How I Turned Down the Noise and Built a Cancer Drug Discovery Portal in One Year

On November 7, 2024, I was primarily distracted. More noise and less productivity. At the time I did not know it...So, I opened my laptop like I had a hundred times before…but that day was different, even though I didn’t know it yet. A year passed, and I am now writing this short post, a token of my personal development journey that may be useful to someone else.

One year later, I’m sitting here with a working quantum-enhanced drug discovery portal, a symbolic quantum-enhanced glyph system, and a brain that somehow stitched together physics, a bit of math, some biology, a dash of chemistry, AI, quantum computing, and annealing, all from a garage and my back office in Oklahoma. So, let me explain this:

For a long time, I thought the “secret” was just hard work or stubbornness. Now I realize I actually did something much more specific: I quietly became the master of my own signal-to-noise ratio. SNR!. Back then, I didn’t have that phrase in my head at the time, but that’s what happened.

The Day Noise Took a Back Seat

For most of my life, my brain ran like an always-on TV with every channel playing at once:

• Politics, the stuff that was happening...

• TV, more stuff from around the globe, wars, atrocities, things I had no control over...things that ate my brain and produced nothing but noise...

• social media, Stupid-stupid-stupid...

• old friends with the same old BS stories,

• Random obligations that had nothing to do with my real mission.

Ok, some of that shit was fun, but a lot of it was loud and low-value. High volume, low information.

Then, slowly but deliberately, I began turning things off:

• I stopped feeding my brain endless TV and BS politics.

• I loosened my grip on some friendships that were mainly noise, more BS, and not growth.

• I protected the few things that actually pure signal(s) for me:

  • My quantum projects, a bunch of books I had scattered everywhere.

  • My drug discovery pipeline, Something I was dreaming of building.

  • My daily/weekly weightlifting sessions are not optional. This habit has been ingrained in me. I love it!

  • My family. Ok. This one is not optional either: my wife, my daughter, a couple of grandkids, etc.

Nothing magical happened overnight, but something important did happen:

My mental “channel” went from mostly noise with a little signal…to mostly signal with just enough “play” to keep me human.

That’s when progress stopped feeling sluggish and started feeling inevitable. Let me break it down!

What My “Signal” Actually Looks Like

For me, signal isn’t just productivity. It looks like this:

• Watching almost every lecture I could find from IonQ’s chief scientist, especially Chris Monroe, talking about atomic clocks and trapped ions.

• Reading D-Wave and IonQ documentation, articles, tech papers, not once, but sometimes over and over.

• Learning:

  • a bit of physics and quantum mechanics, lots of books and few audiobooks

  • a bit of math, Freshen up on Algebra, the quadratic calcs, some orbital calcs, a bit of particle physics... stuff like that.

  • a bit of biology,

  • a bit of chemistry,

  • a lot of AI and annealing. I mean a lot of AI stuff.

• Writing Python code, breaking it, get lost and angry and then fixing it, then breaking it better.

• Lifting weights in my garage, feeling electricity shoot from my feet to my brain, like someone just flipped the “focus” switch back on. Try some deadlifts and follow with Olympic Lifts... It grows hair on your chest!

From the outside, this probably looks like a bunch of unrelated, fragmented efforts. From the inside, it felt like I was feeding some invisible engine, I didn’t know exactly how it would all click, but I kept pouring signal in and cutting noise out.

Years of Fragmented Learning… Then an Anneal

When I look back, it’s not like I started from zero on November 7, 2024.

For years, I had been:

• dabbling in quantum textbooks and YouTube lectures, A lot of that during COVID isolation... Do you remember that time?

• hopping through physics, math, and CS topics,

• reading about biology and drug targets,

• poking at AI models and annealing concepts,

• absorbing everything D-Wave, IonQ and a few others decided to publish.

At the time, it honestly felt chaotic:

• I’d learn a bit of tunneling here,

• some Ising models there. You have to understand that ...

• something about receptors and proteins another day, I mean cancer proteins...

• quantum hardware docs on another late night. Lots of Coffee!.

It was fragmented, like scattered puzzle pieces with no box top. But here’s the key, once I reduced the external noise, my brain finally had the quiet it needed to anneal.

All those fragments, physics, biology, chemistry, AI, quantum docs, annealing, started “cooling” into structure:

• A symbolic glyph system (Zaban) to represent entropy and collapse.

• A quantum-influenced drug discovery pipeline.

• Ideas like annealing mood capture, CRISP-G glyphs, citizen scientist simulations…

• And an actual working portal that people can use.

Note that I didn’t get smarter in one year. I finally gave my mind a stable environment to use everything it had been collecting.

Signal vs Noise: The Rule I Wish I Knew Earlier

Here’s how I see it now:

• Attention is a finite bandwidth channel. Every day, you have a limited number of high-quality thinking hours. Spend them casually, and they’re gone.

• Noise doesn’t just waste time, it corrupts thinking. News, gossip, late-night comedians, politicians, and pointless arguments… they don’t just consume minutes. They leave residue: agitation, distraction, mental fog.

• Signal compounds, noise resets. One focused day builds on yesterday’s focused day. One noisy day? You wake up feeling like you’ve lost the thread. When I raised my signal-to-noise ratio, my life stopped feeling like random scatter and started feeling like a trajectory.

The Weightlifting Factor (Not Optional)

One more important part of this story: I didn’t cut everything.

I kept my weightlifting.

That might look “off topic,” but it’s not. It’s part of my signal:

• It forces me to focus completely for short bursts.

• It trains my nervous system to switch into a high-focus state on command.

• It gives me a clean, physical way to discharge stress and reboot my mind.

Two or three intense sessions a week in a cold garage are not noise. They’re the reset button that lets the rest of the signal stay clean. If I had cut lifting and kept the politics and TV, I don’t think this last year would have happened the same way.

What This Means for My Personal Development (And Maybe Yours)

This year taught me something simple and powerful. I mean, you don’t have to control everything in life, but you can control the ratio of signal to noise.

For me, that meant:

• Removing low-value inputs (political drama, mindless TV, noisy social loops).

• Keeping and strengthening:

  • deep technical learning,

  • building real tools,

  • physical training,

  • a few meaningful relationships.

• Trusting that all my weird, fragmented learning over the years would eventually anneal into something useful — if I gave it enough quiet and enough time.

If there’s a “personal development project” hidden inside my last year, it’s this:

• Protect your signal.

• Starve your noise.

• Let your mind anneal all the fragments you’ve been collecting for years.

That’s how a retired guy in Oklahoma, lifting in his garage and listening to quantum lectures on YouTube, ended up building a quantum-inspired drug discovery portal in a single year.

Not magic. Just a better signal-to-noise ratio.