Before I was diagnosed with ADHD, I started 8 university degrees and finished zero, racking up a $60,000 HECS debt with nothing to show for it. I would do really well for the first one or two semesters, even being invited to some special program for high achievers. But that wasn’t enough to keep me interested.
I was fine at school (mostly). I managed to get by learning via osmosis. As long as I was in class, that was good enough for me to absorb enough information to be able to pass tests and exams. Assignments were another matter. I remember a science assignment I had in year 8, where I spent far more time trying to convince the teacher that I had already handed the assignment in than actually doing the work would have taken. But doing “boring” things was always a real struggle for me.
I spent about 12 years working on hospitality before I discovered digital marketing, in between university degrees. I think it’s one of those industries where neurodivergent people can really thrive. There’s something different happening all the time, but my favourite part about it was managing the front desk of a busy restaurant in Sydney Olympic Park on an event night (State of Origin, big concerts, AFL games, other things). Trying to fit as many walk-ins as possible around our bookings was something I lived for. Some of the people I would work with didn’t have quite the same risk profile or pattern recognition, so the way I would work definitely stressed them out a little, but as far as I can remember, nothing ever really blew up in my face, and we often managed to squeeze in close to an extra 100 people over one of those busy evenings.
I feel like that’s the real secret for a neurodivergent business owners and professionals. Risk profile and pattern recognition.
Where my co-workers might have been considering all those extra tables we snuck in as potential things to go wrong, I was thinking of the whole thing as a logic puzzle to be solved. Each time we had a new walk-in, I’d be thinking of where every other table we had was up to, how long the kitchen was taking to get things out, and who looked like they were in a rush to get out and get to the event early. I used that same “osmosis” that had got me through school to take in as much information about what was going on throughout the restaurant and turn that information into action.
At some point, I got tired of working in hospitality. So much standing. My feet were sore all the time. Maybe if I didn’t buy the $10 Kmart shoes it wouldn’t have been so bad, but you buy what you can afford I guess, and money was always tight then.
I was back at uni for the last time, this time doing Computer Science. I loved computers, and had grown up tinkering with them, taking them apart and putting them back together, so it seemed like a good fit. I saw a job listed on Seek for a call centre agent at iiNet, which I think at the time was Australia’s 3rd biggest ISP. This felt to me like it might be related enough to what I was studying that I may be able to progress and get a job after I’d finished studying.
The call centre job was supposed to be a stepping stone while I finished my Computer Science degree (spoiler: degree number 8 also remained unfinished). But something unexpected happened.
iiNet had been purchased by TPG Telecom a few months earlier, and it felt to me like they may have been getting ready to wind up the call centre in Sydney. So I watched the internal careers emails like a hawk. One came up that piqued my interest. “Digital Marketing Assistant”. Now, I had absolutely no idea what digital marketing was, but surely it had to be better than telling people to turn their modems off and on again for the 15th time that day.
I applied, and was asked to do an interview. The person interviewing me was the Chief Operating Officer of the whole company, a somewhat terrifying South African called Craig. A couple of things that stand out in my memory from that interview; first, he asked me a few questions about what I knew about different digital marketing platforms/tools, Google, Facebook, Excel. I was honest. I didn’t know much, but what I was good at was finding things out, and I said as much. Second, he asked if I was good at maths. I’ve always gravitated towards maths focused things, and to get into uni the last time I’d had to do the Special Tertiary Admittance Test (STAT), and managed to score in the top 0.1% of Australia for math and logic.
Craig gave me the job. Not because I could install a Facebook Pixel (I couldn’t), or because I knew how to do complex excel operations (I didn’t), but because he recognised a brain that liked to solve puzzles.
Suddenly I had a lot of new things to learn. My initial job was doing daily reports for one of our suite of brands. This was a task that was taking the majority of the day for two people across iiNet, TPG and Internode. I looked at what they were doing, copying and pasting one number at a time from Google Analytics into a spreadsheet, and immediately set about solving that giant waste of time. By the end of my second week, I had more or less automated my whole job. It took Craig a couple of months to realise I was spending most of my day watching YouTube videos (whoops).
He took me under his wing a little from then on, which was both a blessing and a curse. I was exposed to a lot more of how an ASX100 business operates than a normal marketing assistant might expect. But I also wasn’t allowed to bludge anymore (boooooo). He arranged for direct training from the big digital platforms, I met weekly with Facebook and Google, and once I had learned enough, I was allowed to start making active changes to our accounts. Not long after, I was responsible for the digital marketing budgets of our main brand, TPG.
I spent years in that world, rising to manage the digital for the whole TPG Telecom group at the time. I still sat with Craig once a week to go over things, and I was helping build projects well outside the scope of digital marketing when the need arose, because Craig trusted in my ability to “get things done” regardless of whether I had done them before or not.
Then we merged with Vodafone.
COVID and our merger with Vodafone happened around the same time. To say it was a confusing time for my (still undiagnosed and unmedicated at that point) neurodivergent brain would be an understatement. There was so much change happening both in the world, and in the business. Some of it good, some of it bad, but we were all told to operate like it was business as usual.
Sometime in the COVID years I got hooked by TikTok, and started getting served a bunch of videos that finally gave me some explanation on why I was the way I was. My brain wasn’t broken, I just had undiagnosed ADHD. I called half the psychiatrists in Sydney before I found one who was happy to deal with adult ADHD (turns out most won’t), and got prescribed stimulant medication. It was like a light had been switched on, and all of a sudden I was able to do the things my brain had considered too boring before. I could reply to all my messages. I could pick up that bit of rubbish that had been sitting on the floor for two months. Before, I had often felt what could only be described as a sort of “pain” when trying to do things that my brain didn’t want to do, but now I had something of a solution.
Back at TPG, we operated in more or less the same way we had for a year or two before it was decided that we didn’t need two teams doing largely the same work across the Vodafone and TPG brands, so it was decided that we were going to merge into one big marketing organisation.
It was at this point I met John, the returning Chief Marketing Officer of Vodafone, who would go on to be my mentor for the next couple of years. John had a rare quality: he didn’t need you to have done something before to trust you to do it. He offered me the role of Head of Media for the new combined entity, and backed me while I figured out everything I didn’t know: TV, radio, out of home, all the stuff that had been outside my world until then. He died not long after I left TPG, which still sits with me. He was one of the good ones.
What also came with the new role were endless meetings, stakeholder management, and a huge amount of bureaucracy. And medicated or not, this started to break my brain. There was no time for anything apart from meetings. Nothing ever seemed to move forward. I was used to making changes to my digital campaigns, and being able to see the result immediately. Now I was going to meetings week-in, week-out, talking about the same exact things we had talked about the weeks before. The instant dopamine I had built my entire career on was gone. I was now managing a budget in excess of $100 million a year, but the whole thing felt empty.
In the space of 7 years, with no formal qualifications, I had reached what many might consider the pinnacle of a marketing career; Head of Media for a multi-billion dollar telco, managing a nine-figure budget, and I had the respect of a CMO that I truly admired. But I was miserable.
My brain, which had always thrived in the chaos of a busy restaurant, and figuring out the technical puzzles of setting up complex remarketing campaigns was being suffocated under the weight of “alignment meetings” and “stakeholder management”. My medication helped me do the dishes, or wash my laundry, but it couldn’t make a three hour meeting feel like anything other than that year 8 science project that I never did.
So I packed it in. Quit my job with no real plan. Sat in my lonely apartment in Sydney for a while, trying to figure out what to do next. Decided I would go live on an island for a couple of years, so started selling all my stuff on Facebook Marketplace. Now anyone who has ever tried selling things on marketplace will understand the pain of “Is this available?”, but when you’re trying to sell all your possessions, the process is long and arduous. It dragged on for months.
My brother had moved to Hobart a few years back, and he was going to be travelling a lot over the next year, and one day he messaged me and asked if I would like to come cat-sit for him for that year. With no other plans, I loaded up my tiny car with everything that would fit, put some stuff into storage at my mum’s place, and donated the rest to Vinnies, and was out of Sydney that weekend.
I arrived in Hobart with a car full of clothes and a couple of cats to look after, and my brain finally had the chance to start breathing again.
Not knowing anyone in Hobart, I decided to have a go on a dating app, an altogether new experience for me. The first person I spoke to on there turned out to be the right one. Hannah was also neurodivergent, and it felt like we could communicate better than I had with any girlfriend previously. That’s when I decided to stay.
So my brain started ticking again. Let’s be honest, the Hobart market isn’t exactly lousy with opportunities for former Heads of Media, and I didn’t really want to jump back into the same scenario that had led me here.
I realised that the Hobart market didn’t need more “alignment meetings”. What it needed was the high-velocity, high-logic problem solving strategy I had spent years perfecting. That’s when I decided to start Lightsmith Media. I didn’t want to build just another agency. I wanted to build something that could be “neuro-inclusive”, whether that was for my own benefit, or for clients (my mind was a little blown when I started to realise how many business owners might be a little neurodivergent themselves).
Today, I don’t use a $60,000 degree to tell me how to run my business. I use the same pattern recognition that squeezed 100 extra people into a Sydney restaurant and automated half my job at TPG. I’ve traded bureaucracy for the high-stakes dopamine of actually building things again.
If any of this sounds familiar, if you’ve ever felt you were failing at the traditional version of success while being very good at things nobody had a name for yet, maybe we should talk.
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