Cancel the noise.

I was in a Starbucks last week that got so loud my watch lodged a complaint.

For context, I actually like background noise. Most days a café is exactly the right amount of alive. This was something else.

The music, the orders being called out, three overlapping conversations, someone running a whole meeting on speakerphone. Not lively. Loud. My Apple Watch buzzed with a warning that the environment had crossed into the range that damages hearing.

I already had my AirPods in, so I switched them to noise cancellation.

The room didn't get quieter. It literally disappeared. In that clean space that opened up, I could think again.

A little piece of technology had just done, in half a second, something I am not always good at doing for myself.

I find that profound because it speaks to how capacity actually works.

We tend to talk about handling pressure as if it comes down to how much weight we can carry, a measure of toughness, grit, or tolerance. But the café didn't overwhelm me because I couldn't handle enough. It overwhelmed me because I was trying to take in too much at once.

And no amount of experience makes our attention infinite.

Your capacity for pressure isn't just about how much you can take. It's also about how much you refuse to carry.

I think of expertise as more than being excellent at the work. So many of the people who hold up best under pressure seem to develop a particular kind of judgment: they know what deserves their attention, which means they also know what doesn't.

Herbert Simon wrote about this more than half a century ago. In 1971, long before the feeds and the pings, he wrote that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

The scarce resource isn't information. It's our capacity to attend to it.

That's what I find so instructive about noise cancellation. Instead of simply trying to block everything out, it detects incoming noise and responds in a way that neutralizes it.

As a model for handling pressure, I think that's far more useful than simply gritting your teeth.

I wrote a whole book, Fired Up, around a pressure cooker analogy because it's still the truest picture I know of pressure at work. In that model, the heat is the demands coming at you, the valve is the resources you use to release pressure, and your capacity is the space inside the pot.

Pressure isn't the enemy.
A pressure cooker uses it to do its work faster. It only becomes dangerous when the demands outrun the available space and the ability to release pressure.

That’s where the loud café and the pressure cooker meet.

The more room you keep inside the pot, the more heat you can handle before the pressure turns on you.

So protecting your capacity isn't always about reducing the heat. Much of that heat is outside your control.

Sometimes it's about refusing to fill the pot with things that were never part of the meal.

So here are the three things I try to do to keep that capacity high.

Let’s get it…

The first is to notice when I've crossed my own line, which is harder than it sounds because most of us don't get a watch buzzing on our wrist.

We just start to notice the effects. A shorter fuse and narrower thinking. Decisions that are a little worse than they would have been an hour earlier. Sometimes I don't even realize it until I'm already there.

So I've had to learn my own warning signs, the tells that I'm past capacity rather than merely busy, and to treat them as information instead of pushing straight through them.

The second is to cancel what was never mine to carry.

I am very comfortable with the fact that not every input deserves my attention. The meeting I'm copied on out of habit or the debate that isn't mine to settle.

There’s a constant stream of notifications that seems intended to make somebody else's urgency feel like mine.

Which is a good example of why much of what drains us isn't the work itself, but rather everything around it.

So I try to be more deliberate about what I let in, the same way those AirPods were deliberate for me.

The third is to protect other people's capacity too.

This is the one I almost missed.

That same day, in that loud Starbucks, I had to jump on a video call. So I switched from the AirPods to a pair of over-ear, trucker-style headphones that cancel noise on both ends.

Not only could I not hear the room, but the person on the other end couldn't hear it either.

I hadn't only made it easier for myself to focus. I'd made it easier for them to focus on me.

Makes you think about how often we either protect or drain other people's capacity without realizing it. Sometimes it's the meeting that didn't need to happen or the problem we pass along without stopping to ask whether it really needs their attention.

Either way, making it easier for someone else to focus doesn't always require much from us. Sometimes it just means not adding more noise.

I do want to be clear here though, because "cancel the noise" can easily sound like "shut everyone out," and that's not what I mean.

I like the café. I like the hum of other people working around me, and some of what feels like noise at first is actually worth paying attention to. So the goal isn't to block everything out. It's to get better at deciding what deserves your attention and what doesn't.

That's really my point.

So instead of asking myself how to handle more, I focus on: What am I carrying right now that I could simply cancel?

One of the easiest ways to lose your capacity to handle everything coming your way is to keep giving your attention to things that never deserved it in the first place.

So learn your own warning signs, drown out the noise that was never yours, and when you can, make it easier for others to focus, too.

Most of this will never be visible to anyone else.

That may even be the point.

A lot of influence is quiet. It shows up in the pressure you don’t pass on, the distraction you don’t create, and the space you leave for someone else to think clearly.

Thanks for reading. Be easy!