Why the “Square Peg” Often Becomes the Architect: My Journey into Neuro-Entrepreneurship
People often talk about entrepreneurship as though it begins with ambition.
A big idea.
A market gap.
A vision board.
A polished pitch deck.
For me, it began somewhere else.
It began with the growing realisation that many of the environments I was being asked to succeed in were not designed for the way my brain worked. And once I understood that more clearly, entrepreneurship stopped looking like a glamorous career choice and started looking like something else entirely:
a way to build work around reality instead of spending my life apologising for it.
As the founder of Divergent Thinking, I now spend much of my time helping organisations understand neurodiversity better. But long before I had that language or that business, I was living the problem from the inside.
For many neurodivergent people, work is not neutral
I think this is where the story has to begin.
Traditional work is often treated as though it is neutral ground. You go in, do the job, follow the process, navigate the culture, and if you are good enough, you progress.
But for many neurodivergent people, that is not how it feels at all.
The typical workplace still often rewards:
linear thinking
conventional communication
ease with social hierarchy
tolerance for sensory strain
comfort with open-ended ambiguity
smoothness with admin and task-switching
being reasonably good at everything
That model works well for some people. But it can be punishing for others.
As someone living with autism, dyslexia and dyspraxia, I often felt that traditional work environments were not simply asking me to contribute. They were asking me to translate myself constantly. To stretch into formats that created drag. To keep proving I could function acceptably inside systems that had never been built with minds like mine in mind.
That is an exhausting way to live.
The issue was never that I could not work
This is important.
The problem was never that I lacked drive, ideas or capacity. It was not that I did not want to contribute. It was that the dominant model of “good employee” was far narrower than people admitted.
I know now that many of the same qualities that made me feel awkward or hard to place in rigid environments were also the qualities that later became central to my work:
intense focus
pattern recognition
systems thinking
creative problem-solving
a different relationship to rules and assumptions
the instinct to ask why something is built the way it is
In the wrong environment, those traits could look inconvenient.
In the right environment, they became the basis of value.
That is a very different way of understanding neurodivergence.
Neuro-entrepreneurship is often born from incompatibility
I think this is one of the least discussed truths about entrepreneurship for neurodivergent people.
Sometimes it is not only about wanting freedom. Sometimes it is about needing a form of work that does not constantly distort you.
If you spend long enough being told — directly or indirectly — that you are too intense, too awkward, too different, too hard to place, too specific, too spiky, then at some point one of two things tends to happen.
Either you spend your life trying to sand yourself down into something more manageable.
Or you start asking whether the shape was never the problem.
For me, entrepreneurship became the place where that second question came alive.
Not because running a business is easy. It is not. But because it allowed me to build from my strongest spikes instead of endlessly organising my life around my weakest points.
The “spiky profile” stopped being something to hide
This is at the heart of everything.
Many neurodivergent people have what I often call a spiky profile. That means there may be very high ability in some areas and very real difficulty in others. Traditional systems tend to fixate on the lows. They ask how to smooth them out, how to make the person more balanced, more rounded, more standard.
But a lot of innovation does not come from well-roundedness.
It comes from spikes.
In my own case, that meant recognising that I did not need to build a future around becoming slightly more competent in all the places my brain found draining. I needed to understand where my energy, insight and unusual capability actually lived.
For me, that included:
deep focus on complex problems
seeing patterns across different fields
creative storytelling
strategic thinking
strong emotional insight shaped by lived experience
Once I understood that more clearly, entrepreneurship stopped being about escaping employment and started being about building around my real cognitive profile.
I stopped trying to become employable and started becoming useful
This was one of the biggest internal shifts.
For years, like many neurodivergent people, I was subtly trained to think in terms of employability:
How do I make myself easier to hire?
How do I present more normally?
How do I reduce the friction I create in standard systems?
How do I prove I can cope?
At some point, that frame became too small.
The better question was:
What am I uniquely useful for?
That question opened a completely different path.
Because the answer was not “become more generic”.
It was not “hide the spiky parts”.
It was not “learn to mimic the dominant style better”.
The answer was to build around the value I could create when I was not constantly forced through the wrong interface.
That is ultimately what led to Divergent Thinking.
Entrepreneurship became a form of neuro-design
This is how I think about it now.
People often talk about accommodations as though they are small adjustments made at the edges of a job someone else designed. But entrepreneurship allowed me to go much further than that.
It allowed me to shape the whole structure.
That meant:
designing a schedule that reduced overload
using video, audio, dictation and AI tools that suited my brain
communicating in ways that aligned with how I naturally think
building work around depth and strategy rather than performative busyness
creating room for recovery, focus and meaningful output rather than constant friction
In that sense, entrepreneurship was not only a job model. It was a design intervention.
It was a way of saying: if the default model of work keeps producing unnecessary drag, I am allowed to build another one.
This is not about doing everything alone
I think this also matters, because entrepreneurship is sometimes romanticised in a very individualistic way.
The truth is, building something sustainable has also meant recognising where my low spikes are real — and not making those the centre of the business.
I do not need to be brilliant at every operational detail to build something meaningful.
I need to know:
where I add the most value
where the friction is
what systems help
what support is sensible
which tasks belong with others
That is not failure. It is good design.
It is also exactly why I care so much about workplace needs assessments. At their best, they help people and organisations stop asking, “How do we make this person more standard?” and start asking, “How do we build work around reality, strengths and fit?”
Neurodivergent founders are often redesigning more than their own careers
This is the bigger reflection I have now.
When neurodivergent people start businesses, projects or new forms of work, we are often doing more than creating income for ourselves.
We are exposing how narrow the dominant model has been.
We are showing that:
there is more than one way to lead
there is more than one way to communicate value
there is more than one way to organise work
there is more than one kind of mind worth designing for
That is why I think neuro-entrepreneurship matters even for people who never want to become founders. It expands the imagination of what work can look like.
And that, to me, is one of the most powerful things about it.
To the next generation of divergent builders
If you are neurodivergent and you have spent years feeling like the square peg in every room, I want to say this clearly:
Sometimes the problem is not that you are the wrong shape.
Sometimes the problem is that the room was designed with too little imagination.
That does not mean everyone should start a business.
But it does mean you are allowed to question whether the forms of work you have been handed are the only valid ones.
You are allowed to build around your spikes.
You are allowed to work with your brain instead of constantly against it.
You are allowed to treat your different way of thinking as a source of design, not just a source of difficulty.
That shift can change a life.
Final thought
I did not become an entrepreneur because I wanted a shinier title.
I became one because, as a neurodivergent person, I eventually realised that if the structures I was being offered kept misreading my value, I did not have to spend the rest of my life proving myself inside them.
I could build differently.
That is what neuro-entrepreneurship has meant for me.
Not escape.
Not ease.
But alignment.
And sometimes, for a square peg, that is the beginning of everything.
To explore more of my work as the founder of Divergent Thinking, visit the blog or learn more about workplace needs assessments.
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