Cut Through The Noise To Find Signals
How To Find And Navigate Your Vision In A Chaotic Environment
Introduction
Until age 16, almost everyone has a common goal: score well in school or board exams. Between 16 and 18, that goal shifts to cracking entrance exams, be it for engineering, medicine, law, or business school. From 18 to 23, variations begin to emerge. Some want jobs, others prepare for higher studies, a few start agencies or startups. But the bell curve remains centered around one goal: getting a job and earning money.
That pattern starts to shift when you move abroad for studies, or even when you start working in India. The range of goals people pursue becomes much more varied.
Exposure To A Wide Spectrum Of Motivations
Once you begin studying abroad, you're exposed to a wide spectrum of motivations and life paths:
Some folks already have work experience. They're here to get a master's degree, land a high-paying job, earn in dollars for a few years, and eventually return to India.
Some come from privilege and are here mostly to experience life abroad, studying takes a back seat.
Others arrive with the goal of ‘settling’ abroad. For them, the degree is just a means to get a job, a visa, and eventually permanent residency.
Some are doing a second master’s simply to stay in the US, especially if their H-1B didn’t get picked in the visa lottery.
A few are genuinely passionate about a particular subject. They’re not chasing a job or a visa, they just love learning and are building a career around it.
While you’re investing money and effort into studying in the US, your friends back home are already earning, spending time with family, and enjoying a more stable life, while you're juggling 10 things every single day with limited mental, time, and financial bandwidth.
And if you left a job to pursue higher studies abroad, you’ll inevitably see peers back home getting promoted, switching companies, and progressing professionally while you hit reset.
The decade between 20 and 30 is interesting because everyone’s life moves at a different pace, in different (or sometimes the same) directions.
Amplification Of These Motivations
Of course, there are Instagram and YouTube influencers walking one or more of these paths. Then there are your friends, batch mates, and peers posting about their own lives on these platforms.
The result? We’re flooded with information about everything and everyone. And that can be especially daunting when you don’t quite know which path or ‘template’ you fit into among the 7 (or more) mentioned above. In that haze, it’s easy to default to a direction, distraction, or both, based on an external influence. Phrases like ‘still exploring’ or ‘figuring it out’ start feeling like weak answers. And when everyone around you appears to have clarity, it’s tempting to follow a path that’s not truly yours. Uncertainty breeds fear, and fear makes imitation feel safer than introspection.
Cut Through The Noise To Find Signals
In an ideal world, you should be able to define a clear path for yourself, which some people can define. But when that clarity is missing, I find it helpful to define something I call an ‘anti-vision’, i.e a clear understanding of what you definitely don’t want to do.
Defining your anti-vision helps cut through the noise. It automatically helps you avoid people, events, or opportunities that don’t align with who you are or where you want to go. And with the remaining time and energy, you can focus on exploration on figuring out what your actual vision might look like.
Once you’re able to define your vision, even if it’s just for the short term, you start defining your priorities, after which you’re able to cut through the noise around you ruthlessly, and can focus on finding the signals: your strengths and weaknesses, long-term goals, and communities, classmates, professors, projects, and opportunities that align with that vision.
I’ve always believed you either need to run away from something to get to something, or towards something to get to something. But running blindly without a vision or even an anti-vision is almost always harmful.
Conclusion
As Stephen Hawking said,
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
When you move to a new country, especially a city like New York, you need to iterate fast. You need to observe the different paths people are on, define your own vision or anti-vision (whether before or after arriving), and accelerate the process of cutting through the noise to find the signals that truly matter to you by taking action. In short: adapt quickly.
If you liked today’s newsletter,
Love this! "Anti-vision" is my new favourite word. "Fear makes imitation feel safer than introspection" is the reminder that I needed.