Signal in the Silence

Why you can’t find your path when no one tells you what to look for

When I look back at my life and some of the current events that have come into being, I remember an event that happened at my first pharmaceutical job. I attended a presentation by Benjamin Zander, conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra. He was there to talk about his book The Art of Possibility, which he’d written with his wife Rosamund, a family therapist and painter.

I’d never heard of him. Looking back, it was an incredible introduction to thinking differently about what’s possible.

The Demonstration

Zander began by working with a few students from the Music School. Each one played a solo for him. He stopped them and just started talking about the emotion of that piece and how you could change it. He started talking to the musician, not about technique, but an emotional feeling. They played again and the changes were amazing. A different aspect or way of feeling greatly improved their playing style.

He did this with each student. Really having an impact on each performer. Then as he was talking to the crowd, he played the movie for the hidden gorilla experiment.

You’ve probably seen it—or think you have. A group of people in a video pass basketballs back and forth. Your job: count the number of passes.

Midway through, a person in a gorilla suit walks directly through the middle of the players. Stops. Beats their chest. Walks off.

About half the people watching miss it completely. I was in that half.

Zander told us to watch for the gorilla. I thought he was making another joke. He replayed the clip. There it was—a person in a full gorilla suit, standing in the center of the frame, impossible to miss once you knew to look for it.

How had I not seen that?

The point, Zander explained, was that you can miss things completely when you limit your sense of what’s possible. When you’re focused on counting passes, your brain filters out gorillas. Even obvious ones. Even ones standing right in front of you.

Great lesson. Pretty obvious once someone tells you what to look for.

The Methodological Problem

But here was my problem—the one I’d carry for the next twenty years: I couldn’t find what I was missing.

When I told my spouse or family I felt unfulfilled despite having good opportunities, their response was predictable: “What are you complaining about? You have all these opportunities.” They were right. By conventional measures, I was doing fine. Better than fine.

Looking back at that Zander presentation, I realized something. I saw the gorilla only after Zander told me what to look for. Once you know what to look for, the problem becomes obvious. Maybe not easy to solve—but at least you have something to work on.

But what if no one knows what to look for? Not even you?

What if your path—your specific design, your unique alignment—is something no one can describe to you because it’s uniquely yours? Your parents can’t tell you what to look for. Your boss can’t. Career counselors can’t. Because YOUR gorilla is different from theirs. Hidden in your own data. Visible only to you, once you learn to see it.

So how do you develop the ability to see what you don’t even know to look for?

How do you notice the signal when you don’t know what signal you’re searching for?

How do you recognize alignment when you’ve never experienced it before?

That’s the methodological problem.

And it’s the problem I’ve spent the last several years trying to solve—first for myself, then realizing others face the same challenge.

Applying the Methodology

I’d spent my entire career in pharmaceutical modeling, integrating disparate data—blood levels, tissue exposure, receptor binding, clinical outcomes—into coherent models that predicted drug behavior. Multiple data sources. Pattern recognition. Convergent evidence.

What I didn’t realize was that I was about to apply the same methodology to a far more important question:

Not “How does this drug work?”

But “How do I work?”

What drives my happiness? Why am I drained despite outward success? What am I actually built for?

The conventional advice wasn’t working. “Follow your passion” assumes you know what your passion is. “Find what energizes you” assumes you can recognize energy when it’s not in familiar forms. “Talk to a career counselor” assumes they can see your gorilla when they’re looking at their own frameworks.

I needed a different approach. Not someone to tell me what my gorilla looks like—methodologically, that’s impossible. But a process to help me reveal what to look for, even when I couldn’t name it.

What’s Emerging

Here’s what is emerging:

Multiple data sources. Don’t trust any single framework. Draw from many: analytics and intuition, conventional and unconventional, conscious and somatic. As the Zanders proposed, you can change your narrative—but you need different lenses to see which narrative might actually fit.

Pattern recognition. Look for convergence. When several independent signals point in the same direction, that overlap is meaning. When your body says one thing, your timeline shows another pattern, and an unconventional framework suggests a third angle—and they all point the same direction? That’s signal, not noise.

The biomarker. Your body knows before your mind does. Energy levels, time perception, physical sensations, even seemingly random emotional responses—all are data. Learn to read them. That drained feeling despite success? That’s not a character flaw. That is a system alert. It is your body’s check-engine light signaling a mismatch between your environment and your design.

Quantified self. Track your experiences. You cannot find a pattern in a dataset that doesn’t exist. Writing these articles is how I build the dataset. I am logging the raw signal so the pattern can emerge. You’ve been making decisions, missing opportunities, feeling drawn to some things and repelled by others. Don’t be afraid to look back at where you’ve been. The pattern is there.

That’s how you see the unseen: by designing systems that can detect signal even in the absence of prior knowledge.

No Zander in Your Life

Zander could point to the gorilla because he had seen the tape before. But in your life, there is no Zander. You are watching a tape that has never been played before. So who tells you where to look?

This isn’t about me telling you what YOUR gorilla looks like. I can’t. Not because I’m being modest, but because it’s methodologically impossible. I found that pattern recognition and teaching energize me. You might find something completely different.

This isn’t “follow my path.” It’s “here’s how I found mine—use the approach to find yours.”

Real-Time Pattern Recognition

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sharing how this methodology works in practice. How I use biomarkers to navigate decisions. How I test frameworks—including unconventional ones like astrology—rigorously rather than dismissing or blindly accepting them. How I’m applying all of this right now, in real time, as systems around us shift.

Not because I’ve arrived. But because I’m still going through it. And the methodology appears to be working.

If you saw my recent post about buying AI equipment last week—feeling that pressure before I consciously understood why, then watching it validate days later with China’s silver export restrictions—that’s this methodology in action.

The biomarker detected the pattern shift in the economic field days before I was made aware of the news cycle reporting the export restriction. That isn’t magic. That is a high-speed sensor picking up a signal before the noise of the headlines caught up to me.

That wasn’t luck. That’s what happens when you develop systems for seeing signal you can’t yet name.

Welcome to Fire in the Cave

If you’ve already tried following conventional advice and it didn’t work—if you’ve succeeded by conventional metrics and you’re still miserable—if you’ve realized that no one can tell you what YOUR gorilla looks like—then this is for you.

The good news? You don’t need someone to show you the gorilla. You need a process for developing the ability to see it yourself.

That’s what I’m building here. That’s what Fire in the Cave is about.

Not inspiration. Methodology.

Let’s figure this out together.