The Chaos Translator Why the mess is where the magic lives I've spent 13 years at one of the most process-driven companies on the planet. I run a film festival on the side. I build Notion templates that turn sprawling business operations into something navigable. And the through-line isn't that I love order. It's that I see things in chaos that other people don't. There's a moment — you've probably felt it — when you're staring at a messy situation and everyone around you is either panicking or pretending it's fine. A project with no clear owner. A process that exists only in someone's head. A system held together by tribal knowledge and good intentions. Most people see a problem. I see a puzzle with all the pieces already on the table. What "bringing order to chaos" actually means It's not about imposing rigid systems on creative work. It's not about spreadsheets for spreadsheets' sake. It's about pattern recognition — finding the hidden structure that already exists and making it visible. My brain works differently. Always has. What looks like scattered information to most people often looks like a constellation to me. The connections are already there. Someone just needs to draw the lines. This is how I pitched an AI tool to senior leadership last month that's now getting fast-tracked through approval. Not through political maneuvering — through an organic conversation where someone recognized that the chaos I was describing had a shape, and I could show them what it was. This is how I build templates that actually get used. Not by starting with features, but by starting with the specific, detailed mess someone is drowning in and working backward to what would make it navigable. This is how I evaluate which film submissions deserve a closer look, which side projects are worth pursuing, which problems are actually worth solving. What you'll find here I'm not going to pretend I have a content calendar mapped out for the next six months. That would be dishonest, and honestly, a little boring. What I can tell you is what I'll be thinking about: The craft of systematization — Not productivity porn. Real talk about building systems that survive contact with actual human behavior. Why most templates fail. Why most processes get abandoned. What makes the ones that stick different. Building in the margins — I have a day job I'm good at. I also have a film festival, a template business, and a growing list of projects that scratch itches the market doesn't know it has yet. How do you build something real when you can't go all-in? That's the game most of us are actually playing. Seeing what others miss — Pattern recognition as a practice. How to develop the eye for hidden structure. Why neurodivergent perspectives aren't bugs in the system — they're features that traditional environments don't know how to use. The chaos itself — Sometimes I'll just share what I'm noticing. Connections between things that shouldn't be connected. Problems that are actually the same problem wearing different costumes. The weird stuff that makes me think. Why subscribe I'm not going to change your life in 5 minutes a week. I don't have a course to sell you (yet). I'm not going to promise transformation through a newsletter. But if you've ever felt like your ability to see patterns, to hold complexity, to find signal in noise — if you've ever felt like that skill is undervalued or misunderstood, you might find something useful here. I write for people who are good at things that are hard to explain on a resume. People who bring order to chaos not because they love order, but because they can't help seeing the order that's already there. If that sounds like you, stick around. Let's see what we can find. First lesson, free of charge: The mess isn't the enemy. The mess is where all the information lives. The only question is whether you can read it. — Ted runs the Southern Shorts Awards, builds productivity systems that people actually use, and works in AI/ML privacy at a company you've heard of. His professional tagline is "Bringing order to chaos" — which is less of a marketing statement and more of a neurological inevitability.