Santa Cruz Works CEO Works Luncheon: Jesse Abrams on ADHD, Dopamine, and the Future of Work
At the November CEO Works Luncheon, Jesse Abrams delivered a compelling talk that fused neuroscience, personal narrative, and practical management advice. After a severe surfing accident that caused significant concussion damage, Abrams became absorbed in how brain biology shapes motivation, attention, and performance. That recovery journey intersected with a lifelong experience of ADHD, leading him to a clear mission: help people and teams “build a life that fits their brain.”
Abrams framed ADHD not as a deficit but as a functional difference: the “space” between stimulus and response is smaller. In that compressed gap, there’s less room for the reflective micro-dialogue that helps regulate emotions, weigh trade-offs, and project consequences. The result can be impulsivity or trouble starting tasks, even when values are aligned. Yet the same wiring often confers creativity, rapid pattern recognition, and comfort with risk.
Key concepts and insights
ADHD as reduced “mental space“. The executive functions that simulate consequences and generate emotion have less runway. Decisions skew toward the immediate unless systems restore that missing space.
Entrepreneurial fit. About 5–10% of the population has ADHD, but roughly 29% of entrepreneurs do. Early-stage company building rewards novelty seeking, vision casting, and charismatic “masking,” all familiar strengths for many with ADHD.
Scaling is a second act. As companies mature, structure, process, and sustained follow-through dominate. Leaders who once thrived on chaos must deliberately build habits and supports to maintain performance.
“Type 2 ADHD.” Even without a diagnosis, digital life can induce ADHD-like symptoms. Notifications, task switching, and algorithmic rewards fracture attention and mimic working-memory limits.
Three modern cognitive challenges
Working memory overload
Constant context switching crowds out the cognitive “RAM” needed for analysis and creativity. A full buffer behaves like a small buffer.Emotional volatility and rejection sensitivity
Social media comparison and reduced face-to-face conflict practice heighten stress responses, making difficult conversations at work feel threatening.Dopamine imbalance
Dopamine is the brain’s gasoline. Instant digital rewards short-circuit the drive to do hard, long-horizon work. If the phone gives the same hit now, why pursue the multi-month project?
Motivation by design: process and purpose
Abrams urged leaders to locate intrinsic, healthy dopamine sources by reverse-engineering two levers:
Process: What actions inherently energize a person’s brain (building, debugging, investigating, designing, communicating, connecting)?
Purpose: What meaning reliably “colors in” their work (impact, mastery, service, beauty, providing for family)?
A client example made this concrete: a brilliant programmer who stalled on “good enough” work but hit flow when aiming for “undeniable, beautiful” work. By reframing tasks around craft and visible excellence, his motivation returned without willpower theatrics.
The youth signal: a workforce trend
Citing large-scale attitudinal data, Abrams noted declines among 16–39-year-olds in perseverance and conscientiousness, with rises in distraction and carelessness, plus a drop in trust and helpfulness. This isn’t moral panic; it’s an operating constraint for leaders building teams over the next 25 years.
Leader playbook (practical takeaways)
Design for focus:
Reduce concurrent work.
Bundle communication windows.
Protect deep-work blocks and single-thread complex tasks.
Make the future feel now:
Ship in short increments with visible wins.
Use prototypes, checklists, and demo rituals to create immediate feedback.
Personalize motivation:
Map each teammate’s process and purpose profile.
Align roles and goals with those intrinsic drivers.
Normalize brain-fit conversations:
Leaders go first by sharing their own attention tools.
Make accommodations standard practice, not exceptions.
Train for hard conversations:
Rebuild “rejection calluses” with structured feedback training and regular, low-stakes reps.
Individual tactics (fast starts)
Externalize working memory: write plans, break tasks into next visible action.
Engineer dopamine honestly: pair difficult tasks with energizing rituals; track streaks.
Reduce inputs: curb notifications, batch messages, schedule focus time.
Reframe goals around craft or service, not just outcomes.
Use movement, music, and mindfulness to stabilize arousal and reset attention.
“The world is changing our brains,” Abrams concluded. “The teams that acknowledge this—and deliberately design roles, rituals, and environments around real human neurobiology—will own the next era of execution. Focus is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure”.