The Creative Life — with Jim Kroft

# Understanding Signal to Noise as a Creative

## The 60/40 Rule for Prioritising What Moves You Forward

### In Short

**The 60/40 Split:** Why success isn’t about effort, but about the ruthless separation of deep craft from the noise of audience-building.

**The Jobs Maxim:** How treating “signal” as the next 18 hours—rather than next year—cures creative paralysis.

**Arts vs. Audience:** Reconciling the digital hell of promotion with the sacred work of making art.

**On My Radar:** “Love From, Imi” explores life, love, and identity in real time. From career pivots to relationship chaos, it’s honest, funny, and human.

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# 1. Intro

Many creatives don’t understand the difference between signal and noise.

Today, I want to clarify three things:

* What the concept is
* Why it is the key to building creative momentum
* How the framework shifts when you’re a creative rather than a CEO

I’m turning this over because of a video I saw of Kevin O’Leary discussing Steve Jobs’ approach to work. The segment on signal-to-noise fascinated me; it’s a frame I’ve been employing since a three-month bout of creative resistance last year.

It completely changed my life.

If you’re struggling to build momentum, this is for you.

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# 2. What Is Signal and What Is Noise?

To understand signal-to-noise, it’s best to invert it.

Noise is easier to understand than signal.

Obviously we all know how noisy modern life is with its intrusion of social media, AI slop, and how much we wrestle with distraction since the TikTok-ification of culture.

That’s a given.

But that’s not what we’re discussing here.

We are discussing what we do with our time day to day — more specifically — what choices we make to do this over that.

### Noise

Noise is the stuff that feels urgent but makes no material change to your life or your project.

Feeling stuck?

You’re probably too overrun with the immediate stuff that evaporates before the end of the day.

It has no consequence, no outcome. It just happens, day after day.

Then suddenly it hits you like a thunderclap:

Why am I so stuck when I’m working so hard?

You’re overrun with the noise and unable to hear the signal.

### Signal

Signal, on the other hand, is what cuts through the bullshit.

It moves you consequentially towards an intended outcome. With everything else yapping at you, you filter it out.

Bad signal equals noise.

You’re looking for your own frequency — to tap into the unspoken language of your own life.

Listen hard enough and you start to hear it.

You begin applying your own filters. You gain an internal feeling for how life is speaking to you.

Like having a stethoscope to hear the heartbeat.

Trouble is, too many of us are so distracted by inconsequential things that we live in a fog.

You have to hear the signal — and then act deliberately upon it.

Simply put:

If you remove the noise and concentrate on the signal, you progress.

But how do we determine this?

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# 3. The 18-Hour Mission

Here is the passage that got me excited — Kevin O’Leary talking about working with Steve Jobs in the 90s:

> “What was so brilliant about Steve Jobs is how he defined signal.
>
> For Jobs, signal wasn’t a five-year vision or even a plan for next quarter.
> Signal was the three to five things that had to get done in the next 18 hours — the time you’re actually awake.
>
> Not next week.
> Not next month.
> Today.
>
> Those three to five actions were critical to the mission, and they had to get done.
>
> Anything that interfered with that was noise.
>
> The great outliers — the geniuses of their time — lived very close to 100% signal.”

Adapting this to a creative life is problematic, and I want to dig into those weeds later. But before adapting the idea, you first have to grasp the concept.

Practically, I find it very useful to do this:

Observe what you do over the course of a week.

Which actions are eating up your time without having an actual consequence on your life?

Which things are moving the needle?

How can you shift the balance?

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# 4. My Substack as an Example

I’ll give you a concrete example.

I was writing for three years on Substack but seeing no discernible growth. I wasn’t bothered because I had one goal — I wanted to become a good writer.

However, at a certain point, I realised I was spending a lot of valuable time on my writing, yet it wasn’t growing.

So I asked myself:

What do I really want?

“Ok,” I said — is this just a hobby?

If so, fine. But I can’t have it eating into my professional life.

Why?

Because it was not moving anything forward.

Noise, not signal.

I had to have a tough conversation with myself.

Writing, for all my love of it, was becoming an indulgence.

Roger that.

To carry on writing, I needed to start making it work — to move it from noise to signal.

So on May 15th I started using Notes on Substack, which before I had been quite dismissive about.

I’d developed my writing so much in those three years that it had an immediate effect.

Then in December I started phase two, which was to get more serious about newsletter growth.

My motivation wasn’t vanity metrics.

It was because I had clarified what I want:

* To transition my income from freelance filmmaking to an online business
* To double down on my artistic life by having a platform I own (an email list)
* To help more people using my 20 years in the arts
* To sell my record directly to customers without needing social media

So I created my own systematic approach to newsletters — a system I could run for 45 minutes a day that was bulletproof.

It has started attracting around 200 new subscribers per month.

Simply put:

In one area of my life, I clarified signal-to-noise.

I was now able to continue my love of writing, but have it working as part of my broader vision.

Not an ornament to my life.

A structural pillar of the future I’m building.

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# 5. Signal as Creative Saviour

Other areas of my life were not moving forward.

In October, I hit a terrible low.

I was nearly two years into my album project and I had hit a dead end.

I was overrun. My freelance work had pulverised my momentum and was taking too much time.

But I was wrong about the cause.

The work wasn’t the problem.

Work was just the vehicle for my excuses.

The real problem?

I was unwilling to prioritise what the project required over what I wanted to do.

That’s a common problem for creatives.

We are drawn to what feels good rather than what is consequential.

I had a mini breakdown.

Not because I was stuck.

Because I wasn’t willing to examine the priorities.

Too much noise.

Not enough signal.

It was time to either lose the project or make a radical change.

So I started applying Jobs’ maxim.

Signal wasn’t a five-year vision.

Signal was the three to five things that had to get done in the next 18 hours.

The paradox is that the grandness of our vision is often the very blockade to moving it forward.

You need to work out what you can do in the next 24 hours.

Those who do those three to five difficult, consequential actions — the ones we resist most — move forward.

Those who don’t stay stuck.

Here are the changes that transformed my life:

* Eliminating side quests: everything serves the album
* One clear goal: finishing and releasing the record
* Daily first-thing practice: one hour, non-negotiable
* Improvement before content: publishing comes downstream of getting better
* Removing friction: no alcohol, deleted apps, posts scheduled in advance
* Facing resistance directly: one hour daily on what I’m avoiding
* Measuring real work: timed sessions, paused if interrupted

The pattern is simple.

First, radically reduce the noise.

Only then do you have the space to hear the signal.

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# 6. Is Audience Building Noise or Signal?

The deeper problem for creatives is that our signal-to-noise ratio is far less clear than for a CEO.

You don’t have marketing teams or built-in infrastructure.

You have to handle promotion while trying to stay an artist.

Likely while every pore in your body feels sick at the idea of marketing.

Yet in this digital hell, that is the job whether one likes it or not.

Trouble is, the more you do, the busier your week becomes.

If you’re serious about building something, it starts eating into a week already packed with trying to get better and trying to survive.

You know instinctively that social media is noise.

And yet suddenly it becomes signal.

If you don’t play the game, you get left behind.

You know you have the facets of a great author.

But no one will read a word unless you build to 10K.

You put years into an album.

But no label looks at you without 50K followers.

So building the audience becomes the work.

But then that stops you getting better.

That is the no-man’s-land where many creatives get caught.

Everything neutralises everything else.

Until you’re just stuck.

Your work needs an audience to exist meaningfully.

But building on oversaturated platforms is dispiriting.

You’re motivated by work that matters — not by external metrics.

So you don’t put quite enough energy into the audience.

Then the audience doesn’t grow.

You feel depressed because you have no delivery system.

Now neither the art nor the audience is moving.

There is an approach that works.

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# 7. The 60/40 Rule

Jobs could be 100/0 because he had institutional power.

But you don’t need to be 50/50 either — the failure zone where both sides are weak.

Aim for **60/40**.

60 percent of your energy goes to creative work.

40 percent goes to consistent audience practice.

Two shifts have worked for me.

First, my creative work comes first. Always.

That’s where my primary energy goes — trying to get better.

Second, I accepted that building an audience is part of the work.

I used to hate doing it.

It felt cheapening.

I wanted to be a great songwriter.

Then I realised:

My path is in the arts.

To do that, I need to reconcile with the modern world.

So for me it is:

**Arts and Audience.**

That’s how I structure my creative life.

But I guard what matters most with this maxim:

**Content comes downstream of improving.**

60/40.

Maybe the trade-off is that I never achieve the greatness of the greats.

Maybe that’s just the cost of a functioning indie artist’s life today.

But it’s mine.

And I get to share.

And the audience has become fuel, joy, and meaning.

Often the strength to go on comes from the comments and encouragement of others.

When I know I’ve helped someone, my life makes sense of itself.

Signal can feel like noise.

Noise can dress up as signal.

But when you lean into the problem hard enough, light leaks out.

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# 8. Conclusions

A long-term creative project requires sustained, protected attention over months or years.

Audience practice requires daily consistency.

They don’t have to fight — yet we often let confusion make them compete.

I think of them as different energy states.

My signal remains songwriting and documentaries.

That’s where I’m asking questions of life.

Yes, the audience side can be noisy.

But it can also be rewarding and powerful.

Sometimes the biggest help is simply to take it less seriously.

Overthinking?

Stop worrying about perfecting posts or what people think.

People will judge you.

Roger that.

Post.

Treat it as your digital magazine, not the curation of your life.

It’s not your artwork.

It’s documentation.

Not your novel.

Not your album.

Along the way some people might tear you down.

That’s noise.

Concentrate on the signal.

Create something material.

While those who judge you circle the same judgments, your life moves forward.

You become the signal.

Because the signal is listening to the frequency of the deeper call moving through you.

Weirdly enough:

It manifests in those three to five things you need to do today.

Listen to that.

My **60/40 framework** protects both the work and the human connection.

To build momentum:

* Clarify what is signal and what is noise
* Work on the signal before the noise
* Put your prime energy into creative work
* Keep the audience side bounded

With love,
Jim