About the Creator
George Hersh
Founder · ADHD Learning Pathways & the Success Navigator Program
George Hersh is not a researcher who studied learning differences from the outside. He is someone who spent a lifetime navigating them from within — building companies, raising a family, and achieving things most people never attempt, all while quietly carrying something he could not yet name.
George grew up in Topeka, Kansas in a family with deep community roots. From an early age, it was clear that his mind worked differently. Spelling and reading were a struggle from the start. No tutoring helped. No program clicked. He felt lost in the classroom — even as he led naturally everywhere else. He could build things, ride horses, run a job site, and read a room full of adults. He just couldn't get words onto a page the way school demanded.
He went on to run 22 companies across transportation, real estate, and commercial development — generating over $100 million a year across all his businesses. He did it without a college degree, without accommodations, and without anyone around him knowing he was dyslexic. He was formally diagnosed at the Menninger Clinic in 1990, at age thirty, already successful by most measures. The diagnosis gave him a name for it. It did not give him a solution.
That took decades more — leadership programs, personal development intensives, brain-based research, and a lot of hard-won self-knowledge. George is a self-teacher. He did not arrive at what he knows by following one system or one mentor. He learned from many sources, tested everything against his own experience, and built something that actually works. Over thirty years, he pieced together what genuinely moves the needle for minds wired like his.
Throughout that entire journey, he carried a goal he never acted on — to start a company that would help kids and adults the way no one had helped him. He had the knowledge. He had the means. What held him back was vulnerability. To help others, he would have had to say out loud: I was like this once. I struggled like you do. And here is how I found my way through. For a long time, that felt like too much to ask of himself.
Eventually, the goal won. In 2013, he founded what has become ADHD Learning Pathways and built the Success Navigator — a program that brings together everything he learned the hard way into a structured, practical path for people who have been told, in one way or another, that they aren't trying hard enough.
He knows what it costs to hide something like this. He knows what it feels like to lead a room while terrified someone will ask you to read aloud or be asked to spell something. He has lived both the failures and the wins, and he treats them the same way: as information.
For all he has built and all he has accomplished, nothing in George's career compares to watching a student succeed. He has seen kids who were heading down a bad path — whose parents came to him as a last resort — go on to graduate from college and build careers of their own choosing. He has seen adults who spent years locked out of the degree or credential they needed finally open that door. The difference between a struggling kid and a struggling adult is often just time and the wrong kind of help. The Success Navigator is the right kind.
George has no patience for all show and no go — for polished promises that sound good on a webpage and deliver nothing in a real person's life. Because the people who need this aren't just kids in the back of a classroom. They're adults behind a desk they've long outgrown, or grinding through a job that was never built for how their minds work — quietly convinced, at every age, that they are the problem.
They are not the problem. They just haven't found the right path yet.
That is what the Success Navigator is for.
