The Variance

Wrong question. Here's the right one — and a framework that actually holds up. I am headed out to the Blade Show in Atlanta, so I am recording this early. I pulled this question off Reddit this week. “How to cope with intolerance to being corrected or being wrong? I absolutely hate being corrected. It used to make me feel devastated and depressed but nowadays it makes my blood boil — especially if it’s something I’m supposed to be knowledgeable in.” Before I answer it I want

Why Managing ADHD Is a Practice, Not a Destination I've been back on the Aikido mat for a few months now. Different school, different style, a lot of relearning. And somewhere in that process — in the awkward, humbling experience of being a beginner again with knowledge I didn't have the first time — something clicked that I think is worth talking about. There's a concept in Aikido and other Japanese martial arts called shugyo. It doesn't translate cleanly into English, and I

A question pulled straight from Reddit — and an approach that the ADHD community usually won't give you. I pulled this question off Reddit recently. “I constantly am about 30 minutes to an hour late to everything, especially during the morning and I’m close to being fired. Every morning I get desperate and just can’t move. I even cry sometimes yet everyone thinks I’m just lazy.” If this is you — or someone you know — the struggle is real. But the answer most people give isn’t

A label does not change the contents and it will not be answer to everything. I use the word ADHD because it’s the common language. Not because I accept the disorder framework. What I carry doesn’t look like a disorder when I examine it honestly. It looks like a wiring profile — with costs and capabilities attached. The friction isn’t coming from something broken. It’s coming from a mismatch between how I’m built and systems that weren’t built for me. I’m not a clinician. Eve

I’m Doug Katz, the creator of Children of Chaos. It’s a fairly new venture, but you may have read some of the articles I have out there. I’m publishing here and a couple of other places, and you might see my shares under my other business ventures. I figured it was time to start adding video to what I’m creating — that’s a lot of the currency of how things are done today. Thanks for reading The Children of Chaos! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. As

"You don't solve a problem until it's a problem — until it's an aspirin and not a vitamin." That realization changed the direction of my life more than I understood at the time. Like many people, I spent most of my life identifying as capable. Army service, athletics, business, building, problem-solving — I saw physical capability as normal, stable, and largely permanent. But over time, injuries, wear, surgery, and age began forcing a different conversation. Not all at once.

Late diagnosed. No meds — bad heart valve, stimulants were never an option. For most of my life I was navigating this without even knowing what I was navigating. What I finally figured out through experience is that the wiring wasn't the problem. It was the environment. Find the terrain that rewards what you are, and everything shifts. That's what Children of Chaos is built on. If your wiring has ever felt like the enemy, it probably wasn't. It was the terrain. Learn more →..

Part 3: Maximizing the Value of High-Variance Wiring on Your Team This is part three of a four-part series on ADHD and organizational dynamics. Parts one and two were written for the person living inside the wiring — how to add value as a peer, how to navigate the relationship above you, how to build the currency that funds everything else. This one changes chairs. Thanks for reading The Children of Chaos! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This one

PART 2: Value-maxing as an ADHD Subordinate This is part two of a four-part series on ADHD, leadership and organizational dynamics. Part one was about the team — how to add value as a peer, build currency horizontally, and stop performing as a normative version of yourself that was never going to hold. This one moves up. The relationship with the person above you. Same wiring, higher stakes. Because the person above you controls your terrain, your tasking, and your trajectory

The right structure doesn't suppress high-variance wiring. It gives it somewhere to go. I was recently fortunate enough to have the opportunity to appear on Faster Than Normal with Peter Shankman. Not only is he an amazing host but the interview covered a lot of common ground that can hopefully be beneficial to other Children of Chaos. Not only did our shared neurological wiring have similarities but also the way that we approach focusing it in a productive manner. FULL AUDIO

What a Miscellaneous Billing Classification Reveals About a System That Was Never Built for the People It Claims to Serve By Douglas Katz I did not come to this work as an expert. I came to it as someone whose body stopped cooperating. After years of military service and a lifetime of physical activity, the cumulative damage caught up with me. My shoulder. My grip. Upper extremity impairments that turned something as fundamental as preparing my own food into a daily negotiati

PART 1: Optimizing as a Team Member This is part one of a four-part series on ADHD, leadership and organizational dynamics. Full disclosure, I use the word ADHD because it’s the common language. Not because I accept the disorder framework. What I carry doesn’t look like a disorder when I examine it honestly. It looks like a mismatch — between the wiring and the systems that were never built for it. I’m not a clinician. Everything here comes from the wiring. In a stone arch ev

A diagnosis explains your wiring. It doesn't author your outcomes. The diagnosis is real. The wiring is real. The friction it creates — in school, in work, in relationships, in systems designed for a different kind of mind — is real. I want to be unambiguous about that before I say anything else, because what I'm about to argue is going to land as contrarian and I want to earn that position rather than dodge the weight of it. There are people for whom ADHD creates significant

The wiring is visible whether you disclose it or not. The only question is who controls the narrative. I have ADHD. I say that directly and without apology, because it matters to everything that follows. Not as a disclaimer — I've written before about the damage that defensive framing does — but because the wiring shapes how I move through every high-stakes conversation I'm in, and pretending otherwise would be both dishonest and tactically stupid. What I've learned, after en

Most people with ADHD spend their lives installing new software. New habits. New planners. New routines. New accountability systems. New therapists. New medications. Different jobs. Different relationships. They swap out the operating system over and over, convinced that this version will finally work. And it might — for a while. Until it doesn't. Because the OS isn't the problem. The BIOS is. For anyone unfamiliar: the BIOS is the firmware that runs below the operating syste

Most self-improvement systems assume you can notice your own behavior before it happens. For minds wired like mine, that assumption is the entire problem. I was not surprised when I was diagnosed with ADHD. The diagnosis did not reveal something new about me — it confirmed something I had already been living. The intensity. The jump-cut thinking. The friction with monotony. The ability to feel underloaded in stable environments and sharply alive when stakes rose. What changed

By Douglas M. Katz | Children of Chaos What Is the Connection Between ADHD and People-Pleasing? Most conversations about ADHD focus on attention — the inability to focus, the wandering mind, the forgotten tasks. That framing misses what people with ADHD actually experience every day: friction. Not just internal friction — the kind that comes from a mind moving faster than its environment. But social and professional friction. The kind that builds over years of missing cues, i

ADHD is often framed as a disability. I personally do not feel that way. For some people, it is—but that experience is shaped heavily by environment. There are theories that different cognitive styles evolved for different roles—some oriented toward structure and order, others toward movement, adaptation, and uncertainty. Both are valuable. But modern systems tend to reward only one. When the environment aligns with the wiring, performance changes. This is about ability—and f

We need to start thinking about what can go right with AI and who it can help. Much of the public conversation about artificial intelligence revolves around replacement. The argument tends to fall into one of two camps: either AI will replace human thinking, or it will diminish the value of human work. The framing assumes that the central question is substitution. But from where I sit, that isn't the most interesting aspect of what these tools are doing. The more compelling d

Sometimes in life, roads don’t fork. They intersect. Recently I stepped back onto an Aikido mat after several years away. Within the first few training sessions — most of which ended with me on the floor, where I seemed to be spending more time than I remembered — I realized something that should probably have been obvious much earlier. Getting up after being thrown took longer than it used to. A lot longer. And the getting up was just the beginning. I also found immense j