"Signal to Noise"
It's now a very popular term.
You’ve probably heard “signal to noise” thrown around a lot lately. The term has been kicking around radio land for decades, but suddenly the term is everywhere.
Here is how Claude defines it.
“Signal-to-noise ratio comes from engineering. It’s literally the ratio of the power of a meaningful signal to the power of the background noise corrupting it, usually expressed in decibels. A high ratio means the message comes through clean. A low one means it’s buried in static and you strain to pull it out. In common usage the metaphor carries the weight: signal is the information that actually matters, noise is everything else competing for your attention. So here’s the one-liner: signal-to-noise is the ratio of what matters to what doesn’t, and most of modern life is an exercise in raising it.”
VCs use the term constantly when describing a pitch. Everyone says Elon Musk is all signal in conversation and walks away from noise. He just doesn’t have time for it. Over the years I’ve become much the same way. Some of that is getting old and dealing with a cancer that’s held back in chemical remission. The point is, I don’t have a lot of time for noise.
The other day I got stuck in a conversation with someone who was 99% noise, 1% signal. A rare ratio, I’ll admit. I had trouble extracting myself, so I stood there not really listening, just separating the two. Every sentence, I’d grade in my head as signal or noise. I didn’t want to be a jerk, so I kept waiting for some signal to surface, as if they were building toward a punch line. It never came. There was no signal. Just noise. And there I was keeping a running scorecard, which made me feel like the jerk, before I finally moved on with a few pleasantries.
It took me a while to realize that just about everything I do is decided by that very thing. Signal to noise. It’s why I like some movies and not others. It runs mostly below the surface with me, a habit formed over decades that I only recently caught myself moving around. I never sit at parties for long and I dislike gatherings, because I don’t have the skills to generate much social noise. I’m not into sports, and I don’t talk politics with people I don’t know well. I have no patience for political bullshit anyway. I’m happy to discuss a real issue.
This is also why I never have a good answer when people ask me about success, which is why I write here and why I wrote my book. I beat myself up over those writings, because I want to be helpful and make a difference for the people who ask. The goal is to be all signal and very little noise so I don’t bore you to death.
The book and all the other articles are my best attempt at telling you what built my career. Out driving the other day, it clicked. The one habit present in everything I do is cutting the noise down to nothing and living in pure signal to the best of my ability. The exceptions are a few breaks and time with my dog, who is mostly noise and worth every decibel. The habit got reinforced for years by clients who paid me by the hour.
That instinct is a large part of why I get so much done here at Moose Lodge. I gravitate toward signal. It’s why a meeting that should take ten minutes and instead eats an hour drives me up the wall. I can’t really explain how I got this way, other than that running out of time is a fast teacher.
Here in Springfield, Missouri, the noise ratio runs naturally high, because people have more time. It’s cultural. You see it in the community posts on Facebook. It’s charming and I’d never want to change it, and when you’re out and about, people will chat. It’s probably good for me to take in some of that noise. I honestly don’t know. It’s the reality of my situation. I’m keenly aware of the years I think I have left and I want to get as much value as I can out of my time. It’s all well intentioned, but the bigger point of this post is that cutting more noise out of your life may make the difference in your success velocity. Just be aware of it and live accordingly.
What I do know is that when I distill my life down to the points that actually worked, what got me to a point of success was high signal in every situation. If you’re not feeling productive, there’s a decent chance the noise in your life is simply drowning out the signal.