Clarity Comes From Subtraction, Not Force

In 1994, when a powerful earthquake triggered a citywide blackout in Los Angeles, something unexpected began happening. Emergency hotlines lit up with calls—not from people reporting injuries or fires, but from residents who had spotted a strange, glowing streak stretching across the sky.

Some thought it was smoke. Others feared it was a chemical plume drifting in the darkness. It wasn’t either.

They were looking at the Milky Way.

For the first time in decades, the sky over Los Angeles was dark enough for people to see their own galaxy. The stars hadn’t changed brightness, and the sky hadn’t morphed into something new. The only thing that changed was the disappearance of noise—the wash of city lights that normally drowned out everything subtle.

The mind works the same way. Clarity doesn’t usually arrive through effort or force. It shows up when the unnecessary quiets down.

Most people try to fix a clarity problem by adding more—more planning, more thinking, more frameworks, more effort. But clarity is rarely an addition problem. It’s almost ​always a subtraction one​.

But before you can subtract, you need to understand the two types of noise that hide your signal.

Why Clarity Feels Harder Now

Think about how a typical morning unfolds.

You wake up, turn off your alarm, and even before you sit up, your phone throws a stream of inputs at you: messages waiting for replies, emails marked urgent, notifications competing for attention, reminders you forgot to dismiss, and thoughts you postponed yesterday that return without warning.

None of these things is individually overwhelming, but together they create a low-grade mental tension that lingers throughout the day.

You haven’t taken a single intentional action, yet your ​attention already feels divided​.

This is why clarity feels elusive. The problem isn’t a lack of direction. It’s the presence of too many competing signals.

Noise comes from the outside world and from inside your own mind. Each plays a different role, and both can silence the signal beneath them.

Hick's Law: When the World Overwhelms You

In the 1950s, psychologist William Hick ran a series of simple reaction-time experiments. He sat volunteers in front of a panel of lights and buttons. Their task was easy: press the button that matched the light that turned on. With one or two options, people responded almost instantly. But as Hick added more lights—three, four, five—their reaction time slowed sharply.

It wasn’t a small slowdown. Every ​added option​ created a disproportionate delay.

From this, Hick uncovered something powerful: The more choices we face, the slower and more fatigued we become when deciding.

This isn’t just a laboratory phenomenon. It’s something you feel every day, especially in modern work and modern life. Once you recognize it, the “external noise” you experience becomes easier to see:

• A packed inbox where every email looks equally important
• A calendar that leaves no obvious breathing room
• Multiple projects that all seem like reasonable places to begin
• Half-finished tasks scattered across tabs, devices, and notes
• The small hesitation that shows up when choosing your next step

External noise overwhelms not with intensity, but with accumulation. It scatters your attention across micro-decisions until even simple actions feel heavier than they should.

But there’s a deeper layer of noise—one that doesn’t require a single notification.

Default Mode Network: The Mind That Never Sits Still

In the early 2000s, neuroscientist Marcus Raichle made an observation that changed how we understand the resting mind.

He was scanning subjects’ brains during cognitive tasks and expected neural activity to drop in the moments between them—after all, the mind should quiet down when it has nothing to do.

Instead, the brain lit up. Raichle discovered the Default Mode Network, the system that becomes active the moment your attention isn’t anchored to a task.

It produces a steady stream of internal chatter: memories, imagined scenarios, replayed conversations, worries, predictions, and unfinished loops.

This is internal noise. You’ve likely felt it in countless quiet moments:

• Replaying something you said days or weeks ago
• ​Worrying about outcomes​ you can’t control yet
• Slipping into worst-case storytelling during idle moments
• Drifting between unrelated thoughts anytime you try to focus
• Feeling mentally “busy” even when your day has been slow

External noise pulls your attention outward. Internal noise pulls it inward.

Both make the real signal harder to hear. And once you understand how both operate, clarity becomes less about trying harder and more about removing the layers that hide the truth beneath them.

Quieting the Noise to Reveal the Signal

The blackout in Los Angeles didn’t create a better sky. It simply removed the interference. The Milky Way didn’t need to shine brighter for people to see it. The city just needed to get quiet enough.

Your mind has its own version of that night sky. It holds instincts, priorities, and ideas that sit quietly beneath the surface, often overshadowed by brighter, more urgent distractions. They don’t need more intensity. They need more space.

Clarity usually isn’t a breakthrough. It’s a return—a rediscovery of something that was already there, waiting behind the noise.

So instead of asking, “How do I think better?”

A more useful question might be, “What noise can I remove?”

Because once the noise falls away, the signal tends to reveal itself—steady, familiar, and unmistakably yours.