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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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Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.