The Variance

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