What Happened When I Stopped Trying to Be “Normal”
By Danielle Thompson, Founder of Goldspun SupportFor a long time, I believed that being a serious entrepreneur meant staying in my lane, it’s a hangover from a being an employee, you focused one thing, became good at it, and that’s what I thought running a business required.
One business. One focus. One plan.
Fewer ideas. Less distraction. More discipline.
So when my brain was acting “crazy” - firing off ideas at speed, spotting opportunities everywhere, craving novelty, momentum, and the next shiny object - I ignored it. I treated that part of me as something to manage, suppress, or fix.
And during the years I did that, my business was stuck – stuck in terms of growth, stuck in earnings, and I was stuck too, getting bored quickly.
It was never that I lacked ambition. It was that I lacked permission.
The permission to be creative. The permission to explore. The permission to make mistakes. The permission to chase joy. The permission to design a business around who I really am, not who I think I should be.
Ironically, the moment I stopped trying to be normal was the moment my business started to grow.
Photo: Danielle Thompson, Founder of Goldspun Support
For most entrepreneurs, creativity isn’t the problem - containment is.
For years, I confused focus with restriction.
I thought focus meant saying no to ideas. I thought professionalism meant narrowing my thinking. And I thought success came from discipline alone.
What I was really doing was cutting myself off from my strongest asset: creative pattern-spotting.
When I finally accepted that my brain is idea-driven, fast-moving, and thrives on stimulation, something shifted. I stopped seeing creativity as noise and started treating it as raw material.
That’s when everything changed.
Designing for creativity, not against it
The breakthrough wasn’t acting on every idea - it was giving ideas somewhere safe to go.
Instead of forcing myself to ignore ideas, I created a space and a system that allowed ideas to flow without stopping me from being productive.
I blocked one day a week for creative thinking and growth - personal or professional. That day was for exploration and enjoyment. Some ideas became real projects or initiatives. Some were benched.
I embraced experimentation without expectation - trying things simply because they felt aligned or brought me joy, without needing them to succeed or earn immediately.
I invested in myself and in my business. Rather than being overcautious and restrictive, I put money back into things because I wanted to - podcasting, book publishing. I stopped settling for “fine” and started working on shining.
I got excited about everything. I was curious. I learned and grew as both a person and a business owner. I expanded my network and shared what I was doing. Visibility wasn’t the goal - it was a side effect of the energy and enthusiasm I had for what I was building.
Although it might sound like it, this wasn’t chaos. It was design.
What that unlocked in practice
Once I stopped suppressing creativity and started structuring it, growth followed quickly.
In the space of 12 months, I went from:
One business to three distinct businesses, all in aggressive growth phase.
Loving writing but “just blogging” to writing and publishing three books - all reaching number one bestseller status
Talking idly about a podcast to launching a top-ten podcast, now approaching its first birthday and monetisation
Earning enough to pay the bills to doubling my turnover, with a 97% client retention rate
None of this happened because I worked harder (although there were some late nights). In reality, it happened because I stopped working against myself.
Why this matters beyond neurodiversity
I have ADHD, recognising and accepting that was part of the journey to me becoming creatively free but you don’t need ADHD to recognise this pattern.
Many entrepreneurs:
Downplay their ideas to seem “serious”
Force themselves into rigid productivity systems
Mistake restraint for strategy
But businesses don’t grow because founders think less, they grow because founders learn how to channel what they already have. As an entrepreneur you are already thinking differently to the average person, you are already breaking norms and so creativity comes naturally, but it is not just a personality trait, it’s a business input.
When you design systems that allow ideas to be listened to and tested, rather than suppressed, creativity becomes a growth lever and my creativity experiment over the last year shows this.
The real lesson
The most dangerous thing I did in my early business years wasn’t experimenting too much.
It was trying to be someone else, someone who stayed in their lane and didn’t try and do all of things.
The moment I accepted how my brain works and built around it, everything became easier, more profitable, successful and a lot more fun.
Enjoyed this perspective?
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