The Battle For Signal In The Noise

Lately I’ve been thinking less about “consumption” and more about “sensemaking.”

We’re swimming in infinite feeds, endless alerts, never-ending scrolls of information (often conjecture, lies and opinions with little regard for facts and sources). 
But what really matters is not how much we consume… it’s how we filter. 
How we choose what to keep, what to discard and what to transform into something meaningful.

Editing my conversation with Patrick Tanguay from Sentiers this week for Six Pixels of Separation – The ThinkersOne Podcast, I kept coming back to this…

Patrick is like me… he doesn’t just read. 
He builds a system. 
He reads, filters, archives, connects and then outputs. 
It’s not about hoarding knowledge… it’s about making sense of it.

That’s a subtle but essential distinction.

Because in this age of AI, consumption is no longer scarce. 
Machines can ingest everything… indiscriminately. 
Every book, every article, every paper, every post, every transcript. 
Infinite intake. 
But they don’t have taste… yet.
They don’t have judgment… yet.
They don’t have the quiet moment where you pause, stare out the window and realize: this one matters (and this may be the only thing these machines never get?).

Humans do this.

And that’s where I think most people stop too soon. 
They stop at reading. 
That’s only one-third of the equation. 
For me, the loop looks more like this: read, take notes while reading/take the time to reflect. 
But it can’t end there either. 
The last part is output. 
Doing something with it.

That might be as simple as sharing an idea on LinkedIn. 

Or it could become an entire podcast conversation, a slide in a keynote presentation, an article, or a segment for my weekly radio hit. 
I’m constantly thinking: Where can I best take what I just learned and turn it into a learning moment where we all get to grow together?

That’s the full arc. 

Reading… reflecting… sharing/outputting that which is worthy. 
Without that last step, all the highlights in your Kindle or notes in your Moleskine risk staying locked away. 
The real value emerges when those fragments are stitched back into culture, conversation and connection.
And if AI does eventually learn to mimic our sense of taste (reflecting our own patterns back to us) will we become better at filtering or simply more predictable?

It’s easy to forget that the value isn’t in the feed… it’s in the filter.

That’s what Patrick reminded me.
And it left me wondering…

In a world where AI can consume everything, will our edge come from how much we take in… or from how carefully we decide what’s worth passing on?

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