If you're exhausted from thinking, but it doesn't feel like anything meaningful is moving forward, you might be solving the wrong problems.

Good morning and welcome to the Increase Your Impact Podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 2,212.

There's a powerful distinction between signal and noise.

Signal are the things that truly matter. And noise is everything

that feels important, but it really isn't. The problem happens in our own minds because they can

feel identical. And that's when we experience paralysis by analysis. We start to overthink, debate, over refine, try to sharpen details, but we really can't

wrap our minds around the things that really matter.

And these are the things that aren't truly moving the needle.

There's a mental model that we've talked about before.

It's called bike shedding. It comes

from the concept, this concept introduced by a British historian, Surreal Parkinson, back in the

1950s. And he observed that organizations will spend a disproportionate amount of time

debating trivial issues, like what color to paint the bike shit, because

everyone else feels qualified to have an opinion.

Meanwhile, these complex, important high-stakes issues like building a nuclear reactor get

far less discussion because they're hard, they're technical, they're uncomfortable.

It takes a lot of time.

And we do the exact same thing.

We want to tweak the logo.

We want to reorganize the notes.

We want to debate minor details.

All of these things while avoiding the heavier conversations, the harder decisions, the things that are the real signal.

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