The room is stuck. Engineering is talking past sales. Marketing is talking past both of them. Everyone is an expert in their thing and nobody can figure out why the thing isn't working.

I'm not the expert on anything in that room. I'm the guy who's been a little bit of all of them. Different companies, different industries, different roles, never long enough to go deep. Always long enough to see something the specialists can't.


The engineering lead has 15 years in one system. The sales director has a decade of pipeline data memorized. They're brilliant. They're also standing in trenches so deep they can't see each other. I see the whole field. I spot the pattern that connects the customer complaint to the product roadmap to the campaign that's about to launch with the wrong message. Not because I'm smarter. Because my brain has been pulling threads across domains my entire life, and it turns out that's not a flaw. It's a form of intelligence most people never develop because they never had to.

I didn't know that for 20 years. I thought I was scattered. I thought I was broken. I thought "jack of all trades, master of none" was a diagnosis.

My name is Jack. And I recently found out there's a second half to that phrase.

The Pattern
For most of my career, the cycle looked the same. New project, new obsession, new industry. The enthusiasm was real, almost electric. I'd go deep, build momentum, feel like *this was the thing*. Then the energy would drain out like someone pulled a plug. The project would stall. I'd move on. The story I told myself got a little darker each time. You can't stick with anything. You're lazy. Something is broken.

I watched other professionals and entrepreneurs power through that wall I kept hitting. They shipped. They stayed. They finished. I kept accumulating half-built things and a growing suspicion that I just wasn't built for follow-through.

That fear didn't stay fear for long. It became desperation, then burnout, then the background noise of my entire career.

The One That Broke the Pattern by Breaking Me
The worst version of this played out with my startup. Years of intense personal investment. Not just my time and money. My identity. It wasn't something I was building. It was who I was.

When it ended, people said the things people say. Failure is just learning. You'll take these lessons into your next venture. Every successful entrepreneur has a graveyard of startups behind them.

That felt like bullshit. I wasn't processing a business failure. I was processing an identity collapse. The lessons didn't feel like knowledge I could bank for later. I was empty.

It took years to move past that. Not months. Years. I'm 40 now, only recently arriving at a place where I can hold this startup experience as an integral part of my story without it swallowing me whole.

A System, Not a Pep Talk
What finally cracked things open wasn't a motivational quote or someone telling me to get back on the horse. It was stumbling into a framework that my brain could actually use.

The core idea was simple: separate what you can control from what you can't, and stop bleeding energy into the second category. Our startup failed. That sucked, and it was done. Nothing I did from that point forward could change what happened. I could keep grinding against that reality or I could redirect.

That distinction sounds obvious written down. For a brain that latches onto things, that replays and ruminates and builds identity around outcomes, having an actual system for letting go was different from being told to let go. Pep talks bounce off my brain. Frameworks stick.

It still hurts a bit. I don't think it ever fully stops. And the practice hasn't been consistent. Stretches of intense journaling and meditation followed by long stretches of bare-minimum mindfulness. Which, as it turns out, is its own kind of foreshadowing.

Half the Picture for Twenty Years
I was diagnosed with ADHD and major depression at 19. That explained some things. The restlessness, the hyperfocus-then-crash cycle, the executive function problems that showed up in every job I ever held. I had a label. I had a framework. I thought I had the whole picture.

I was just diagnosed with level one autism. At 40.

Twenty years of thinking ADHD was the full explanation. Twenty years of "yeah, but that doesn't quite cover it" lingering in the background. When I started reading about AuDHD (the intersection of autism and ADHD, how the comorbidity actually presents), I had that moment. Damn. That's 100% me.

It's hard to describe the push-pull to someone who doesn't live it, but here's the simplest version: two operating systems running on one machine, often in direct conflict. The autism wants routine. The ADHD wants novelty. My ADHD brain wants to be social and my autistic brain is exhausted twenty minutes into a function and wants to leave. One side builds structure. The other side rebels against it.

That tension explains so much. Why I've always wanted clean spaces and organization but lived in constant organized chaos. Why my computer desktops were perpetually buried under files and folders, to the point where "hide my desktop" became my actual solution. Don't fix the chaos. Just hide it so it stops triggering the shame.

The Generalist Problem (That Turned Out to Be an Edge)
This tension showed up everywhere in my career. Take sales. I was always a shitty salesperson. My product knowledge was second to none. I could learn a product inside out, understand its technical nuances, map its value. Communicating that in a way that actually *landed* with a customer? That was the bottleneck. The knowledge was all there. The translation layer between my brain and theirs was where everything broke down.

Executive functioning problems don't stay in one lane. When you combine that with the generalist pattern: a different industry here, a different role there, another pivot, another reinvention, it's easy to read your own resume as a record of someone who couldn't commit.

The shift happened when I stopped looking at the list of jobs and started looking at what connected them. I wasn't scattered. I was accumulating. Different industries, different departments, different vocabularies. Slowly, without realizing it, I was becoming the person who could walk between rooms and translate.

A product owner role in Scrum made sense in a way nothing else had. I didn't have the organizational follow-through to be a traditional project manager. But bridging sales, marketing, and technical teams, with working knowledge across all of them without specializing in any, made me an advocate for the end customer that a specialist couldn't be. Not the deepest expert in any room. The person who could make the rooms talk to each other.

The Gap Nobody Was Filling
Once I saw this in myself, I started seeing it everywhere. Late-stage neurodivergent diagnosis is on the rise. The same media that brought attention to my experience is reaching thousands of people hitting the same realizations at 30, 35, 40.
When I went looking for content that spoke to this, specifically the AuDHD professional experience, I found two worlds that didn't connect. On one side, people sharing the lived experience. On the other, psychologists covering the clinical angle. In between, a graveyard of productivity tools built for neurotypical brains with a "focus mode" slapped on top.

I know that graveyard well. Apps, planners, methods. Each one launched with that familiar burst of enthusiasm, each one abandoned when the drop-off hit. The tools weren't broken. They just weren't built for a brain running two operating systems.
So I started building my own. Using AI to offload the mental overhead. Using established psychology, not just productivity hacks, to build internal systems that actually stick. And using this blog to document what's working for the people who were standing where I stood a couple of years ago.

Who I'm Writing This For
If you're the burnt-out professional who just got a diagnosis that upended everything, this is for you. If you're trying to understand why the usual advice never seems to land, this is for you. If you've got your own graveyard of abandoned tools and you're wondering if maybe you're the problem. You're not. The tools were.

A few things worth knowing upfront: I use AI to help write these articles: interviews, outlining, drafting. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. That kind of support is exactly what makes space for an AuDHD brain to focus on what actually matters. Walking the walk.

Not every post will be polished. Not every week will have the same output. That's not a disclaimer. It's the point. The work here is figuring out what sustainable actually looks like for a brain like mine, and sharing that as I go.

The phrase is

jack of all trades, master of none, but often better than a master of one.

I spent 20 years reading it as an insult. I'm done with that. This is what it looks like to finally use what you've got.