We no longer live in the world of lions and bears. Today, we inhabit the realm of bits and bytes.

Changes in habitat necessitate a change in habit, and humans have adapted to the digital age in powerful ways. Technology has driven our species far and fast over the past millennium, creating a safer and more prosperous world than we have seen at any point in human history. Where scarcity once reigned, abundance has taken its place.

Yet while we have taken many steps forward, new solutions to old problems often introduce a swath of unintended consequences. And as the digital realm has strengthened its grasp on our world, we are increasingly being washed away by the firehose of information. The result is a paradoxical age - an era that will either be known as a Digital Renaissance or the Digital Dark Ages. Only time will tell which.

Today, the promise of ever-present information - and the endless possibilities it enables - is held hostage, trapped in the jaws of distraction. We find ourselves immersed in a war of our attention, one that we must win in order to create the fulfilling future we wish to see. Yet we are slowly slipping backwards, losing battle after battle to Tik Toks, Reels, Tweets, and more. Each day we find ourselves falling further down the rabbit hole of distraction, playing the games of others instead of our own.

To win the war of attention, we must flip the script and take back the power of focus into our own hands. To do so requires a deep understanding of the terrain upon which we are fighting - and through the lens of human evolution, it becomes clear why we have slowly fallen behind. Yet while history offers clues, so to does it offer solutions - as long as we know where to look.

The battle is only just beginning, and strategies for victory will emerge if we do the work to find them.

A Battle of Signal and Noise

We find ourselves in this conundrum of attention for a simple reason - the course of human evolution has adapted us to an environment of scarcity, rather than one of abundance.

Yet that is no longer the world in which we live. Human innovation has slowly pushed us up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - our basic needs (food, water, shelter, etc.) are becoming increasingly satisfied, leaving us free to want more. Our freedom to pursue the things that we want, as opposed to the things we need, is at an all time high.

In today’s digital age, where any piece of information lies at the tip of our fingertips, the sense of opportunity is amplified. The future is abundant in possibilities - we are connected as a species in ways that we have never seen, creating a collective conscience of human intelligence. As such, the secrets of the world are being brought to light at breakneck pace. This interconnectedness is a primary driver of the progress we see today - infinite streams of information afford us the ability to tap into the knowledge of the world at a moment’s notice, allowing us to borrow and innovate faster than ever before.

It wasn’t always this way, though. Over time, technological innovation has led to compounding effects on the amount of information present in the world. Ever since the invention of the printing press in 1436, humans have been on the quest of amplifying both the amount of intelligence available to us, and the ability to spread it at scale. The telegraph, the telephone, the internet, social media - each innovation in information technology a new medium for transmitting the secrets of the world. The quest continues today with Tweets, Tik Toks, Reels, Youtube Shorts, Netflix Documentaries - on and on - each its own unique form of information. And each competing for your attention.

As these information streams have grown, so too have the demands on our abilities to process them. A confounding problem has emerged as a result - a story of signal and noise. Over time, the signal to noise ratio of our world has become drastically skewed. More information does not equate to more truth - for each story or fact, there are a million different ways to spin it. Signal is thus becoming more difficult to find - it remains relatively constant, failing to expand to fill the informational vortex we inhabit today. As a result, our world is providing us with more noise than ever before.

The challenge here lies in a fundamental flaw of human biology - evolution has not shaped our brains for these high noise environments. In the saga of human history, information has been scarce for much longer than it has been abundant. Information technologies are a new phenomenon, one to which we are still adapting as a species. Historically, we have only needed to process limited numbers of streams as a species, those most suited to a simple instinct - survival. When threats are all around you on an open prairie, your focus tends to tighten. Less distraction prevented our ancestors from missing critical needs - they attuned to what would keep them alive. They kept their peripherals narrow, focusing only on what mattered most.

We are thus armed with primitive brains in an advanced world. The end result of biology adapted for scarcity in a world of abundance is simple - confusion. We know not where to look, what to pay attention to. We are in need of an antidote if we are to win the the battle over our attention, and we would be wise to take a cue from those that have come before us.

The Illusion of Choice

The modern road to ruin is one of distraction, a shapeless path wandering back and forth with lack of purpose and direction.

Perhaps you have found yourself on this road at some point - it is the feeling of losing an hour doom scrolling through Twitter or Tik-Tok, buried in memes amidst the quest for cheap dopamine. I’ve been there too - few, if any, are immune. Behind the scenes, algorithms are amplifying the ability of media platforms to capture our focus and exert control over our time. The level of precision with which they are doing so is frightening, to say the least.

As a result, a paradox is now at play. In the age of infinite information, we can direct our attention in more ways than have ever been possible. Yet the majority of our options are trap doors masquerading as friendly bread and breakfasts - ‘come stay a little while, and we will satisfy the desires of your heart’, they say. But upon leaving we find ourselves emptier than when we first arrived. They promise us signal, but all we get in return is more noise.

Through this lens, one of the great illusions of the world becomes clear - while our choices appear infinite, they are in fact the opposite. If we are to get what we want out of our lives, there are only a finite number of roads we can travel to do so. The set of choices we can truly make is a much smaller subset of the options that are afforded to us.

The best story I’ve come across to highlight the dichotomy between choices and options comes from the late mental performance coach Trevor Moawad in his book It Takes What it Takes. In it, he shares a story from his time working with NBA legend Vince Carter when he was at the back end of his career.

Known as a high flyer early on, Carter had begun to shy away from highlight reel dunks as he aged. His rationale: explosive dunks were placing more stress on his body, making recovery challenging both over the course of a game and the course of a season. To him, these decisions were representative of the illusion of choice - if Carter wanted to extend his ability to perform at his peak later into his career, every windmill dunk was a disservice to that vision. So while each breakaway appeared to the casual fan as an option for Carter to cement himself on SportsCenter’s Top 10 segment, in his mind it was not a choice worth making.

Moawad sums up the lesson he took from Carter well, writing:

“Do we have the luxury of choice if excellence is what we aspire to?”

The answer is a resounding no. A world full of abundant possibility is also one filled with endless opportunity for distraction. The number of things competing for your attention continues to amplify day by day, yet the set of choices that is consistent with the vision you have for your self remains constant. More options do not beget more choices. The pursuit of excellence requires that you must find a place to plant your flag. Sacrifice the things you like that don’t matter, in favor of the things you love that do.

The Game of Attention

The Illusion of Choice has natural applications to the game of attention.

Here, choices determine the answer to the question ‘what am I paying attention to?’. And if we are to live the best versions of our lives, the response cannot possibly be ‘everything’. Pursue everything, and we run the risk of pursuing nothing. We must recognize the illusion of choice at play and place boundaries around our attention so that we can take back control of our focus.

And so, let me propose the best antidote I have found, a counter-intuitive red-pill in a world in which we are encouraged at all points to ‘open our minds’: close yours instead. Make a contrarian bet to seal off your attention - constrict your focus to play a game of filters in the hope of re-exerting control over the inputs seeking to influence your attention - and as a result, your actions.

Such a strategy may come off on the surface as ‘closed-minded’. But consider this - perhaps the game of open-mindedness is played internally, rather than externally. Perhaps the goal is to have strong opinions that are weakly held, convictions you are constantly squaring against information relevant to those convictions. To take a beginner’s mind to any piece of data that you allow into your mind rather than every piece outside of it.

To do so requires a strategy, and it is here that we can borrow from Nobel Prize winning scientist Richard Feynman and his ‘12 Favorite Problems’ model. A physicist by trade, Feynman is regarded today as one of history’s great polymaths, contributing to areas such as quantum electrodynamics and the Manhattan Project over his lifetime. When asked how he was able to live such a broadly impactful life, he responded:

“You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while, there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”

Feynman’s approach to creativity was thus to establish boundaries around his attention - his ‘dozen favorite problems’ - so that he could play with each of them infinitely and in unique ways. Through this lens, a lesson about closed and open minds take shape. It is not an either or debate, but rather a question of ordering. Close your mind your first, so that you may more readily open it later. Identify the questions that pull at your soul, the ones that you cannot help but feel the spark of curiosity to pursue, and let them guide your attention like beacons in the night. And as your focus illuminates new information along the way, open your mind to think like a scientist. Square it against your convictions to help crystalize your understanding of the problem at hand.

The catch here is that in order to live the life you want, rather than the one the world tells you to, you must spend time thinking about what your favorite problems look like. The questions that pull at your soul will be unique - as a comprehensive set, your ‘twelve problems’ cannot possibly be identical to someone else’s. Only you can look internally and ask yourself what truly draws the best out of you.

The questions we ask ourselves influence the ways in which we see the world, serving as filters that sift and parse the information around us. They are a powerful lever to pull in the war of attention, and the power to set these filters lies within your control. Choose your filters and the path to victory becomes clear..

Choose your filters, take back your life.

Filters at Play

Look around the world at those that have made sense of it, and you will see filters at play under the surface.

When studying these success stories, we have a tendency to attribute their creations to some hidden genius not gifted to the masses, as if their brilliance has been pulled from the ether. Stories of mastery thus quickly become more akin to myth than fact - each a unique version of creativity spun out of some alignment of the stars. Genius takes on an air of mystery, difficult to understand yet even more difficult to replicate.

Yet when we consider high performers as a set and look across them in the search for similarities, hidden patterns emerge. These masters of the world do produce non-intuitive ideas in their respective fields, but it is in their processes for doing so that they are more alike than different. The closer you look, the more you recognize the ways in which they place boundaries around their attention - guardrails that direct their focus and shape their perspectives, so that they may express in a way that helps them uncover new aspects of reality.

Consider that every great invention is downstream of an insight a human had about the world. In many cases, these ideas are born out of singular perspectives - a worldview unique to the creator, shaped over years of experience in their field. In the world of startups, such a perspective is often referred to as a founder’s ‘one big idea’. It is a lens - a filter - they apply to the world, allowing them to see opportunities that are hidden to others. To borrow from Charlie Munger, they “take a simple idea and take it seriously.”

In this regard, a number of the world’s highest performers and companies stand out:

• Elon Musk has built his companies around a singular vision - How do I create a more abundant future for humanity? Tesla, Space X, and even his recent acquisition of Twitter are all downstream of this one big idea.

• Jeff Bezos founded Amazon around the principle of How do I improve the customer experience? This filter directly influences the company’s operation, nearly 30 years after its inception.

• Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, is perhaps best well known for the simplicity filter he applied when creating the Walkman. He vetoed the addition of a recording functionality, arguing that more was actually less and such a feature would obscure its true use case. The Walkman soon became one of the best selling products in history.

• McDonalds began by filtering out 99 percent of the American diner menu in its early years, simplifying its menu to the bare essentials. As a result, the Dollar Menu was born.

• Starbucks kept their focus narrow at the onset of the company, choosing to focus only on coffee and waiting nearly 30 years before adding any type food to their menu.

• Twitter filtered out length from their communication platform, setting a 140 character constraint initially that took nearly 11 years to expand to 280.

These examples get at the core of what filters are - while they appear on the surface to be about input, their true purpose lies in the domain of expression. The information you attune to will ultimately determine the actions you take, the things you build. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. If you want to express in a certain way, then being strategic about your inputs matters.

And so, recognize that the path to creative expression often begins by choosing to study a narrow band of ideas. Determine the subjects where your most powerful inclinations lie and monopolize the insights they provide. In doing so, you will find your own version of mastery and create the edge you desire.

Simple Wins (Why Filters Work & How to Mess Them Up)

Why do filters work? Why have some of the world’s greatest minds employed them to resounding success? Because in complex environments, simple wins.

As humans, this is the domain in which we operate - a chaotic, ever-changing world where the past is often a poor predictor of the future (although we like to think the opposite). Abundant information introduces layers of complexity to our decision making processes, placing high demands on our energy and requiring that we sift through the noise to find truth. The conundrum here is that while information is a requisite for making high quality decisions, more is not necessarily equivalent to better. In practice, there are often thresholds at which our ability to grasp what is in front of us is confounded by all there is to be said about it. We get lost in the details, losing the forest for the trees.

Amidst these conditions, simplicity serves as a superpower. It allows us to zoom out, to find the details with the highest value return and to discard the rest. It is through this light that the core value proposition of filters becomes evident - they provide simple barriers through which we can pass information, subsequently distilling the noise into our own versions of signal. By defining our filters up front, we become better positioned to determine what matters and are more easily able to identify leverage points in the world as they are presented to us.

Yet while simplicity is often our target, we often times re-introduce complexity into the equation unintentionally. We seek to design systems for every contingency, ones that account for every wrench the world may throw at us. It is here that we must be honest with ourselves, stripping out our egos to recognize that the world is more complex than we can possibly imagine. We cannot account for every possibility it might offer. Thus in creating systems that will allows us to win the game of attention, it is critical to resist the urge to complicate your filters at all costs.

Like many great aspects of life, filters thrive in the presence of balance - too few, and you are destined to be washed away by the information firehose; too many, and you will simply be spinning your wheels trying to keep up. The point here is to play a game of minimal effort on the intake, so that you can spend more energy thinking, experimenting, and combining the information that makes it through. If you are at a point where you find it difficult to maintain the information filters you have enacted, it is likely that you have gone too far. Constraints are useful in the pursuit of clarity, and amongst that clarity the space for creativity emerges. Yet balance must be struck - constrain too much, enact too many rules, and you ensure there is no room for experimentation.

The legendary music producer Rick Rubin portrays this dichotomy between soft and rigid filters well. In his new book The Creative Act, he introduces a triad to contextualize the process of attention, writing:

“Source makes available. The Filter distills. The vessel receives.”

To Rubin, the world provides us with more source material - more information - than we could possible make sense of. As a result, we learn over the course of life to employ filters that inevitably reduce the information around us to what we deem most essential. Yet while he recognizes the inevitability of filters, he encourages us to find room for the aspects of the world that do not easily fit in our resulting worldviews, claiming “The more raw data we can take in, and the less we shape it, the closer we get to nature.”

From this perspective, we can better clarify the role of filters. They are not about the reduction of the quality of the information, but rather the reduction in the quantity. Think of your filters as boundaries rather than sieves - their role is to constrain the types of information you allow to capture your attention, rather than to make judgements about the information on the intake. Allow the information that you want into your vessel, your focus, in as close to its purest form as possible so that you may play with its essence once it is is inside. More is less, and less is more.

And so, a crucial key when it comes to the art of filters is to start with a strong foundation, seeking to strike a balance between rigidity and fluidity. Resist the urge to overcomplicate your questions - start simple and evolve alongside them over time. Because where the complex reigns, simple wins.

Final Thoughts - Insights from Practice

Some final thoughts on the art of filtering.

Consider that the more you study and apply your own perspective to the world, the more broadly applicable you will find your filters to be. For while they are powerful weapons in the war for your attention, they are also useful tools for understanding the domains of human behavior and psychology. As you recognize and shape your own filters, you will begin to notice how they do the same for those around you.

An analogy from the field of optics is helpful here. Think of filters like a refractory device, prisms that alter beams of light according to the specifications to which they are cut. Prisms can serve many functions - they can bend, split, reflect, invert, and even combine light, creating new ways of expressing their initial inputs. Yet the output of each depends on its design, in such a way that two non-identical prisms will take the same beam of light and produce entirely different results. In the same way that prisms alter the shape of light, filters alter the shape of information. No two filters are alike - apply two different sets to the same source of information, and unique insights emerge for each.

Through this lens, some lessons emerge.

First, a hack exists for you to apply. If you seek to become unique, make the rules for yourself - your filters - different from those of others. If the goal is to nourish a voice that is distinctly yours, recognize that playing by the rules of others is a disservice to that quest. Doing so will only lead to you amplifying their pre-existing perspectives, rather than creating one for yourself. So, rather than directing your focus externally along with the spotlight of the world, first shine it inwards like a flashlight illuminating the depths of your soul. Choose to play the game at the intersection of your unique curiosities, bringing in more of yourself and less of others in the process. Leave space for you.

Secondly, the more you play the game of filters, the more you will recognize it as a multiplayer affair. To employ filters ourselves is to acknowledge their existence in others; if we are to cultivate a perspective that is unique to us, we must recognize people around us are doing the same. This process begins playing out in each of us from the moment we are born - the world is too complex to navigate without a method for reducing the source material it offers. Biases build in each of us as a result, resulting in filters that distill perspective out of truth. Each of us develops a point of view over time, a filter that refracts ideas in the background but is ever evolving. These shape our decisions and provide a looking glass through which to view human behavior. As the marketing master Rory Sutherland writes in his book Alchemy:

You cannot describe someone’s behavior based on what you see, or what you think they see, because what determines their behavior is what they think they are seeing.”

By paying attention to the filters you impose, you will be more easily able to understand the ways in which others are doing the same.

Thirdly, appreciate that as you practice the art of filtering over time, what once required effort will soon begin to require little at all. As always, the best way to get better at the game is to play it. The more you employ them, the more attuned your filters will become - your mind will begin to instinctively tune out the information that does not serve your vision, coalescing into a perspective unique to you. Connections between your interests will emerge if you allow them, like barricades conjoining to create a castle wall around your attention.

Lastly, recognize that filters are meant to be dynamic. They are not static walls destined to stand for the duration of your life, but should rather shift alongside the sands of your interests. As you take in more of the world and find new areas to which you are drawn, allow your filters to adapt to match them. Think of your them like a flashlight - keep the beam of light itself narrow, so that you may better avoid distraction. But do not be afraid to change the direction in which it points, illuminating new parts of the world so that you may better see amidst the dark. Such flexibility will allow you to better navigate a chaotic and ever-changing world, while at the same time always knowing where you’ve planted your flags to return home to.

And so, I’ll leave you with this: the path to clarity is in your hands, if you wish to take hold of it. The game of attention is won by constructing boundaries around your focus, and doing so will enable you to parse out signal from a world full of noise. Look internally and identify the questions that pull at your soul, and allow them to direct your attention like a compass finding true north. Play the game for yourself, and find what the path to victory looks like for you along the way.