Have you just tried playing the game?
People love to say “You just need to play the game,” as if the sentence itself explains everything. The tone is always the same. Calm. Reasonable. Gently corrective. As though the rules are obvious, shared, and written down somewhere sensible. As though everyone else received the same handbook and I simply chose not to read it.
This piece is for people for whom the game has always felt alien and opaque. Not something they could see clearly, but something they could feel pressing in from all sides.
For most of my working life, I did not understand the rules. That may sound strange given that next year marks thirty years for me in finance technology, including many years at senior levels. Experience did not make the game clearer. It simply raised the stakes.
Part of this is autistic. Social norms, power dynamics, and unspoken expectations have always been opaque to me. I could sense that they mattered, but I could not reliably read how they operated or when they would be enforced. The rules were rarely explicit, and I have never been good at inferring social rules that are not stated. I often knew I was at risk of getting something wrong without knowing exactly what the “something” was.
And part of it is ADHD. When I cannot see the system clearly, my ADHD instinct is not to slow down or step back, but to push harder. To compensate. Effort became the safest lever I could pull. If I could not play smarter, I would play harder. I worked longer hours, took on more responsibility, and poured myself into work, because output was something I could control in a system I could not fully interpret.
That strategy works, for a while. When you are always available, always delivering, always absorbing pressure without complaint, people tend to forgive other forms of difference. You become dependable. Useful. Hard to criticise without sounding unreasonable. You may not quite belong, but you are valuable, and value buys a kind of conditional safety.
There is something else worth talking about here, especially for those of us diagnosed later in life. If you have made it this far without understanding the rules, you are almost certainly resilient. Not in a heroic sense, but in a practical one. You have navigated education, work, and relationships without a reliable map, adjusting constantly to different people, different rooms, different expectations. Many of us became skilled at reinventing ourselves, sometimes several times a day, depending on what was being asked of us.
From the outside, this can look like adaptability. And sometimes it is. That ability to shift tone, role, and presentation can make it easier to fit into different contexts and work with a wide range of people. But it is worth being honest about where that skill came from. It was not taught. It was learned under pressure. Reinvention was not a creative choice. It was how we stayed employed, connected, and safe in systems we could not reliably read.
I am an auditory processor. I work problems out loud. I do not arrive at conclusions fully formed and ready to present. I discover what I think by saying it, testing it, following threads, and noticing where they connect or break. My brain works in parallel. It builds models from the bottom up. Dependencies and edge cases only become visible once you start walking the terrain.
From the outside, this can look like verbosity. From the inside, it is the work. The thinking does not happen before the speaking. It happens through it.
Many professional environments are not built for this. Leaders are trained to want short summaries, clean options, and fast decisions. Detail is treated as noise. Context is something to be stripped away. There is nothing inherently wrong with that preference, but it rests on the assumption that thinking is a private activity that should be completed before anyone else sees it.
There is a particular autisticdiscomfort that arises when you are asked to summarise early, before shared understanding exists. It can feel like intellectual dishonesty. Not because you want to overwhelm people, but because you know you are discarding information that might matter later. Over time, this has a cost. You participate in decisions while quietly knowing the logic foundations are incomplete. You begin to disengage, not out of apathy, but out of self-protection.
My autistic side does not grant respect automatically based on hierarchy. Authority alone does not create credibility. For me, credibility is earned through showing logical thinking, behaviour, and integrity. When decisions are made because of status rather than substance, something in me recoils. Not loudly. Not rebelliously. More like a deep internal friction that makes it harder to participate without feeling misaligned.
This is where “playing the game” often lives. It means not saying the actual thing. It means softening or withholding observations that might be inconvenient. It means prioritising smoothness over accuracy, optics over truth, deference over understanding. For some people, this trade is manageable. For others, it accumulates as a steady erosion of trust in themselves and in the work they are doing.
There is another paradox running alongside this for AuDHD people. ADHD brings a need for novelty, movement, and stimulation. Autism brings a need for order, coherence, and internal peace. These needs can pull in opposite directions, and the workplace often offers the worst possible compromise. Enough ambiguity to create anxiety, and enough rigid process to create suffocation.
Traditional delivery models assume a kind of linearity that many of us do not have.Set the objective. Make the plan. Execute. Deliver. Review. For non-linear thinkers, value often emerges earlier and messier. Through exploration. Through pattern recognition. Through reframing the problem itself.
This is why many AuDHD adults end up as idea people, system designers, connectors, and culture carriers. We hold complexity. We see what is coming. We notice misalignment early. None of that fits neatly into promotion frameworks that reward visible certainty and linear progress.
For much of my career, I functioned well inside complex organisations. Not because I finally understood the game, but because the environment around me quietly compensated for the fact that I did not. I was lucky to work with managers who understood how my brain works and could handle the political translation. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Not a workaround, but a form of good role design.
Only much later did I realise how much my effectiveness depended on that fit. When you do not understand the rules, effort becomes the substitute for insight. It is expensive, but it works, until it doesn’t.
When the environment changes, the cost of that strategy suddenly becomes visible. Overwork stops paying dividends. Reinvention stops feeling flexible and starts feeling brittle. You begin to feel as though something is wrong with you, even though nothing fundamental has changed.
Many neurodivergent adults turn inward first. Years of correction train us to assume the problem is us. When work becomes harder, the default assumption is personal failure. We try harder. We adapt more. We give more of ourselves away.
One of the most useful principles in AuDHD coaching is the idea that you change the environment, not the person. Sometimes the difference between thriving and burning out is not resilience or effort. It is whether the environment can hold your way of thinking without constantly asking you to translate or conceal it.
There is a broader contradiction here that is hard to ignore. Organisations talk a lot about the future of work. About complexity, creativity, and systems thinking. And yet, many promotion structures still reward fit, fluency in communication, size of network, and confidence.
As a technology leader, I have sponsored many whose leadership is grounded in engineering influence or subject matter expertise, rather than in the performance of social norms.
Promotion is rarely just about capability. It is often about visibility. When you are in a minority that thinks differently or communicates differently, that gap is easy to misinterpret as a lack, even when the underlying contribution is substantial.
Reports like the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs highlight skills such as systems thinking, analytical thinking, creativity, curiosity, resilience, and adaptability as increasingly core by 2030, leaning towards many neurodivergent peoples strengths. And also, many of the skills that are predicted to become less central are the very ones current systems still privilege. Smooth summarisation. Narrative confidence. Effortless social performance. For many neurodivergent people, these are not natural skills. They are areas of real cognitive and energetic cost.
The result is a widening gap. People are asked to perform one set of skills to progress today, while being told a different set will matter tomorrow. For those whose strengths already sit closer to the latter, the pressure to “play the game” can feel not just exhausting, but quietly irrational.
Autistic communication styles often suffer in these contexts. Honesty is misread as aggression or rudeness. Directness is misread as disrespect. Thinking out loud is misread as lack of executive presence. The double empathy problem becomes very real at work, because misunderstanding is mutual, but the cost is not shared equally.
I have noticed myself increasingly using AI tools as a form of translation support.Not to replace thinking, but to help compress my thinking without distorting. To extract what someone needs in order to decide, without leaving me feeling like I have lied. I recognise this not as a failure, but as accessibility. I am not alone in this, with a recent Ernst & Young Report on Neuroinclusion finding that neurodivergent professionals are 55% more likely to use AI at work, with 79% already doing so, compared with 51% of neurotypical professionals.
What matters here is not the technology itself, but what it represents. For years, the burden of translation sat entirely with the individual. We were expected to compress, soften, and reshape our thinking to fit systems that were never designed for us. Tools like this shift some of that burden back where it belongs, into the environment. They do not fix the person. They change the conditions.
If I were coaching someone on their career, I would not start by telling them to play the game better. I would start by getting curious about where the friction actually sits. Is it a lack of clarity about the rules, or is it the ongoing cost of complying with them. Energy, dignity, authenticity. Something is always being spent.
The goal is not to refuse reality. The goal is to stop treating the translation tax as evidence of personal deficiency. Some of us will learn parts of the game because we need to survive. Some of us will seek environments that require less performance and more truth. Many of us will do both, often at different points in our lives. As with most things in coaching, it helps to name it to tame it. Understanding what the game is, and how you are doing at performing it usually brings deep insight and the chance to reflect.
There is a Japanese concept called ikigai, often described as the overlap between what you care about, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. It is not a formula, and it is not something you find once and keep forever. What matters is the permission underneath it. The idea that work can fit a person, rather than a person endlessly reshaping themselves to fit the work.
I have been lucky. I have had environments that made sense to my brain. I also know how fragile that fit can be, and how quickly self-doubt rushes in when the conditions change. Naming that is not career sabotage. It is self-trust. It is choosing to see the system clearly enough to stop blaming yourself for the parts that were never designed for you.
I write about these experiences because I spent years thinking I was broken, when what I actually needed was language for how my nervous system works.
I write one thoughtful piece a week for people who find themselves overwhelmed by things that everyone else seems to cope with. If this resonated, subscribing just means you’ll get the next one quietly, without pressure or expectation.
If you know someone who’s struggling with the weight of something, sharing this might help them feel understood.
Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem”. *Disability & Society, 27*(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Doyle, N. (2020). Neurodiversity coaching: A whole-person approach to supporting neurodivergent adults at work. Kogan Page.
Edmondson, A. C. (2018). *The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth*. Wiley.
World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025: Skills outlook. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Ernst & Young. Neuroinclusion at work study 2025 https://www.ey.com/content/dam/ey-unified-site/ey-com/en-gl/services/consulting/documents/ey-global-neuroinclusion-at-work-study-07-2025.pdf
