When I say 'chasing threads'

There is this idea in productivity circles, self-help books, and startup culture: Focus. Only work on what matters. Cut the noise. Eliminate the distractions.

I think that’s only half the story.

Chasing threads is about following inspiration when it strikes.

During my induction week as a graduate engineer, over seven years ago, I was told a story about our CEO. It’s where I first felt encouraged to be curious at work.

The CEO had a planned visit to one of our front-line Telco stores. All staff were prepped with questions and had a stacked agenda for photos and content capture. When the boss arrived, he spotted a staff member off to the side, absorbed in something (repairing a device, restocking a shelf) I can’t quite remember.

He walked over and simply asked: “Hey what are you doing?”

Whoever this person was, they spoke about what they were doing with such genuine passion and joy that the CEO scrapped the rest of the agenda entirely. He spent the whole visit just talking with this one person: about technology, about their goals, about what they loved about the job.

That conversation turned into a friendship. They kept in touch across the year. And eventually, that staff member grew into a role back at headquarters. All because the boss saw someone doing something that looked interesting, and went and spoke to them.

Do you know the feeling? You’re reading something and a word catches you, you look it up, and suddenly you’re twenty minutes deep into the history of something you never knew you cared about.

The conventional wisdom says: ignore that. Get back to the task and stay on track.

But what if the thread is the track?

Here’s the reframe I keep coming back to: life is distractions. Not in the doom-scrolling-at-2am sense. In the sense that the interesting stuff, the stuff that actually shapes who you are, rarely arrives through the front door. It sneaks up on you. It’s the thing you weren’t supposed to be doing that ends up mattering most.

Steve Jobs is probably the most famous example of this. In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, he talked about dropping in on a calligraphy class at Reed College, completely randomly, with no practical application in mind. A decade later, that class became the foundation for the beautiful typography of the first Macintosh.

He didn’t chase calligraphy because it was strategic. He chased it because it pulled at him. Same instinct as a CEO who walks past a stacked agenda to talk to someone doing something interesting. Same instinct as anyone who follows a word into a twenty-minute rabbit hole and comes out knowing something they didn’t expect to care about.

But I have to be honest with myself, because this idea has a dark twin. Something a colleague of mine introduced me to because I was chasing the latest technologies all the time.

There’s a concept called Shiny Object Syndrome. The idea that some people —especially curious, creative, entrepreneurial types— get so drawn to the next interesting thing that they never actually go deep on anything. They bounce from project to project, tool to tool, always chasing novelty, never building something real.

I’ve been there. Most curious people have. You pick up a thread and it leads you to another thread, and another, and before you know it you’ve spent a whole day falling down rabbit holes and nothing is finished.

The shiny ball of yarn is real. And if you’re not careful, chasing threads becomes a sophisticated-sounding excuse for avoiding the hard, slow, unglamorous work of actually finishing things.

The difference between a thread worth chasing and a shiny object isn’t obvious in the moment; but it becomes clear with a bit of distance. If you park an idea for a few days and it’s still pulling at you, it’s probably a thread worth chasing. If you forget about it, then it probably wasn’t worth following anyway.

So go chase your own threads. Not all of them and not recklessly. But when something tugs at you, don’t immediately dismiss it as a distraction.