Do you remember when you had to actually “dial in” a radio station?  You’d go through a bunch of static until you’d start to hear a song, and you would slow down as the song became louder and the static quieter.  Then you’d fiddle with the dial until it was just right and there was no static and all you could hear was the song. 

This demonstrates the idea of noise vs. signal.  In this case, the signal is exactly that, a signal broadcast by a radio tower that is picked up by the receiver in your radio.  The noise is the background -the random radio signals that come from hundreds of different sources and have no discernible pattern – they could be remnants of a radio signal from a station across the country or the remnants of the big bang (really!).

This concept of signal versus noise can also describe what it’s like to live in our current, information-saturated society.  To an unprecedented degree, there are massive amounts of information available to us.  From television and books, to the internet and Twitter, there are so many people and organizations creating information and sending it out that it’s bewildering.

Some of this information is valuable to us.  It relates to things that are important in our lives, and it’s relevant and accurate.  So much of it, though, is not relevant, accurate, or important.  Marketing, for example, has exploded to such point that there is almost no place that you can be without someone trying to “share” information with you – whether it’s waiting for the train, filling your car with gas, or using the bathroom.

So even though the signal, the amount of useful information, has increased, the noise has increased exponentially faster. 

What can you do about it?

The most important thing to do is become an astute judge of the information that is coming into your mind.  Not every piece of information has the same value.  Just like tuning in a radio station, you need to keep rejecting the noise until you get to the signal.  For example, be very deliberate where you get your news reporting.  Most traditional sources of journalism have swung over to the noise side of the spectrum.  The 24–hour “news” networks are just one example of this; there is probably 15 minutes of valuable information in every 24 hour period – the rest is just fluff (noise).

There will always be noise.  Our job is to filter it out, to find the signal that is too often being crowded out by everything else.  When you do get to the signal, you will find that decision-making becomes easier, because you have the right information to base your decisions on.  You will find you have more time and energy, because you aren’t getting bogged down considering all of the unimportant information.  Lastly, you will create a lot more clarity in the signals that you put out as you realize that the world doesn’t need more noise.