I have a habit that has served me well.
And occasionally made things much harder than they needed to be.
When I don’t know how to do something, I learn.
I read the book. Buy the course. Watch the training. Ask someone who’s done it.
More recently, I ask AI.
It’s a useful instinct.
Right up to the point where information stops being the problem.
Because eventually something strange happens.
You have too many good answers.
One person tells you to build a funnel. Another says forget funnels and build relationships.
One says launch. Another says evergreen.
One says narrow your positioning. Another says follow your curiosity.
One says systemise everything. Another says the thing making your work valuable is precisely the part that cannot be systemised.
And the difficult part is that they can all be right.
AI has made this worse, not better. I can ask for fifty positioning strategies and have them before I’ve finished my coffee.
When options become abundant, filtration becomes scarce.
More answers stopped helping a while ago.
What I was short of was a way to decide which of them deserved to become mine.
Good advice is harder to reject
Bad advice is relatively easy. You can usually see the problem.
Good advice is more dangerous.
Especially when it comes from someone successful.
They have evidence. They have results. They can explain exactly why the thing worked.
And somewhere between listening to their experience and trying to learn from it, something subtle happens.
Their evidence becomes your instruction.
I’ve noticed this in myself.
Someone I respect explains a model and my first instinct is to ask:
How do I use this?
I’m getting better at asking a different question:
Should I?
Those are not the same question.
Something can be intelligent. Proven. Profitable. Elegant.
And still not belong in the business you’re building.
I needed a filter, not another framework
I’ve been going through Business By Design recently. There’s plenty in it I find useful.
But I noticed I didn’t want to do what I’d done so many times before.
I didn’t want to take somebody else’s complete system and install it wholesale.
Nor did I want to reject useful ideas simply because they arrived in someone else’s language.
I needed more than yes or no.
So I started using a simple decision filter. I’ve been calling it the Resonant Prism.
The name comes from the metaphor.
A prism doesn’t create the light that enters it. It reveals what’s already there.
That’s the job. Not to tell me what to think. To help me see more clearly what I’m looking at.
Which means everything gets to enter.
Business advice. Marketing tactics. Books. AI suggestions. Client feedback. Coaching models. Ideas I disagree with. Ideas I desperately want to be true.
Even my own frameworks.
Nothing gets automatic admission. Nothing gets rejected simply because it came from somewhere else.
It gets examined.
And the first question is the one I keep returning to:
Has reality demonstrated this, or is it still theory?
That doesn’t make an untested idea worthless. It means I should know what I’m holding.
Instruction says: do this.
Evidence says: this happened.
The second is far more useful to me. Tell me what you tried. Tell me what happened. Tell me where it failed.
Then let me decide what that means in my circumstances.
Because your evidence is not automatically my evidence.
I can borrow your hypothesis. I still have to meet reality myself.
What it costs is the first question, not the last
Something can work and still fail the next test.
Business advice tends to evaluate ideas by business outcomes. Will it grow revenue? Increase conversion? Save time?
All reasonable questions. Just not the first ones.
My first question is more personal:
What will this cost the life the business is supposed to support?
Health. Family. Energy. Integrity. The ability to remain present in my own life.
I’ve carried enough responsibility to know how easily capability becomes justification.
You can carry it. So you do.
You can make the strategy work. So you should.
You can tolerate the cost. So apparently the cost is acceptable.
I don’t believe that anymore.
A strategy that strengthens the business by weakening the life supporting it has failed the test. Even if it works.
Which is why an idea now leaves with one of five outcomes rather than two.
Adopt. It fits. The evidence is sufficient. Use it.
Adapt. The principle is useful, the expression isn’t. Keep what’s true and translate it.
Test. Interesting. Plausible. Not yet proven here. Run the smallest experiment that lets reality answer.
Park. Good idea. Wrong season. Return when the conditions are right.
Reject. It doesn’t fit. Put it down. No guilt required.
Park has been unexpectedly liberating. You don’t have to destroy an idea simply because you aren’t going to pursue it now.
But Test is the one doing the real work.
I’m living inside it at the moment.
I have an idea about helping experienced professionals identify the judgement they’ve earned and express it in a way other people can recognise. I’ve called that work Signal Expression.
I can construct an elegant argument for why it should work. I can connect it to my own experience. I can see the intellectual architecture. I can write articles about it.
None of that proves anyone wants to buy it.
Reality hasn’t answered yet.
So the honest response isn’t adopt. And it isn’t reject.
It’s test.
That distinction sounds small. It isn’t.
Without it, we turn uncertainty into identity.
The idea worked, therefore I’m right. The idea didn’t work immediately, therefore I’m wrong.
A test asks for neither conclusion. It asks what reality taught you.
What experience actually changed
I said something to my coach a few years ago that I’ve been thinking about ever since.
Whatever the problem is, I find the solution, but I don’t know there’s a name to it.
I’d learned by doing.
I’d built systems because problems needed solving. I’d developed ways of seeing things without knowing the formal language for what I was doing.
Later I’d meet the theory and think: oh. There’s a name for that.
At the time I described it as learning the theory after the practical.
I see something else in it now.
Experience wasn’t giving me more information.
It was changing how I filtered information.
I knew which details mattered. Which problems were symptoms. Which questions were worth asking. Which ideas sounded clever but wouldn’t survive contact with the business.
That’s judgement.
And it may be one reason experienced people struggle when they enter a new chapter.
We’re surrounded by people telling us what to do next.
The more interesting task is recognising what all those years taught us about how we decide.
The question underneath it
I’m still developing this. Reality may change it.
That’s rather the point.
But underneath the filter is a question that matters more to me than the filter itself:
How do you encounter other people’s ideas without surrendering your own judgement?
Not by becoming closed. Not by assuming you already know. Not by refusing expertise.
And not by endlessly collecting more of it.
You let the idea enter. You examine it. You notice what it asks of you. You test it against reality.
You keep what survives.
And you leave the rest behind.
Because maturity isn’t becoming impervious to other people’s ideas.
It’s becoming capable of learning from them without becoming governed by them.
We do not need more ideas.
We need better judgement.
And reality gets the final word.
Sometimes another article isn’t what you need.
Sometimes you need another person to help you hear yourself again.
Signal Fire is a one-to-one conversation for quietly capable people carrying responsibility, decisions or identities that no longer feel like their own.
I think the strongest idea here is the shift from asking “How do I use this?” to “Should I?” Good advice can still be wrong for the life you’re trying to build. I also liked the point that experience changes not just what we know, but how we judge what deserves to stay.