Signals I Pay Attention To

On a clear night, the stars matter because there is darkness around them. If the sky were packed edge to edge with light, no single star would register. It would be bright, but meaningless. What makes the stars visible is not their abundance, but the space that holds them.

I’ve come to notice something similar with signals. Signals don’t amplify through addition. They emerge through subtraction. Clarity rarely arrives by adding more - more information, more opinion, more activity. It arrives when enough noise is removed for something to separate itself. What remains after subtraction is usually the signal.

What follows are some of the signals I’ve come to notice and pay attention to over time. Not rules or advice—just patterns that tend to emerge once the background clears.

Energy

Of all the signals I pay attention to now, energy is the most important.

In the heat of an interaction or a decision, I still find it easy to get caught up in facts - pros and cons, logic, timing, surface appeal. But over time, I’ve learned that those details are rarely decisive. The signal that matters most comes afterward.

Every interaction, opportunity, or decision leaves a residue. It either adds energy or it takes it away. There’s no neutral. The effect may be subtle, but it’s always there. Do I feel more awake, or slightly depleted? More energized or less energized?

I don’t try to assess this in the moment. I notice it later, often without commentary. That after-effect has proven more reliable than whatever rationale I could assemble at the time. So the primary signal I pay attention to now is energy - not intensity or excitement, but the net balance it leaves behind.

Urgency

Another signal I pay attention to is urgency - not as a fact, but as a form of communication.

I’ve noticed that when someone pressures me to make a decision within twenty-four hours, my interest usually drops rather than rises. I often find myself quietly amused when that same offer resurfaces a couple of days later, still very much available. By then, whatever urgency existed has evaporated entirely.

I don’t find it offensive or alarming, just informative. When everything is marked urgent, nothing actually is. The mailbox fills with envelopes stamped “urgent,” and they cancel each other out.

A friend of mine has a simple rule: he only responds to the second email someone sends. Not out of indifference, but as a filter. If something is truly urgent, it tends to resurface on its own.

Taste

One place I notice signal very clearly is taste, something I’ve written about before as I ate my way through San Sebastian. I’ve always loved espresso and cacao. What draws me to both is that they are already complete, just as they are. The flavour is fully formed in the bean itself - shaped by air, altitude, humidity, soil and time. Nothing needs to be added.

For that reason, flavored coffee or flavored cacao has never held much appeal for me. It feels like diffusion - something layered on top of a signal that was already pure. When the base is strong, additional flavor doesn’t clarify it. It blurs it.

Competence

Another signal I pay close attention to is competence on a topic. I consider myself an autodidact. I learn most things on my own, and over time I’ve noticed that the fastest way to understand a new subject is to look for signals of competence and influence.

Today, there’s very little friction to expressing an opinion. Anyone can publish a post, a tweet, or a thread. Volume is cheap. What’s harder to fake is influence on other thoughtful people.

When I want to understand a field, I pay attention to who everyone else is quoting. Not who’s loudest—but who keeps appearing across independent sources. In artificial intelligence, for example, you can read thousands of takes. Or you can notice that conversations keep circling back to neural networks and to Geoffrey Hinton. That repetition isn’t accidental.

A simple trick I once read—and still use—is this: take any three books on a subject, flip to the bibliography, and see which names appear most often across all of them. That person is usually the signal. I start there.

Bubbles

I’ve also come to find the structure of bubbles fascinating. Not prices, but signals. There’s no better place to see this than in meme stocks.

What happened with the GameStop stock in 2021 and later dramatized in the film Dumb Money (it was no foreign film but was still excellent) wasn’t just a market event. It was a memetic one. Ideas spreading faster than understanding. Signals amplifying each other.

I notice a familar pattern. When the cleaning lady mentions a stock in passing, a bubble is beginning to form. When the cashier at the grocery store checkout casually mentions the same stock, a bubble in full swing. When the cleaning lady, the cashier and the Uber driver are all talking about the same stock, its only a matter of time before the bubble bursts.

Music

A final signal I love is music.

Silence can be described as auditory perfection. Every note, musical phrase, or piece is competing with silence—and silence is a very high bar. Most don’t clear it.

Most people can name a song or a piece that didn’t resonate with them. It wasn’t offensive. It simply wasn’t better than silence. Only what earns that interruption is worth listening to.

The same is true with writing. An empty page is perfect. Every word competes with it. Most don’t win.

I’ll stop here.

There are more articles about my various experiences on my writing page.