Diary of a Dyslexic Strategist

About Diary of a Dyslexic Strategist

What if your Neurodiversity was your Greatest Strength? - Join host Eli Dervonte as he interviews successful entrepreneurs who’ve overcome ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, and Trauma. - Discover how to redefine success and thrive on your own terms. - Find me: http://neuro.dervonte.digital/ Buy me a coffee: https://aiwire.link/buy-me-a-coffee elidervonte.substack.com (https://elidervonte.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Hosted by Neurodivergent Business Strategist Eli Dervonte

Category

business · health & fitness

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Jun 2024

Latest episode

22 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

115 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   22 Sept 2026

   Part 2: It cost me 10 times more. when I switched to the cheaper model.

   Diary of an ADHD Strategist — Part 2 of 4 Recently I told you the machine has no memory, and that 0.01% of my usage was anything I’d actually typed. If you ran the audit, you have your own number now. Sit with it for a second before you read on, because everything below is a footnote to it. This part is about the two changes that moved mine the most. One of them is free and I’d been ignoring it for months. The other one I’d been doing on purpose, believing I was being careful with money. The free one When you finish a job and start a different one, clear the session. That’s it. /clear in Claude Code. /clear or /new in Codex. Five letters, no cost, no setup. I had never done this. Not once. I’d finish a piece of work and just... keep going in the same thread, because the thread was already open and opening a new one felt like admin. Here’s what I didn’t understand. That finished job doesn’t sit quietly in the background waiting to be useful. It gets re-sent, in full, with every single message you write after it, until the session ends. I watched my own context sitting at eighty thousand tokens of pure history. Typed /clear. Watched it go to zero. Every other fix in this series trims one component of your context. Clearing resets the whole base that all those components are a fraction of. If ninety-odd percent of your spend is the machine re-reading history, this is the only tool that deletes the history. You’re not throwing the work away This was my actual objection, so let me deal with it. In Claude Code, use /rename before you clear, and you can pull the session back with /resume if you ever urgently need it. In Codex, codex resume --last reopens your most recent session, or plain codex resume gives you a picker. You’re not deleting anything. You’re stopping the next job from having to carry the last one. I want to be honest about why this took me so long. It wasn’t a technical failure. It was that closing something down and starting fresh has always felt, to me, like admitting I lost the thread. Like evidence. It isn’t evidence. It’s maintenance. Now the one that hurt Here’s the move. You’re running low. You can feel the limit coming. So you do the responsible thing — you switch down to the cheaper model. You feel good about it. Sensible. Restrained. That switch is the most expensive thing you can do. Here’s why. Your conversation is cached, and reading from that cache costs a fraction of processing it fresh — roughly a tenth. That discount is the only reason long sessions don’t bankrupt you. But the model is part of the cache key. Change the model and none of your history matches any more. The entire conversation — all of it, from the top — gets reprocessed at full price. On a long session, that turns a ten-cent turn into a dollar turn. Ten times the cost, on the exact keystroke you pressed to be careful. It is completely invisible. Nothing warns you. And you did it to yourself while trying to save money. Reasoning effort does the same thing. So does turning on a faster mode. Anything that changes what’s answering you invalidates everything it has already read. What breaks it, and what doesn’t Worth knowing, because half of what I’d been avoiding was fine and the thing I was doing freely was not. Breaks your cache: Switching models. Changing reasoning or effort level. Turning on fast mode. Connecting or disconnecting a tool server if your tools load upfront. Enabling a plugin that ships one. Compacting. And a nasty one — updating your CLI and then resuming a long session from before the update. Doesn’t touch it: Editing files in your repo. Editing your instruction file. Changing output style or permission mode. Running skills and commands. Rewinds. Spawning a subagent. So the rule is short. Pick your model and your effort at the start of the session, then leave them alone. If you want to be on the cheaper model, start there. Choose once, deliberately, at the top — and then stop renegotiating with yourself halfway through. Why this one got under my skin I have been downgrading myself in rooms for as long as I can remember. Sensing that I’m taking up too much — too many questions, too much explaining, too much of someone’s afternoon — and quietly switching to a cheaper version of myself. Fewer words. Lower effort. Easier to be around. It has never once made things cost less. It makes them cost more, because the smaller version can’t finish the job, so the job comes back around. That’s what the model switch is. It’s the same move, in a terminal. Getting smaller mid-way through doesn’t save the resource. It throws away everything you’d already built up and makes you start again from nothing — and you don’t even get to see the bill. Choose properly at the start. Then stay in it. Next week: the load you never typed. Eight hundred lines of install output you didn’t read, the tool manuals sitting in your context before you write a word, and why delegating to subagents doesn’t save tokens — it moves them. But this week is two keystrokes. Clear between jobs, because it’s free and it resets the base everything else is a fraction of. And whatever you pick, pick it once. This week, in the Diary: 🧹 Clear between jobs. Rename first if it makes you braver. New work, new thread — every time. ⚖️ Choose your model at the top. Cheaper is fine. Cheaper halfway through is the most expensive thing on the board. 🔍 Notice where else you downgrade mid-way. In meetings. In messages. In asking for what you needed. Same move, same cost. The Diary is free, and it stays free. If it’s been useful and you’d like to walk a bit further alongside it, there’s a paid option — no extra tier, no locked posts, just a way to come along. Either way, I’m glad you’re here. Part 3 lands next week: everything that’s already in your context before you’ve typed a single word. Get full access to Diary of a ADHD Strategist | ♉ +📣 =👂🏽 at elidervonte.substack.com/subscribe (https://elidervonte.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   20 Jan 2026

   When Everything Falls Apart (And You’re Still Expected to Hold It Together)

   There’s this thing that happens when you’re neurodivergent and life decides to absolutely demolish whatever fragile systems you’ve built to keep yourself functional. It’s not just that things fall apart—things fall apart for everyone. It’s that when you’re ND, you’ve spent years (decades, really) engineering these incredibly sophisticated scaffolding systems just to do what other people seem to manage automatically. And when crisis hits? That scaffolding doesn’t just wobble. It disintegrates. Last year taught me this in ways I’m still processing. 💭 And by “processing,” I mean “occasionally lying awake at 3 AM wondering how I’m still upright.” The Morning Everything Changed It started ordinary enough. My partner was taking the dog out—just another morning routine in our carefully constructed life. Except she mentioned her eyesight wasn’t quite right. 💬 “But I’m still going to take the dog out.” Ten minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. Which is weird for that time of morning. Strange enough that my brain flagged it immediately—that’s not right, that’s not the pattern—before I even opened it. She fell through the doorway. I caught her. Called emergency services. Watched as the life we’d been building got loaded into an ambulance. Stroke. She was in hospital for weeks. I stayed with her for two months while she recovered, watching someone I love struggle with tasks that used to be automatic. Watching her face the same kind of cognitive challenges I’ve been navigating my whole life, except hers appeared suddenly, traumatically, without the decades of coping mechanisms I’ve had to develop. 💭 There’s something particularly cruel about watching someone you love experience a fraction of what you deal with daily and seeing how hard it is for them. It makes you realize how hard it’s been for you all along. And also how resilient you’ve had to become without even noticing. The Impossible Equation Here’s where the neurodivergent experience gets especially fun during crisis: I’m in London because that’s where work is. My partner and daughter are elsewhere. My daughter is three years old and needs her dad. My partner is recovering from a stroke and needs support. I have ADHD and dyslexia, which means sustained separation from my family while maintaining work responsibilities while managing crisis is... Let me put this mathematically, because sometimes numbers help: Executive Function Required = (Work demands × Physical distance) + (Family crisis × Emotional load) ÷ (Support systems - Geographic isolation) × (Neurodivergent processing challenges) The answer? Does not compute. And yet. Here I am. Computing it anyway. Because what’s the alternative? What Isolation Looks Like When Your Brain Already Feels Isolated There’s the regular isolation that everyone talks about—being physically separated from people you love, missing important moments, feeling disconnected. Then there’s neurodivergent isolation during crisis, which is... different. It’s not just being alone. It’s being alone while your brain is screaming for dopamine, for routine, for the exact structures that have just been obliterated. It’s needing to talk through your thoughts to process them (hello, ADHD verbal processing) but being physically separated from your people. It’s needing familiar environments to function optimally but being split between two locations because life demanded it. It’s watching yourself struggle with things you “should” be handling better while simultaneously knowing that of course you’re struggling—your entire support infrastructure just collapsed. 💭 The cruel irony: I’ve spent years building systems to support other neurodivergent people, teaching them how to construct sustainable structures for their lives. And then life said “lol no” and knocked mine over like a toddler with blocks. The Mythology of Resilience People love to talk about resilience. Especially when talking about neurodivergent people or people facing challenges. “You’re so resilient!” they say, like it’s a compliment. But here’s what resilience actually looks like in practice: It’s trying to be consistent for the people who’ve asked for your help while your brain is doing backflips trying to remember what day it is. It’s showing up for work calls while calculating whether you have enough executive function left to also remember to eat lunch. It’s being present for your three-year-old daughter during precious video calls while part of your brain is spiraling about all the moments you’re missing. It’s holding space for your partner’s recovery while your own mental health is doing that thing where it pretends everything’s fine until it absolutely isn’t. Resilience isn’t strength. It’s the exhausting mathematics of rationing a finite resource (your cognitive capacity) across infinite demands. And sometimes—most times—the equation doesn’t balance. What I’m Learning (While Everything’s Still On Fire) 1. Crisis doesn’t care about your neurodivergence. Life will absolutely hand you situations that require exactly the skills you don’t have. Sustained attention? Executive function? Emotional regulation during high-stress situations? Cool cool cool, here’s a family medical emergency across multiple cities. 2. But your neurodivergence will absolutely affect how you experience crisis. The isolation hits different. The loss of routine is catastrophic in ways neurotypical people don’t fully grasp. The cognitive load of managing multiple locations, responsibilities, and emotional demands while your brain is already working overtime just to function normally? It’s not just hard. It’s different hard. 3. You can’t engineer your way out of everything. 💭 This one stings, because I’ve built my entire approach around “engineering solutions” rather than “accepting limitations.” But sometimes life presents problems that don’t have elegant solutions. Sometimes the answer is just: this is terrible, and you’re going to feel terrible, and there’s no system or app or routine that makes it not-terrible. Sometimes you just have to be in it. 4. Asking for help is still really hard. Even when you desperately need it. Even when you teach other people to do it. Even when you know it’s the logical thing. Because there’s this voice (internalized ableism is fun) that says you should be able to handle this. That if you were better at managing your ADHD, more disciplined, more organized, less... you... then this would be easier. That voice is a liar, but it’s a persistent one. The Part Where I Try to Be Hopeful (Despite Everything) Here’s what I know: This year has to be different. Not because I’m manifesting positive vibes or whatever, but because the current equation is unsustainable and something has to shift. I’m pushing forward—not in that toxic productivity “hustle harder” way, but in the “I need to fundamentally restructure my life so I can actually be present for my family” way. I’m going to keep helping people. Partly because it’s what I do, partly because supporting others actually helps me feel less isolated (ADHD brain loves being useful for other people even when it can’t support itself), and partly because I’ve been asked specifically to help with tech solutions for neurodivergent folks and that’s genuinely exciting work. 💭 Technology and AI for neurodivergent business support? YES PLEASE. This is exactly the kind of engineering-solutions-to-ND-challenges work that lights up my brain. I’m aiming for consistency—which is hilarious given that consistency is perhaps the single hardest thing for an ADHD brain to achieve. But I’m going to try anyway, because my daughter is three and watching her dad model “trying even when it’s hard” matters. I’m going to create educational content about applying technology in ways that actually support neurodivergent processing, because if I’ve learned anything this year it’s that we need better tools, better systems, and better understanding of how to make technology work with our brains instead of against them. What I Want You to Know If you’re reading this and you’re also neurodivergent and everything feels impossible right now? You’re not failing. Your brain isn’t broken because it can’t handle crisis the way you think it “should.” The systems you built that worked perfectly fine until they didn’t? They weren’t inadequate. Life just exceeded their specifications. The fact that you’re struggling with things that seem to come easily to others? That’s not a reflection of your worth or capability. That’s the difference between building a life in a world designed for different brains and experiencing that same world during catastrophe. And if you’re isolated—physically, emotionally, cognitively—know that isolation during crisis when you’re neurodivergent is its own special kind of hell. It’s not just you. It’s the intersection of circumstance and neurology and impossible demands. You’re doing better than you think you are. 💭 Even when you’re absolutely certain you’re doing terribly. Moving Forward (One Executive Function Crisis at a Time) So here we are. New year. Same brain. Different challenges. I’m still figuring out how to be in London for work while being present for my family. Still navigating the aftermath of crisis while trying to build something sustainable. Still learning how to ask for help even though my brain insists I should be able to handle everything independently. Still neurodivergent. Still showing up. Still trying. And honestly? That’s going to have to be enough. Because this year—this year—I’m choosing presence over perfection. Connection over consistency. Progress over the illusion of having it all together. I’m here. I’m trying. And I’m going to keep showing up for the people who need me—including myself. 💬 “This year will be a great year, and I will be here for you.” Let’s see if we can make that true together. 💭 Still processing. Still standing. Still here. Get full access to Diary of a ADHD Strategist | ♉ +📣 =👂🏽 at elidervonte.substack.com/subscribe (https://elidervonte.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   7 May 2025

   S5 EP17: ADHD as an Entrepreneurial Superpower - Conversation with Stephanie Hayes

   This episode tells the compelling story of Stephanie Hayes, a seasoned business strategist who has spent years immersed in the world of startups and small businesses. She's known for helping entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of growth and plan for their future, including exit strategies. But there's another crucial layer to Stephanie's journey: her experience with ADHD. For much of her life, Stephanie was a high performer, excelling in various fields, even while navigating certain types of work that felt like a "slog" or presented difficulties with initiation. It wasn't until later, in 2021, that she received her ADHD diagnosis. This understanding brought a profound shift in perspective. Today, Stephanie doesn't view her ADHD as a deficit, but rather as her superpower. She sees that the very traits often associated with ADHD – a need for stimulation and a love for solving problems – are powerful drivers in the entrepreneurial landscape. The constant learning and overcoming challenges inherent in building a business resonate deeply with her. She has developed specific systems and found tools, like medication and even AI, that enable her to function effectively and channel this energy into productive work. This episode delves into how embracing neurodivergence – understanding and leveraging how your unique brain works – can be a powerful business strategy. Stephanie highlights that for neurodivergent individuals, aligning their business with who they are is not just personally beneficial, but strategically smart. Many of her clients also live with ADHD, finding common ground and shared understanding in this approach. Join us for a down-to-earth and insightful conversation with Stephanie Hayes as she shares her personal journey, practical strategies, and the powerful belief that ADHD can indeed be an entrepreneurial superpower, unlocking potential when you learn to work with your brain, not against it, and truly embrace neurodivergence for success. Diary of a ADHD Strategist | ♉ +📣 =👂🏽 is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Diary of a ADHD Strategist | ♉ +📣 =👂🏽 at elidervonte.substack.com/subscribe (https://elidervonte.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

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Apple Podcasts (US)

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Podcast Authority Score: 72 / 100

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