I built eight organisations from my bed.
Not despite being disabled. Through building while disabled.
The constraints taught me things that no MBA program teaches. Things that make organisations work better. And I'm not alone in this. Every disabled person in the workforce has figured something out that non-disabled people are still paying consultants to learn.
Here's what chronically ill and disabled people know that others don't:
You learn to prioritize ruthlessly. When you have 2 hours of good energy in a day, you don't waste it on meetings that could be emails. You don't do busy work. You identify the actual thing that matters and you do that. Organisations kill themselves with 95% effort on 5% of what matters. Disabled workers know the cost of inefficiency viscerally.
You become expert at systems thinking. Your body IS a system. Multiple systems. What affects one affects the rest. A cardiac system that crashes from standing affects your nervous system, your ability to think, your emotional regulation. You learn to see how things connect. How a change upstream creates consequences downstream. That's how you run organisations well.
You get comfortable with constraint-based design. You can't do everything. So you do the essential things brilliantly. You build tools that work within your actual capacity, not some theoretical capacity. That's better product design.
You develop radical honesty. You can't lie about what you can do. If you say yes to something you can't manage, your body will tell the truth and you'll crash. So you get very good at honest communication about limits. Knowing what you can commit to. Knowing what you can't.
You understand vulnerability and resilience. You live with both. You know that resilience isn't about not falling apart. It's about falling apart and getting back up. You build organisations with that knowledge.
The problem isn't that disabled and chronically ill people are less capable workers. The problem is that organisations are built by non-disabled people optimizing for non-disabled people. And then they're surprised when disabled people redesign the work and suddenly it works better for everyone.
Hire disabled people. Not because it's the right thing to do. Because they're better at the actual work.
Listen to the full conversation: Why disabled and chronically ill people are your best employees on Chronically.