Your mind is the channel

Noise in a tie.

I like physics. I like maths.

They don’t lie.

Well. Quantum mechanics gives you probabilities and calls that an answer.

The concept I’m bringing you comes from Shannon. It goes like this:

Every channel has a capacity: the maximum rate at which information can be transmitted reliably under given noise conditions. Push beyond it, and sending more doesn’t mean more gets through. It means less arrives intact.

So what does that mean?

Let me put it this way — applied information theory: your mind is the channel. It has finite bandwidth. And cramming in more won’t make it pass through the tube any better.

Every adjective that doesn’t distinguish is noise. Every reference that only proves you’ve read another reference. Every cross-referenced fact that adds altitude but not understanding.

Simple truth fits in little.

Truth in disguise demands more cognitive cost, more attention, more stomach. And it arrives battered.

Or it doesn’t arrive at all.

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We have an idea.

We dress it in complex words, in academic language, in anything that might legitimize it. We build a castle to reach a concept we once held in the palm of our hand.

Let it show that we know.

But when the castle is too high, we no longer transmit the concept.

We transmit the effort of having climbed it.

And the other person pays to bring it back down.

That’s not rigor.

It’s noise put in on purpose. We do it knowingly. But then — why do we work so hard to make hard what isn’t that hard?

That extra processing cost doesn’t come when we’re handed a new field, a concept, a territory.

It comes when we disguise the truth to make it look loftier.

We make the easy hard, maybe because difficulty sells as judgment. Because “this is more complex than it looks” sounds like altitude and expensive perfume with an eye-watering invoice. Because if you say it plainly, someone can answer you back.

Wrap it up enough, and all anyone can do is nod. And that doesn’t make it truer. Just sophisticated enough to open that gap where the easy move is to say amen or clap your hands — because you haven’t integrated a damn thing by the time the sentence ends — and the hard move is to say: “Excuse me, can you put that in other words?”. Because that would leave you exposed.

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I think of people with astonishing talent, the kind you envy and admire. People who, at times, seem to be talking to their own echo. Not because there’s no value in what they say.

There is.

There’s thought. There’s judgment. There’s world.

But they dress it up so much — references, cross-referenced facts, concepts leading to other concepts — that by the time the idea finally lands, there’s no appetite left.

It’s fine.

But it’s also wrong.

And it’s a habit, one of those vices that’s hard to quit. Because it makes what was already complex even more complex. And it forces the other person to prove they deserve to understand it.

Double backflip.

With brands, it’s the same.

They have something to say. Sometimes even something valuable. But they dress it in adjectives, in school words and layers of legitimation until the idea stops arriving.

Only the effort arrives.

An endless list of adjectives and fancy words is not a position. Positioning starts before you open your mouth. When you open it, you only confirm it.

Or you give yourself away.

A list like that isn’t territory.

It’s noise in a tie.

Make it easy for me.

Make it pleasant.

Make it appetizing.

Don’t sit me down, lecture me, and charge me the toll.

Make it land because you know.

So the class isn’t needed.

Easy isn’t poor.

Easy is not making me work extra to reach what was already simple.

Pleasant isn’t soft.

Pleasant is not forcing me to fake some other altitude.

Appetizing is what makes you wipe the plate clean.

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Damn, Lines.

But open with Shannon?

Yes.

Because if you understood a term from information theory without noticing the mathematics underneath, then I’ve done my job.

And I don’t think your value proposition, your business, or your brand is any more complex than this.

Make it easy for me.

Make it pleasant.

Make it appetizing.

Make it fit.

Make it linger.

Not simpler.

More transmissible.

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Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com