Greg McKeown

of information communication.

And if I were to summarize that law in its simplest possible form, it would be this, is clarity equals signal divided by noise.

Now, that is really important.

And unless somebody is particularly mathematically inclined, it won't be obvious even when you first hear it what the importance of that is.

But what it means is that noise is the determining factor.

A tiny reduction in noise will have a greater impact on clarity.

than increasing signal.

That's the point.

And in fact, if you just want to stay mathematical for a moment, if you can reduce noise to zero, then what happens to clarity is it reaches almost to infinity.

That is the law.

And that isn't just like a nice idea.

That law has been utilized by almost all technologies that are trying to send out messages or receive them ever since.

And so that is a great deal of our modern life is shaped by that.

It's a very profound insight.

All right.

So if you can reduce the noise, clarity increases.

That's the import.

Now you use the phrase, I know the phrase, of course, use that phrase myself, that Gandhi, one of his key input insights for being able to have this disproportionate impact in India was to reduce himself to zero.

If I can cut out that noise, then that will help.

And he was clearly correct.