Basic Concept #14: Attachment Creates Noise

You’ve been working on the project for months. It was your idea. You’ve invested evenings and weekends. You’ve thought through every detail. You can see exactly how it should work.

Then someone suggests a different approach. Or questions your methodology. Or proposes scrapping it entirely.

And suddenly you can’t think straight. You’re not evaluating their input objectively. You’re defending your territory. Your judgment gets clouded by your investment. Your attachment is creating noise.

I learned this lesson during the development of a new client onboarding system that I’d conceptualized and spent months designing. I’d worked through every workflow, interviewed stakeholders, mapped user journeys, and created detailed specifications. It was sophisticated, comprehensive, and I was genuinely proud of the architecture.

When I presented it to the team, a junior developer raised a simple question: “What if we just used the existing CRM workflow and modified it instead of building something new?” My immediate reaction wasn’t to consider the merit of his suggestion—it was to explain why that wouldn’t work. I found myself listing reasons why the existing system was inadequate, why my approach was necessary, why starting from scratch was the only viable option.

But as I talked, I realized I wasn’t evaluating his suggestion objectively. I was defending my investment. I had spent so much time and energy on this design that any alternative felt like a personal attack. My attachment to my solution was creating noise that prevented me from hearing potentially valuable input.

The junior developer’s suggestion turned out to be correct. The existing CRM workflow could handle 80% of what we needed with some modifications, and we could build the remaining 20% as add-ons. The implementation would be faster, more maintainable, and significantly less risky.

The more you put into something—time, energy, ideas, reputation—the harder it becomes to see it clearly. What starts as commitment becomes attachment. What begins as ownership becomes ego protection.

Attachment makes you fight for things that aren’t worth fighting for. It makes you resist feedback that could improve your work. It turns every suggestion into a threat and every question into an attack. When you’re attached, you can’t distinguish between signal and noise. Everything feels significant. Every comment carries weight. Every change feels personal.

But attachment amplifies the noise and drowns out the signal. It makes you defend positions instead of seeking truth. It makes you reactive instead of responsive.

The goal isn’t to protect what you’ve built. The goal is to build something worth protecting. And sometimes, that means letting go of your attachment to let your work become what it needs to become.