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July 07
People with ADHD are built for the future of work. While everyone else worries about AI taking over jobs, we're the ones who'll figure out what to do with it next.
Muxin Li studied at UVA and Rice, but her real education came from following a winding path through anthropology, teaching, journalism, and now AI. Today, she's building tools designed to reduce cognitive overload and help people focus on what actually matters. Diagnosed with ADHD in business school after struggling through chaotic team meetings, Muxin brings a neurodivergent lens to the future of tech—one that sees ADHD not as a barrier, but as a design blueprint.
In this episode, Muxin and Tracy explore why the traits we're told to tone down—intuition, creativity, nonlinear thinking—are exactly what the world needs more of. They dive into how ADHD brains connect dots in ways others can't, why we're naturally drawn to entrepreneurship (hello, 50-60% of founders), and how our bottom-up processing gives us superpowers in an AI-driven world.
Muxin also shares a profound synchronicity experience that shifted her understanding of intuition, love, and possibility. From Carl Jung's scarab beetle to her own moment of cosmic clarity, she explores how tuning into that deeper intelligence might be the key to creating the future we actually want to live in. Plus, she breaks down the AI tools that are actually helping her manage the chaos of modern life—and previews Maestro, the project management tool she's building for brains like ours.
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"People with ADHD have bottom-up processing. We connect different things, see the mind map, and arrive at answers in ways that look alien to sequential thinkers."
- Muxin Li
"I see things differently and connect dots in ways others can't. I met a healthcare startup founder and instantly suggested a strategy they'd spent 9-10 months trying to develop."
- Muxin Li
"What if love is energy that affects improbabilities? What if enough of us live authentically and create a force so powerful it makes the impossible happen?"
- Muxin Li
"I want to free people from being the human glue. We do detailed, underappreciated work."
- Muxin Li
"When you have that space back, you can ask the deeper questions you're too busy to ask."
- Muxin Li
"We don't have to forecast our future. We can create it."
- Muxin Li
"Your ability to empathize and navigate real-world complexity—that's not what AI is built for."
- Muxin Li
- Muxin Li shares her ADHD diagnosis journey, noting breadcrumbs everywhere in hindsight, especially when puberty hit at 13 and depression struck hard, though she didn't understand hormones and brain chemistry were affecting her negative thoughts.
- Her struggles became apparent in business school team meetings and corporate environments where she couldn't rely on textbook self-study, finding herself unable to keep up with chaotic, unorganized discussions while peers seemed unbothered.
- She describes the cultural pressure of being an Asian woman with ADHD, discussing the "bamboo ceiling" effect that's more detrimental to career advancement than the glass ceiling, and learning to navigate expectations of being either a "wallflower or dragon lady."
- Muxin explains how people with ADHD are built for the future of work, citing that 50-60% of founders have ADHD because they see things differently and connect dots in ways others can't, using bottom-up processing to arrive at insights seemingly instantly.
- She shares examples of her rapid problem-solving abilities, like instantly solving a healthcare startup's strategy that took them 9-10 months to develop, and suggesting simplified recycling bin labels that were later implemented by waste management companies.
- The conversation covers how ADHD traits like intuition, creativity, and nonlinear thinking become valuable as AI automates routine work, leaving humans to focus on empathy, collaboration, and figuring out what to do with AI technology.
[00:50:00 - 01:15:00] Synchronicity, AI Tools, and Creating the Future
- Muxin recounts a profound synchronicity experience involving Carl Jung's concept, scarab beetles, and signs from the universe that led to a spiritual awakening about love as an energy affecting improbabilities and creating reality.
- She describes building "Maestro," an AI tool that automatically organizes transcripts, notes, and brain dumps into project management artifacts like Gantt charts and responsibility matrices, freeing people from manual organizational work.
- The episode concludes with practical AI recommendations, including using ChatGPT for project organization, travel planning, and follow-up emails, plus tools like Granola for meeting transcription that focuses on topics you're actively noting.
