My Goliath Isn’t a Person or a Problem. It’s Noise.

A few Sundays ago at church, our discussion turned to David and Goliath. The teacher asked a question that’s been sitting with me ever since: What’s your Goliath? What’s the unbeatable thing in your life — the thing causing you to suffer?

I expected to need time to think about it. I didn’t. The answer arrived almost instantly: FOCUS.

Not a person. Not a circumstance. Just the simple, maddening inability to be where I am, doing what I’m doing, without my attention fracturing into a dozen directions.

The Noise Is the Goliath

We live in a world engineered to interrupt us. Social media, push notifications, texts, emails, the news cycle - every minute carries some small vibration demanding a piece of our attention. None of these interruptions feel like much on their own. A glance at a notification. A quick check of email. Thirty seconds, easy.

But thirty seconds, a hundred times a day, isn’t thirty seconds. It’s death by a thousand cuts to your concentration.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: mental energy is finite. You wake up with a certain amount of it, and every interruption, even the ones you barely register, spends a little of it. By the time you sit down to do the work that actually matters, or look up at the person who actually matters, you’re running on fumes you didn’t know you’d burned.

If mental energy is that valuable, why do we spend it so carelessly? We protect our money. We protect our time, at least on a calendar. But we let our attention get picked apart by anything that buzzes.

The Friday Afternoon Email

I’ll give you a specific example, because abstractions are easy to nod along to and hard to actually feel.

It’s Friday afternoon. An email comes in. I open it, because of course I open it, and it’s something that genuinely cannot be addressed until Monday. There is nothing productive I can do with this information right now. And yet I carry it. Into the weekend. Onto the trail while I’m hiking. Into the boat while I’m fishing. Into time with my family, where part of my brain is quietly chewing on a problem that hasn’t even started yet.

That’s not diligence. That’s just noise I let win.

So I’ve started asking a different question: what if I changed the system instead of trying to white-knuckle my way through more willpower? What if I checked email once a day, at a set time, with intention, instead of letting it check in on me all day long? Whatever doesn’t get handled that day simply waits for tomorrow, because it was always going to wait until Monday anyway. The only thing that changes is whether I spend my weekend pretending otherwise.

This isn’t really about email. It’s about designing a life where the noise has to ask permission to come in, instead of just walking through an open door.

What Presence Actually Feels Like

Early in my career, I worked relentlessly. I told myself — and honestly believed — that I was present for my young family, because I was there. Physically, mostly. But looking back now, I can see the gap between being in the room and being in the moment. I was thinking about work while I was playing on the floor. I was halfway somewhere else during dinner. I don’t say this with heavy regret — I think most of us go through a season like that — but I needed to live it before I could see it clearly.

Fast forward to now. We just had another baby. And I’ve noticed something different in myself this time: I am here in a way I wasn’t before. Fully absorbed in this tiny person, soaking up the moments instead of just logging them. It’s surreal, honestly, how much more there is to experience when you’re not dividing your attention three ways. The bonding feels deeper. The beauty of it actually lands instead of skimming past me on the way to the next thing on my mental list.

I had a similar moment earlier this month on a hike. No phone in hand, no mental tab open in the background. Just sun, trail, and view, fully absorbed in what was actually in front of me. It was a small thing. It was also one of the best feelings I’ve had all year.

And here’s what I want: I want that to be my baseline, not the exception. I want that same quality of presence when I’m holding my newborn and when I’m buried in a spreadsheet, tuning setpoints on a processing line, or building out a project Gantt chart. Presence shouldn’t be reserved for the moments that are obviously beautiful. The task in front of you, whatever it is, deserves the same full attention as the mountaintop.

Fighting Goliath

David didn’t beat Goliath by matching his size. He used something smaller, faster, and more precise. I think that’s the move here too. We’re not going to out-muscle the noise of modern life by trying harder or gritting through it — there’s always going to be more of it than there is of us.

The win comes from small, precise choices: a set time for email instead of constant checking. A phone left in the other room during dinner. A walk taken without a podcast in your ears, just to let your mind actually be quiet. None of these are dramatic. All of them, repeated daily, are the stone in the sling.

I don’t have this fully figured out. I’m writing this as much to hold myself accountable as anything else. But I know what I’m aiming for now: to be present with whatever is in front of me — baby, hike, spreadsheet, family dinner — instead of mentally somewhere else entirely.

What’s your Goliath? I’d genuinely like to know what you’re wrestling with, and how you’re fighting it.