Does Hospitality Attract Neurodivergent Minds?

At university, I could be sitting at 95% in a course and still not finish it.

There were major projects, worth as much as 60% of the final grade, that I was doing well on. I understood the material. I could do the work. Yet somehow, I never got them across the line.

Those memories have been coming back to me lately. Parenting has prompted me to learn more about how differently people experience attention and learning. In the process, I’ve started looking at my own history with fresh eyes.

My study habits. My appetite for intensity. The things I could immerse myself in, and the things I struggled to finish.

And the industry in which I built a career.

Finding my rhythm in hospitality

Picture a busy front desk. Three phone lines are ringing. Ten guests are waiting. Housekeeping is on the radio, and a manager is around the corner needing information about a reservation.

You’re deciding what needs attention first, acknowledging the next guest, answering a question and remembering to follow up on the room that still isn’t ready.

I loved that pace.

Or take a restaurant shift with five tables of six or ten. The bartender is down, so you’re making your own drinks. One table needs water immediately. Another wants to linger over appetizers. Someone else needs their main course moving because they have somewhere to be.

You’re running your butt off between the kitchen and the dining room, adjusting the timing as you go, while trying to make every table feel looked after.

There’s a remarkable amount of judgement in that work. You’re watching, remembering and changing priorities, over and over. The feedback is immediate. You can see when a guest relaxes, when a delay starts to matter, when a small intervention changes the evening.

For me, that rhythm made sense. I could put my energy into something useful and see the result.

The question I keep coming back to

I chose hospitality because I loved people and the work. Looking back, I wonder how much the working environment itself drew me in. Did its movement, variety and immediacy suit the way my attention worked?

That is a personal question I’m still exploring. I haven’t found evidence that establishes whether neurodivergent people are more likely to choose hospitality than other industries.

The language matters here, too. Neurodivergence is a broad term that includes ADHD, autism and dyslexia, among other differences. It describes people with very different experiences and support needs. Cleveland Clinic’s overview is a useful introduction.

My own reflections are mostly about ADHD. The National Institute of Mental Health describes difficulties that can include organising work, sustaining attention and finishing projects. Enjoying a busy shift cannot establish a diagnosis, and ADHD can also make managing competing demands difficult.

So I’m careful about drawing a straight line from the pace I enjoyed to an explanation for my career. I can recognise a pattern in my life while remaining curious about what it means.

What the industry gave me

Hospitality gave me a way to learn through doing. I could work alongside experienced people, take their guidance, try something, see what happened and improve it on the next shift.

Over more than 25 years, that developed into a career grounded in best practices, mentoring and constant iteration. I studied the work while doing the work, and kept finding more to understand.

The human side held my attention. In a dining room, timing changes how an evening feels. At reception, the way you handle a delay can shape the guest’s first impression of the whole property.

I cared about those details because I cared about the person experiencing them. That approach has stayed with me as my work has expanded into operations, revenue strategy and the wider guest journey.

At Peak Hospitality, I’m still thinking about how a guest feels and what the business needs to do to deliver that experience consistently. The perspective is broader now, but I recognise its beginnings in those shifts.

Why I start at 80 percent

These days, I also enjoy building reports and working through larger strategic projects. There’s real satisfaction in finding a pattern in the numbers, connecting it to what is happening on a property and deciding what to change.

I have also built a strategy around the way I like to work: get something to 80%, put it into practice, and keep improving it.

That is a strength I value. Getting a useful version into the world quickly lets me respond to a business challenge sooner. It can mean being first to market with an idea, addressing a guest concern earlier or learning whether an offer actually resonates while there is still time to adjust it.

Chasing the final 20% before anything goes live can consume a disproportionate amount of time and effort. Meanwhile, the business still has the problem you were trying to solve.

An early release gives you real feedback. Guests respond. The team uses it. You find out which assumptions held up and where a change would make the work more effective.

Then you improve it. And you keep going.

Six months later, that work has had six months of use, feedback and refinement. It can be dramatically stronger than the version you would have arrived at by polishing it in isolation, and the business has benefited from it along the way.

The ongoing attention is essential to how I work. I want the early version to become better, and I keep looking for the next improvement even after it is performing well.

I see a connection between that appetite and the way I learned on the floor: pay attention to what is happening, make an adjustment and learn from the result. Hospitality gave me somewhere to develop that instinct. Today, it is a deliberate part of my strategy.

What this asks of hospitality leaders

My enjoyment of a busy shift tells me very little about how someone else experiences it. The same noise and interruptions can be overwhelming for another person. Even someone who performs well under pressure may need substantial recovery afterwards.

There is emerging research on these experiences. The published abstract of a 2025 AUT master’s thesis describes a survey of 110 self-identified neurodivergent hospitality and tourism employees, plus interviews with three managers. It reports both strengths and barriers, including stigma and inconsistent managerial understanding. That sample cannot tell us whether hospitality attracts a higher proportion of neurodivergent people.

It does give us reason to listen more carefully to the people already working in it.

As leaders, we can ask what helps each person do good work. Written priorities, clear handovers, smaller project milestones and time without interruptions may all be useful. CADDAC’s workplace guidance offers practical options and stresses that the right support varies by individual.

I think that matters just as much as recognising someone’s strengths. A person who is brilliant during a rush still deserves adequate staffing, breaks and a manageable workload. Their ability to rescue a shift should never become the staffing plan.

That connects directly to the kind of hospitality I believe in. Good systems help people deliver thoughtful service reliably. A guest’s sense of being cared for depends partly on whether the team has what it needs to provide that care.

Looking back with more understanding

Learning more as a parent has made me more curious about the younger version of myself: the student who could do excellent work and leave it unfinished, and the hospitality worker who found such satisfaction in a demanding shift.

I’m proud of the career I chose. I’m also beginning to understand that choice in a different way.

Perhaps part of what drew me to hospitality was finding work that gave my energy somewhere useful to go.

If you work in this industry, I’d be interested to hear your experience. What part of hospitality feels like a natural fit for the way you think, and what part takes more effort than people realise?

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