’t.
In this episode of The Michael Peres Podcast, I talk about my journey with ADHD, from an early diagnosis and years of trial and error, to learning how structure, not willpower, became the real unlock.
For a long time, I tried to separate “professional ADHD” from “personal ADHD.” That separation doesn’t exist. How you think, focus, get overwhelmed, or get into flow shows up everywhere, especially at work.
What changed things for me wasn’t medication alone. It was building my own operational playbook: protected focus spaces, guarded time blocks, clear separation between deep work and social work, and routines that actually fit how my brain works, not how it’s supposed to work.
That mindset carried into how I build companies. My operating years at Plated and nuts.com reinforced something simple: clarity beats chaos, and transparency scales better than control. Those lessons became foundational to how we think about leadership, partnerships, and culture at Source86.
This conversation isn’t about productivity hacks or motivation. It’s about ownership, of how you work, how you lead, and how honest you’re willing to be about what you need in order to do your best work.
Because the way you design your own work eventually becomes the way you design your company.
