Happy Friday!
In our recent webinars, we’ve been exploring what truly supports creativity. We’ve had incredible and productive discussions on our writing spaces, our routines, and safety. But there are many challenges. Obstacles to our creativity and ultimately our productivity don’t stem from a lack of motivation or ideas, but from everything competing for our attention.
What happens when the mind becomes crowded with lists, obligations, and competing projects? And how do we find the signal, the one step that actually moves us forward?
Signal-to-Noise Ratio, and the Tango
Recently, I found myself overwhelmed by all the things I had to do to keep my life running smoothly. One morning last week, I woke up so overwhelmed that my mind was completely blank. At the same time, oddly, it was racing everywhere, wandering down strange little avenues of thought that I normally try not to visit because I have a system that tends to keep things on track.
Normally, I begin my day with the Self Acknowledgment Hug and the Word of the Day practice. It is a small ritual that quiets the emotional static long enough for the mind to settle, and when the mind settles, something interesting tends to happen. Insight appears. So that morning, I asked for the word that might help sort out the confusion.
The word that arrived was cohesion.
At first, this seemed simple enough. Cohesion meant getting the various projects I was working on into a natural order. I imagined lists that would move each project from beginning to middle to end. Writing projects, teaching projects, life projects, and, for the last 20 years, the tango.
I have started taking tango lessons again, which serves as an excellent reminder that the human body has several parts that do not automatically cooperate with one another. Tango requires moving your heels, torso, arms, and hips in ways that feel both elegant and slightly improbable. The left side of the body is doing one thing while the right side is doing something else, and somehow the result is supposed to look effortless.
Naturally, my response to this complexity was to begin making lists. Lists for tango, lists for writing, lists for life. Dozens and dozens of lists. At first, I felt better. The chaos appeared to be captured. Everything had a category, and every category had a plan. Unfortunately, nothing actually happened. The only measurable outcome was that I developed an impressive case of bronchitis, which was not on any of the lists.
On my desk, there is a book that sits where I can see the title all day long. The book is called What’s the Problem? It is an excellent book about reframing how we approach problems. After several days of heroic list-making, I began to suspect the book was quietly judging me, because clearly my difficulty was not a shortage of lists. Since my techniques were not producing results and I am a writer who strongly believes in the power of metaphors, I asked myself a different question. What metaphor would explain what was happening inside my brain?
It was midnight, and I was in bed scrolling when the answer arrived in a place one does not normally associate with philosophical clarity, a short video. The speaker said he had been studying how great innovators think, and he mentioned Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. What fascinated him was something called the signal-to-noise ratio in their thinking. According to him, Steve Jobs operated with roughly 80% signal and 20% noise, while Elon Musk seemed closer to 100% signal. Something about that idea cut straight through the fog. Within twelve hours, I had sketched a diagram and was beginning to see my problem clearly. It was not laziness, not disorganization, and not even the number of projects I had going at once. I had a noise problem.
The phrase signal-to-noise ratio comes from engineering and communications science. In the nineteen forties, mathematician Claude Shannon developed what became known as information theory while working at Bell Labs. Shannon was studying how information travels through systems such as telephone lines, radio waves, and early computer networks. Every communication system contains two things: the signal, which is the information you actually want to transmit, and noise, which is everything interfering with the message, including static, distortion, and random disturbances. Engineers discovered something important. Successful communication often depends less on increasing the signal and more on reducing the noise so the signal can be heard clearly. When the signal is stronger than the noise, the message arrives intact, but when the noise overwhelms the signal, communication collapses. It turns out the human brain works in much the same way.
But the word that had appeared earlier that morning kept returning to me: cohesion. The word comes from the Latin cohaerere, which means to stick together. In physics and chemistry, cohesion describes the way molecules cling to one another. Water forms droplets because its molecules tend to hold together rather than disperse. In writing, cohesion describes the invisible threads that allow ideas to flow naturally from one sentence to the next. When writing has cohesion, the reader moves forward easily because one idea leads naturally to another. Without cohesion, everything feels scattered.
That realization was uncomfortable. My life had lost cohesion. Everything was floating around like loose molecules. The lists I had been making were not restoring cohesion. They were simply cataloging the noise. When the mind is overwhelmed, it develops a peculiar habit. It begins to treat everything as equally important. That is the definition of noise. Noise includes unfinished tasks, imagined problems, research rabbit holes, reorganizing systems that were already organized, and buying tango shoes before learning tango.
Noise multiplies very quickly.
Signal does not.
Signal is usually quiet and often embarrassingly simple. Signal is simply the next real step. Not the entire plan, not the ten-year strategy, just the action that actually moves something forward. In writing, the signal is obvious once you see it. Write the next paragraph. Everything else, marketing strategies, website redesigns, research folders, reading about writing instead of writing is noise.
With tango, the signal is learning the next movement pattern. The noise is researching shoes, watching hours of tango videos, and wondering whether your left foot has always been this stubborn. In fact, tango turned out to be the perfect metaphor for cohesion. In tango, each side of the body must move differently, yet everything must remain connected through the center. The dance only works when the movements, though different, belong to the same pattern. Without cohesion, the dancer looks confused. With cohesion, the dancer looks graceful.
Life works the same way.
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in nineteen ninety -seven the company had hundreds of products. He walked to a whiteboard and drew a simple grid dividing consumer and professional products and desktop and portable machines. Then he eliminated almost everything else. Apple went from hundreds of products to four. That is what a high signal looks like. Everything else was noise.
And that’s when the tango metaphor began to amuse me. Imagine for a moment that Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are both dancing the tango. Steve Jobs would dance the tango the way he ran Apple. The floor would be mostly empty, eighty percent of the dancers would be politely escorted off the stage, the music would simplify, and the steps would be reduced to the absolute essentials. Somehow, the dance would look more beautiful than before because almost everything unnecessary had disappeared. Elon Musk, on the other hand, would approach tango as a physics problem. First, he would redesign the floor. Then he would calculate the optimal geometry of the steps. At some point, rockets might be involved. But the principle would remain the same. Eliminate the noise and keep the signal. Both approaches are impressive.
But watching tango reminds me of something slightly different. Perhaps the real difference between art and science is that both Steve and Elon forget the most important thing: finding a beautiful partner to dance with.
Because the dance itself, the shared movement, the connection, the coherence between two living beings, is where the signal finally becomes visible.
Everything else is just noise.
Join the Next Webinar
In our next session, we’ll continue this conversation by focusing on a practical skill every writer needs: learning to separate signal from noise inside a large project. Instead of facing an entire book, article, or creative idea all at once, we’ll explore how to break our work into manageable pieces so the next meaningful step becomes clear.
Using the Beyond Happiness Method framework, we’ll explore practical ways to break projects into manageable steps so that even small writing windows can move steadily forward.
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