Excess Noise

I play cards with a group of friends and have been doing so fairly regularly for over 20 years. Over those years, we’ve revised and invented many new games. Even though we have over 30 different card games to choose from, we invariably return to the same five or six simple games that we all enjoy and understand.

I remember one night trying to explain a brand new game and watching my friends’ eyes glass over. As interesting as the new rules of the game were—at least to me—they were excess noise to my friends, who just wanted to return to playing.

At a recent StoryBrand workshop I attended, one of the speakers noted something that stuck with me: “Customers don’t tend to buy the best products and services—they buy the products and services that are easiest to understand.”

This is obviously a good reason to be clear and concise in what you’re describing or selling, but it’s also a good reason to not offer too much. Just like in the card games, more unique twists and options in a game aren’t necessarily a good thing.

I coach soccer and have collected a lot of good drills over the years. But just as my friends’ attention spans dwindle as a card game becomes more complicated, I’ve noticed the kids’ attention spans dwindle as a drill becomes more complex. Even with a simple modification that could make the drill more effective, they quickly lose interest the moment they struggle to understand something.

Often, success isn’t achieved by creating something wonderful and new. It’s achieved by perfecting what you already do. And many times, new and different endeavours actually get in the way of doing something that you already do well.

This is true for many things we do. Online investor Andy Weissman advises that “in working with entrepreneurs, I often first ask them to consider what to remove from their service or application. Maybe this also applies more generally. We could then regularly embrace what happens simply by applying constraints to what we do.”

Weissman points out that there are many popular examples of addition by subtraction, including the unique self-deprecating comedy of Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield worked for decades as an unknown comedian until he figured out that “by eliminating every extraneous element, you could isolate what makes it work and just do that.” His rapid-fire routine of setup and punchline made him famous—and rich.

I’ve often heard people cite businessman Steven Covey’s advice to “keep the main thing, the main thing.” Covey also advised that “the key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”

I think a big part to that is not just focussing on priorities, but reducing all of the excess noise around them.