Episode Transcript
Welcome to Quiet the Noise, where we reveal practical and systematic ways to quiet the noise in our lives, focusing on smarter, more fulfilling living. My name is Gary LeBlanc. I'm the CEO of Zero dB and a life engineer. You know, this is going to be an interesting ride because, you know, I kept obsessing over how we're gonna approach noise and how this is gonna be different because there's a lot of stuff out there. And I was just thinking about really the point is how we connect with it and being aware of it. So I think the most important thing is to treat these words with a bit more nuance and noise is a perfect example of that. We know what noise is, but there are so many sources of noise we don't really even see the noise anymore. It's just life.
So what I wanted to do was I wanted to first dig into noise a bit and kind of where noise came from and what we're really talking about. So I like to get to this thing I call the life graph, the zero dB life graph. And it's essentially our journey through life. So, you know, you're born, so at time zero, you're a baby, you're rolling around and, you know, you're learning things.
You're bumping into things, you're noticing these different things in the air, and you start to become aware. So throughout this, you're doing all these things and you're learning and you're growing. So you're starting to become more aware of things. You're starting to avoid things that hurt maybe. And this goes on and you get this haphazard growth. I say haphazard, but it's life's mystery on how we grow when we're babies. It's just through trial and error.
So at around four or five years old, you start to pay attention to how people are seeing you. It could be somebody teased your hair or your stuttering, which I had very badly when I was a kid, or some other things. Your clothes might be different, and you start to get teased. And what this teasing does is the counterpoint is it creates a bit of an armor, right? You don't want to feel that way anymore.
It's humiliating, and you start to build this ego, this armor, this shell. So, you know, you're growing up, you're seven, eight years old, and this shell becomes more and more pronounced because just it being there almost begs for it to get stronger. You know, you become more and more aware of it, and your teenagers are a perfect example of this. So when you get to be a teenager, then you start to...
You know, have a bit more agency, you know, you hit puberty, you start to have a bit more, you know, gumption to get things done, and your ego becomes more expressed. And throughout our twenties, you know, our ego is right there. Like that's all that exists. At least for me, that was, and I think for a lot of people it is. And then, you know, you're not really sure when this happens. It could be a step change where somebody dies or something bad happens to you.
Or it could just be progressive linear growth. And by the time you get to, let's say, late 30s or 40s, you start to see the noise for what it is. So just imagine the growth curve is still going up, right? We're still growing. It's just not very intentional. And then all of a sudden, we cross, and we kind of pop our head above the noise for the first time. So it's kind of like you're in water, and you know, in water, you can't really see clearly. You can't really hear. It's muffled.
So this is kind of the same. When the noise is all there is, everything's muffled. We're not really getting a clear signal. And I'll explain that in a second, signal to noise ratio. But so you get to this point, everything becomes clearer. So what? Well, that's the point where you start to see the noise for what it was. And you start to be honest with yourself. And there's a certain level of self-awareness that you didn't have before. Now you see the noise for what it is, but then at the same time, you see all that wisdom you've gained over that time. And now without the noise being so deafening and you seeing it for what it is, you can really pick up on where you've learned, you know, where you've grown and what you know about yourself and really understanding the intention you want to really express for the rest of your life. So at this point, you have a bit of agency, right? So what I like to call them is nudges. This isn't, you know,
it's not a complicated word, but a nudge is the smallest measurable action that you could take towards a goal, towards an objective. So now that you have a certain amount of awareness, now you can start to compound these nudges in either quieting the noise or leveling up, right? So intentional growing versus just that haphazard growing when we're a baby. So intentional growing through nudges and then quieting the noise through nudges. And that could be, maybe you're gonna...
Change your group of friends. That's a huge source of noise. Maybe you're going to approach your job differently. You're going to frame things differently. Maybe conflict in your relationship is something you need to deal with. But the point is, you're going to eventually compound these nudges. And you're going to, these lines are going to diverge, right? So leveling up is going to go up and quieting noise is going to go down, right? The noise goes down, the leveling up, the growth goes up. And it's really...
It's really the gap between those two lines. That's where our power is. Like that's where our power is expanding, right? It's expanding by this compound effect of quieting the noise and leveling up. And, you know, I like to call that wisdom. You know, I believe wisdom is, uh, is a result of experience, right? So we have to go through things. We can learn things,
but until you really feel it, like you could read a million books on breaking up with someone, but until you break up with someone, you don't really know how it felt. Like it's the difference between digital and vinyl, let's say, where digital has 99.999% of the signal, you know, but vinyl has a hundred percent, but even though it's just that small little fraction of a percentage.
That's where all the feeling was. That's where the warmth came from. And I think that's what wisdom needs. It needs that feeling. It needs that warmth. You gotta experience it. It's just not gonna leave the same impression as if you just read about it. Like I could read about the Civil War. I'm sure it feels a little different being in it. So you have all this wisdom and really that's what life engineering is. Life engineering is about applying this wisdom, being more aware, and really understanding how you can nudge yourself to a better place. So just to kind of put a bit more context on noise. So in engineering, so I'm a mechanical engineer, and that's why I call myself a life engineer. I know it's pretty clever. You have this something called the signal-to-noise ratio, and it's essentially the purity, the quality of a signal, right? Versus how much noise there is. So
What you do is if you decrease the noise, the ratio, the signal-to-noise ratio goes up, right? And that's really what noise is. It's taking away from the purity of an experience. Because noise by its implication is valueless. It's actually not even valueless. It's a negative on everything. It's not even neutral. It's a huge suck of energy. So that's what we want to be aware of. And...
One of the key sources of noise, and that's how we show up in life, is character. So character defined, you can have your personality. That's essentially your character expressed, your character in action. Maybe it's like empathy as to compassion, as our character is to our personality. So you know, our character is expressed through how we behave, you know? And oftentimes, you know, we talked about ego before, oftentimes what happens is that shell we have, that shell we have is almost, it's almost like it's transmuting our true character. So we have this big ego shell and we have a true nature to us, but this ego shell, it transmutes everything. It converts it into a person you're not.
Right? And it's this, it's this incongruence between who you truly want to be, who you truly are, and who you think you have to express yourself as. And I believe when you start to quiet the noise in your life, when you start to deal with that shell, right? Then you can be your truer self. And that's where your character's going to shine through and you'll get less noise from that incongruency, you know, and obviously it could be something like one of our pillars is obviously honesty. So what happens? Like what's noise in honesty? Well, noise is lying. So you dig a deeper, deeper hole. We all know the same story. And Sam Harris wrote a great book on lying. And there are a lot of philosophers who talk about this absolute, I think it was McCaskill, I believe, talked about absolute truth and no matter what the situation. But anyway, regardless, there's no danger in us becoming too honest. So to make our intention to be more honest is going to create less noise in our lives. Now, what prevents us from being honest oftentimes is the fear, right? The fear that fuels that ego. It's like, if I'm honest about who I am, well, maybe the person won't like me. And this is a real thing. Like it's a, you know, I say this is a real thing. I feel this all the time, right?
Is my true self going to be worthy enough to be friends with these people? Like, are they gonna like me? And you know, you're afraid of a pseudo connection. You're afraid of a phantom connection being broken. You know, that connection has no inertia behind it anyway. So obviously, you should be honest, right? And...
you know, what you are you attract. So you'll start to create these strong covalent bonds in your friendships versus, you know, all these weak connections you have. So that's one example of noise and honesty. And, you know, that's an easy example would be compassion as well, right? So compassion is another pillar. Well, what happens? Well, too much judgment. There's a lot of noise with judgment. You're judging situations. You're creating anxieties. Like these are obvious, obvious sources of noise in our life and they're very, they're very almost empirical. It's like they're so innate, like they come from such a deep place that it manifests in a very strong way when there's a huge incongruence and you can't raise it, like you can't escape it, you know? It's just something that's always gonna be with you until it's addressed. So
All that being said, that's what we want to do in the, well we, that's what I want to do in the podcast. Andrew's gonna join us for the Character Code sessions. So, you know, I keep saying Joe Rogan has his MMA sessions. So that's kind of the setup for the Character Code. We're gonna have Character Code sessions.
And all of our sessions are going to be different metaphors. So a different source of noise. It's going to be kind of cool. At the end, we're going to have like a mosaic of all these different sources of noise. And the beauty is we're going to have a lot of tactics, a lot of tactics to reduce those. So the only thing we need is a bit of motivation and I'll help reduce the friction of getting these things done. So I don't know how long they're going to last. They're going to last as long as I guess they do. They won't be three hours though because it'll be pretty boring watching me for three hours. But figure maybe a half an hour and we're gonna have guests often times too. It's great to get perspective. A lot of what I'm gonna talk about is just multiple perspectives anyway. Just bring it all together. So yeah, I hope you, I don't know, spread the word. Subscribe. I'm just kidding, but spread the word if people would dig this. I love doing it.
It's just the first one, but I'm sure the future me loves doing it. So, uh, all right, take it easy. That's another episode of Quiet the Noise.
