“Ignore the Noise!”
This has become a common phrase from coaches and consultants in a world of calls, texts, emails, social media, project manager alerts, and instant messaging. Out attention is pulled by these communication notifications and the red circle with a white number (or in my case, the red oval with the white number) on our screens and monitors.
Even if we manage to filter out all the social communication that’s become woven into our lives, sometimes many of us let business media through the filter: training notifications, CE emails, digital magazines and newspapers, economic and trade reports. We let these in so we are “in the know.” And yet, like squirrels, we find ourselves pulled by one story or another.
Our coaches—or the 20 second clips of coaches we swipe past—tell us that in order to make true progress we need to ignore the noise. The next coach we swipe past is reminding us of Steve Jobs’ overused quote:
People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
Sure, I say. When there’s a thing I’ve got to focus on, the virtue is not a habit of willing what I have decided to make the object of my effort. The virtue of focus is the habit of fending off the appetite to attend to the myriad of objectives that intrinsically or extrinsically deserve my attention and effort.
What Steve doesn’t tell us (and didn’t mean to) in this quote is what to focus on.
How do we know what is deserving of our energy? How do we know the good idea to say yes to, and which good ideas to say no to?
Certainly, if we are looking to innovate, we need to be clear on what to innovate. By definition an innovation is new… a new method, a new tool, a new idea, a new product. By definition an innovation is also better, that is, is intrinsically more good or brings into being more good than the present method, tool, idea, or product produces. We’re going to set aside practical arguments about tradeoffs, such as trading ease of writing business letters with AI for the skill and ability to express creativity and passion in those letters.
I propose that by listening to the noise we can discover what people are worried about, what they’re stressed over, what’s scary in their lives. I think the noise – captured in particular, but listened to in general – gives us a kind of feel of the people, of the crowd, of the challenge and suffering that people are facing. It takes a lot of listening for a technology company to know the pain points of today’s tool that should be solved by tomorrow’s solution.
I like to take a step back and listen with reverence to the noise. I read local and national newspapers. I pick up trade journals for my industry and pay attention to forecasts and focus articles. I make time to scroll through LinkedIn bios and posts, all in an effort to feel the market, to feel the noise.
Are people afraid? Are they excited? Are they expectant? Are they hopeful?
What does this article from this paper have to do with that interview in that magazine? What doesn’t feel right about the current situation? What feels good, real good, true and proper?
Sure. We have to be careful not to get sucked into the details of one article or another at times. Especially once we know what we’re working on and we’re clear on our telos, our goal, our purpose. Once we have our telos, our end in sight, we can focus on it and “close the mechanism” (a quote from For Love Of The Game, a baseball romance).
But it pays to listen to the noise! To listen for the suffering to relieve, or the joy to amplify.
I think we’ll find, like we’re finding now, that we innovated ourselves away from some of the intrinsically good things in life… quiet, community, physical connection. Maybe when Steve said “no to the hundred other good ideas that there are” he said “no” to naturally, intrinsically good values like quiet, community, and physical connection in order to amplify an innovated values like notification, automation, and remote connection.
It almost sounds like his focus brought us more noise.