What My Puppy Taught Me About Enough
More information doesn't mean more clarity
“The more frequently you look at data,
the more noise you are disproportionately likely to get
rather than the valuable part called the signal.”
-Nassim Taleb, Antifragile
This summer, I got a puppy.
Her name is Bear. She’s a Bichpoo with curly, white fur and dark eyes. She looks exactly like a teddy bear.
I was instantly in love and also instantly overwhelmed.
The Optimization Spiral
Within days of bringing Bear home, I was deep in research mode. Online courses, YouTube videos, training blogs, and Reddit threads. I learned about crate training and leash reactivity. Socialization windows and the critical importance of the first sixteen weeks. I built a schedule with checklists and mapped out her entire first year.
And the more I consumed, the more anxious I became.
Was I crating her too much or too little? Was I reinforcing the wrong behaviors? Was I missing a critical developmental window that would ruin her forever?
I wasn’t just trying to raise a puppy. I was trying to optimize one.
What I Almost Missed
Bear grew fast. In her first six months, the tiny fluffball I brought home nearly tripled in size from three pounds to over eleven.
And I was so focused on following the perfect schedule that I almost missed it.
I was rushing our mornings to match a recommended best practice. Get her out of the crate. Immediately outside. Training before breakfast. No wasted time.
Then one morning, I sat on the couch with a blanket, finishing my coffee. Bear jumped on my lap, stretched out, sighed, and fell back asleep. I sat there with my coffee cooling and realized: this is the part that I’m supposed to be protecting.
Not the optimized schedule or the perfect training, but this moment. The warmth of her. Her satisfaction with just being close to me. The ordinary morning, I’d been too busy to notice.
Signal vs. Noise
Nassim Taleb writes about this trap in Antifragile. He calls it the Noise Bottleneck.
The more data you consume, the more noise you get relative to signal. Signal is the meaningful information—what actually matters. Noise is everything else: the contradictions, the edge cases, the endless opinions.
“This is hard to accept in the age of the internet,” Taleb writes. “The more data you get, the less you know what’s going on.”
You think you know more. But you actually understand less.
That was me with puppy training. I had consumed so much information that I couldn’t tell what mattered anymore. Every decision felt high-stakes. Every choice had numerous opinions attached to it.
The noise had drowned out the signal.
One Priority
After that morning, I made a change.
Instead of trying to execute a checklist for her entire first year, I asked a simpler question: What’s my one priority right now?
That week, it was this: spend time together in the morning with no agenda. I’d sit on the couch while I read. Bear would curl up and sleep a little longer. No rushing. No optimization.
That one shift changed everything.
Where Bear Is Now
Bear is ten months old now. Fully in her “teenage” period: testing boundaries, pretending she’s never heard the word “come.” But she’s also crate-trained, walks nicely on a leash, and has good manners.
The fundamentals worked. Not because I followed the perfect system, but because I stopped trying to follow them all at once.
I learned to filter for signal and ignore the noise.
The Trap We All Fall Into
This isn’t just about puppies. It’s about the way we approach everything now.
New job? Consume fifty articles on how to succeed in your first ninety days.
New relationship? Research attachment styles and communication frameworks.
New health goal? Fall down a rabbit hole of protocols, supplements, and tracking apps.
We think more information will make us more prepared. But past a certain point, it just makes us more anxious and less likely to act.
The goal isn’t to know everything. It’s to know enough—and then act.
This is scarcity versus sufficiency with information.
Scarcity says: more data, more certainty. Keep researching until you’re sure.
Sufficiency says: enough information is enough. Trust yourself to figure out the rest.
Where The Compass Points
When I bring the ENOUGH Compass to moments like this, it asks:
Notice: What’s the signal here? What actually matters?
One Focus: What’s my single priority right now?
Grow Curiously: What would I try if I weren’t afraid of getting it wrong?
The Compass doesn’t ask for more data. It asks for clarity.
A Small Practice
This week, notice where you’re caught in the Noise Bottleneck.
Where are you over-researching instead of acting?
What would it look like to trust that you already know enough?
See you next week.
P.S. I’d love to know: where have you fallen into the optimization trap? What helped you find your way back to the signal?