I Learned Entrepreneurship From Drug Dealers

Here's a number nobody puts on the vision board. Entrepreneurs are about twice as likely to struggle with addiction as everyone else. Twice. And the wellness industry that sells us morning routines and cold plunges never says the quiet part, which is that the same wiring making you good at one is what makes you vulnerable to the other. It's the same animal. We just dressed one of them up in a blazer.

I'll say it plain. I learned entrepreneurship from drug dealers.

Not from a book. Not from a mastermind. From watching people who had nothing build entire operations out of instinct and nerve. Read the room in three seconds. Know who's lying before they finish the sentence. Move product, manage risk, keep the whole map in your head with no spreadsheet and no safety net. Price things exactly at what the moment would bear. Never let them see you flinch. I was a kid taking notes I didn't know I was taking, and years later I'd sit in a business coaching call and realize I already knew all of it. I just learned it somewhere I wasn't supposed to say out loud.

So let me name what was actually happening in my body, because this is the part that matters.

A dysregulated nervous system runs hot. Hypervigilance means you're scanning constantly, reading micro-expressions, tracking threat before it forms. That is a nightmare at a dinner party and a superpower in a negotiation. My baseline cortisol taught me to feel a deal turning before anyone said a word. The reward system that lit up for the substance is the same dopamine circuit that lights up for the win, the launch, the yes, the next impossible thing. Novelty-seeking, risk tolerance, the ability to function inside chaos that would flatten a regulated person. None of that is a character flaw. It's a brain built under pressure to do exactly what pressure required. The tragedy is that nobody tells you the wiring is neutral. It'll build you an empire or it'll build you a grave, and for a long time it was pointing me at the grave.

That's the pivot I want you to actually feel. The intensity was never the problem. The intensity, unmanaged, aimed at the thing that was killing me, that was the problem. The exact same engine, turned toward something that wanted me alive, built a business, a book, a whole second life. I didn't get sober and become a different person. I got sober and finally got my hands on the wheel of the person I already was.

And here's where it stops being about me. Because if you are the woman who has been called too much, too intense, too fast, too obsessive, too all-or-nothing your whole life, you already know this feeling in your chest. You have been managing a high-horsepower nervous system with no instruction manual, and someone somewhere convinced you the answer was to make it smaller. To calm all the way down. To become manageable. And maybe you white-knuckled your way into small, and maybe you found out small doesn't fit, so the intensity leaked out sideways into the wine, the shopping, the work you can't stop, the person who was bad for you. That's not weakness. That's an engine with nowhere legal to go.

So have you. You've been running the same wiring. You just maybe haven't been told it's an asset yet.

I want to be honest about where I'm standing when I say this to you. I am not on the other side of it. I don't wake up regulated and serene with my addictions safely in a museum behind glass. I still feel the pull toward intensity, toward too much, toward the edge. Some days I white-knuckle. What changed is not that the engine got quieter. It's that I stopped being ashamed of having one, and I started pointing it on purpose. That's the whole practice. Not extinction. Direction.

I'm not telling you this because I've got it figured out. I'm telling you because I'm living it, right now, this week, and I would not lie to you about that. I'm really fucking proud that the thing that almost ended me is the thing I now build with. That's not a metaphor. That's the data of my actual life.

This one's for the women who were told they were too much. The recovering ones. The intense ones. The founders running on a nervous system that learned to survive before it ever learned to rest. Your wiring is not broken. It was never broken. It was pointed at the wrong thing, by people who never taught you it could be pointed at all.

Pick up the pen. Point the engine somewhere that wants you alive.