Stop Apologizing for Your Brain

Peter Shankman says the thing about ADHD that I have been trying to say for years.

I met Peter Shankman nearly twelve years ago, and if you know Peter at all, you know he is not someone who enters a room halfway.

He is loud in the best possible way. Generous with his stories. Brutally honest about his brain. Somehow both wildly accomplished and completely willing to tell you where he has fallen apart.

I’ve read or listened to Peter’s book, Faster Than Normal: Turbocharge Your Focus, Productivity, and Success with the Secrets of the ADHD Brain, at least three times so far, and each time, I learn something new about my ADHD, and about myself.

His book, along with Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder by Edward M. Hallowell and John J. Ratey, are the only books I consistently recommend on ADHD. On the latter, you may know you have ADHD after reading pages 4–7. If you are still not completely sure, read chapter four.

This week, I asked Peter for permission to share one of his recent pieces in full because he says something about ADHD that I have been circling around for a long time but could not quite land this cleanly: that the same brain people often treat like a problem can also be the very thing that saves you, pushes you, rebuilds you, and refuses to let someone else’s doubt have the final word.

His essay is about discipline and weight loss on the surface, but underneath, it is really about shame, identity, decision, and learning to stop apologizing for the way your mind was built.

Thank you for sharing this, Peter.

The Decision Is the Whole Game

On doubters, doors, and the quiet moment that changed everything

by Peter Shankman on May 12, 2026

Two photos. Nine months apart. Same guy, completely different operating system.

The one on the left was taken in August of 2025 in my bedroom. The one on the right was taken this morning, in the mirror inside Equinox Hudson Yards, with that red EXIT sign glowing over my shoulder like some kind of accidental metaphor. Forty pounds down. A staggering amount of muscle put on. Nine solid months of discipline that the August 2025 version of me genuinely did not believe he had in him.

I want to talk about how I got from one photo to the other, but not in the way you think. I am not going to give you a macro breakdown. I am not going to tell you what protein powder I take or what my split looks like or which Peloton instructor I like the most. (Charlotte Weidenbach.) There are a thousand newsletters that will do that for you, and most of them are written by people in better shape than me anyway.

I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about the two doors.

The two doors

Here is something most people who do not have ADHD will never quite understand about the ADHD brain. When someone doubts you, when someone tells you that you cannot do something, when someone looks at you with that particular flavor of pity that says “oh honey, that is not for people like you,” one of two things happens, and there is NEVER a middle ground. There is no thoughtful integration of the feedback. There is no mature, measured response where you sit with it for a few days and decide how to incorporate the criticism. There are two doors, and your brain picks one of them in roughly the same amount of time it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings once.

Door number one is the shame door. I used to have a damn EZ-PASS for door number one. In door number one, you believe what they said to you. The rabbit hole opens up underneath you and you fall in. You spend the next six weeks, or six months, or six years, convinced they were right about you all along. You eat the feelings. You drink the feelings. You occasionally snort the feelings. You become exactly the person they said you were, partly out of spite, partly out of grief, mostly because once that voice gets into your head it brings a mother in law amount of luggage, and it never quite leaves.

Then there’s door number two, and that’s the door I want you to know about. In door number two, something flips. A switch you didn’t know existed gets thrown somewhere in the basement of your nervous system, and every neuron locks onto a single thought, which is some variation of “oh, you think I can’t? F you, I’m doing this.” And then you go, balls out, in a direction you didn’t even know you were facing five minutes earlier, and you do the exact thing the doubter said you could never do, and you do it harder than you needed to, just to make a point that the doubter will probably never even see you make.

I have walked through both doors in my life.

I will tell you right now, with absolute certainty, that door number one has never once worked out for me. Not ONE single time. Every time I picked door number one, I wound up fat, sometimes hungover, hating the guy in the mirror, and wondering how I let someone else’s opinion become my prison. EVERY. TIME. There is no version of the story where door number one was secretly the wise choice in disguise. There is no plot twist waiting on the other side of that door. There is just shame, and weight gain, and a slow erosion of every promise you ever made to yourself, until one day you cannot remember the last promise you actually kept.

Door number two is the only door.

The receipts

I know this because I have receipts. Tell me I cannot write a book, I will write six. Tell me I cannot build a company, I will build five and exit three. Tell me a guy with a wandering brain and roughly forty too many pounds on him cannot rebuild his body from scratch in his fifties, and well, you can scroll back up to the right side of that photo.

Every single one of those things started with somebody, somewhere, telling me I could not. A teacher. A boss. A relative at a Thanksgiving table. A guy on an airplane who nonchalantly said to me “Aren’t you a bit too heavy to complete an Ironman Triathlon?” (Seriously.) A voice in my own head that sounded suspiciously like a composite of all the above. And every single one of those things only got finished because at some point my ADHD brain stopped negotiating with the voice and walked, very deliberately, through door number two.

I’m telling you this for one reason only: If you have an ADHD brain, or a brain that works in any way adjacent to one, you need to hear it from someone who has done both. You need to hear that the door number one outcome is not a sometimes-thing. It is an always-thing. The shame spiral does not occasionally produce growth. It does not secretly build character. It does not have a hidden upside that reveals itself in chapter twelve. It just produces more shame. The fuel it burns is your future, and there is zero return on that investment.

The part that has nothing to do with the doubters

Here is the real truth though, and this is the part I want you to actually take with you, because the rest of this is just preamble.

The doubters are just the spark. They are not the fire. The fire has to come from you.

At some point, quietly, with no audience and no announcement and no Instagram post and no New Year’s resolution, you have to decide you have had enough. Enough of the version of yourself you keep apologizing for. Enough of the promises you keep breaking to yourself in the dark. Enough of telling people about the thing you are going to start on Monday. Enough of waiting for the right Monday, which is, by the way, a Monday that does not exist and never has and never will.

You have to decide. You literally have to wake up one morning, maybe hungover, definitely bloated, and you have to look in the mirror and hate what’s looking back at you. Or worse, look in the mirror and not see anything at all in your reflection. That’s when you’ll finally make your decision to walk through door number two.

That decision is the whole game. That is it. That is the entire ballgame in one sentence. Everything after the decision is just math and reps. Heavy weights five days a week. Peloton sessions when I wanted to sleep. Meals weighed and tracked when I wanted pizza. Showing up on the days I felt invincible and, FAR more importantly, on the days I felt like garbage. None of it is glamorous. None of it makes for good content. It is just the slow, quiet, unphotogenic accumulation of a thousand small honored commitments, which is what change actually is when you take all the marketing bullshit out of it.

But none of that math, none of those reps, none of those quietly-honored 3:30 AM alarms, would have happened without the decision. The decision is upstream of everything.

What the ADHD brain actually is

For most of my life, people treated my ADHD brain like a defect. Like a thing to be managed, medicated into compliance, apologized for. Something I had to work around to be successful, rather than something that was contributing to the success in the first place.

That is exactly backwards.

The same brain that cannot sit through a thirty-minute meeting is the brain that can hyperfocus on a problem for fourteen hours straight and come out the other side with something nobody else would have built. The same brain that loses its keys six times a day is the brain that remembers, with perfect clarity, the exact tone of voice someone used to doubt it in June of 1994. The same brain that gets bored of dinner halfway through eating it is the brain that will absolutely, positively, will-not-be-stopped lock onto a goal and grind on it for nine straight months when the conditions are right.

The condition is door number two.

The brain that everyone once treated as a defect is the same brain that got me from the photo on the left to the photo on the right. It is the same brain that built and sold companies. It is the same brain that wrote the books. It is the same brain that, at 53 years old, finds the gym at six in the morning in whatever city I happen to be in, because the decision was made nine months ago and the reps are just what comes after.

If you have one of these brains, I am BEGGING you: Stop apologizing for it. Stop trying to make it quieter. Stop letting other people tell you what it can and cannot do. Find the door. You already know which one.

Walk through it.

Every single time.

Another must-read for anyone living with ADHD.

Wrapping up, I want to congratulate Bellarmine Publishing’s newest authors: Craig Haba and Alex Haba. Their debut book, Beyond The Green: Building Wealth, Purpose, and Legacy Through the Wisdom of Golf, launched yesterday.

With Father’s Day and graduation season upon us, it has been beautiful to see people giving Beyond The Green to fathers and graduates. So many young adults are just beginning to figure out what kind of life they want to build. We didn’t expect the book to resonate with them the way it has.

Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised us. The lessons in the book are about patience, confidence, discipline, disappointment, joy, and learning how to carry yourself when no one is keeping score for you. They are about noticing who you are becoming before life starts pulling them in every direction. Before the habits harden. Before someone else’s voice becomes louder than your own.

It just goes to show, it is never too early to start thinking beyond the green.

The book is available on Amazon.

See you next week.