#HOW to Innovate Yourself
Your Inner Feedback Loop, Part 2
Last week I introduced the inner feedback loop — the signal your natural wiring sends when you’re operating in alignment or against it.
The first step was activation.
Capture what you notice before autopilot washes it away.
But capture is just the beginning.
Most people treat noticing as the finish line.
It isn’t.
The real value comes from what you do with what you’ve collected.
That’s what this essay is about.
Panning for Gold
The practice is simple.
Something caught your attention.
Tag it before it’s gone.
That’s it.
You’re not analyzing in the moment. You’re not deciding whether it matters. You’re not running it through a framework or asking whether it fits your strategy.
You’re just noticing that something registered — and making sure it doesn’t disappear back into the noise.
Most moments that could redirect you get lost before you can examine them.
Not because they weren’t significant.
Because autopilot moved you past them before you could tag them.
Capture is panning for gold.
You’re not looking only for gold. You’re running everything through the pan and trusting that what matters will stay.
The kind of collection pan doesn’t matter. It could be a note-taking app. It could be a notebook and pen. It could be simply texting messages to yourself. It’s pragmatic. The critical point is that you do it habitually. For the rest of your life. Don’t overthink it.
Capture anything that makes you say or think #hmm, #ouch, or #wow. Anything. In any combination. No life and work balance. Anything is fair game. Capture first, assign meaning later.
Most of what goes through is sand.
That’s fine.
You can’t know in the moment which signals will matter. That’s not the job of capture.
The job of capture is simply this:
Don’t lose it.
Three Tags for Everything
After years of noticing things in the comics industry — before I had language for what I was doing — I found that almost everything worth paying attention to fell into one of three categories.
#hmm — something caught your attention. Odd. Surprising. Curious. A pattern you didn’t expect. A question that won’t leave you alone. Something that registered before you could explain why.
#ouch — something created friction or pain. Energy draining. Drag that keeps showing up. A cost that feels disproportionate to what it produces.
#wow — something worked better than expected. Energy rising. Momentum that surprised you. A result that compounded rather than reset.
Together they spell #HOW.
That’s not accidental.
#HOW is how you move from the external feedback loop — which tells you what the market wants — to the inner feedback loop — which tells you what you’re built to deliver.
These three tags aren’t a complete taxonomy. They’re a practical capture layer.
Peter Drucker spent decades identifying seven sources of innovation — the specific conditions where opportunities reliably appear:
The unexpected. Incongruities. Process needs. Market changes. Demographics. Changes in perception. New knowledge.
Analytically precise. But not always easy to use in the middle of an ordinary day.
Nobody walks through their week thinking: is this an incongruity or a change in perception?
But you can notice #hmm. #ouch. #wow.
Those three tags overlay across all seven sources. You don’t need to know Drucker’s taxonomy to start using the system. You just need to notice and tag.
The review stage is where the deeper pattern becomes useful — when you have enough captured to see which opportunity source you may have been sitting on.
Attention Compounds
This is not just a capture system.
It is a way of training attention.
The old playbook trained you to notice problems first.
Not because you were pessimistic. Because institutions reward people who reduce risk, eliminate variance, and fix what is broken.
Quarterly reviews measure problems solved. Performance ratings reward risks managed. The feedback loop trains your attention to scan for what is wrong before it notices what is possible.
That is autopilot at work.
But attention compounds.
What you repeatedly notice, you become better at seeing.
Spend your days scanning for problems and your mind becomes better at finding problems. Start tagging #hmm, #ouch, and #wow consistently, and your attention begins to register signals it previously filtered out.
Opportunities that were always there start becoming visible. Signals that autopilot washed away start staying.
The opportunity mindset is not a personality trait you either have or don’t.
It is a trained orientation. Built one tag at a time.
Change your mindset.
Change your future.
What Each Signal Tells You
The old playbook trained you to respond to each signal in a specific way.
A #hmm meant distraction — get back to work. An #ouch meant a problem — fix it or grind through it. A #wow meant a win — celebrate, then reset.
The inner feedback loop reads them differently.
#hmm is your curiosity compass.
Curiosity is not a distraction. It is a direction signal. What you find genuinely interesting — before anyone tells you whether it is valuable — is your inner loop pointing toward where your natural attention compounds.
High-agency individuals who follow their #hmm signals consistently often find themselves ahead of shifts others recognize only in retrospect.
#ouch is an opportunity in disguise.
The old playbook says fix the problem. The inner feedback loop says look at what the pain is pointing toward.
An #ouch that keeps recurring is not just friction. It is your inner loop flagging a gap — in your workflow, in the market, in your alignment.
The question is not only how to eliminate it. The question is what it is trying to tell you.
Sometimes the most important #ouch is this: you have been rewarded for being good at the very thing that costs you the most. That is the kind of signal the external loop almost never flags.
#wow is a signal to double down.
The old playbook treats wins as endpoints. Celebrate and reset.
The inner feedback loop treats wins as data. A #wow is evidence of natural alignment — something worked because it fit how you are actually wired to operate.
The question is not only how to repeat it. The better question is what can I build from this.
The Compounding Signal
One tag is enough.
A single #hmm, #ouch, or #wow is worth capturing and reviewing. Any one of them could point toward something significant. That is the premise of panning for gold — you don’t know which piece of sand is gold until you look.
But when two or three tags cluster around the same moment, person, project, or idea — pay attention.
That is not confusion. That is signal density.
#hmm + #ouch — something is both curious and painful. That overlap is where many significant opportunities live. The gap between what is interesting and what is broken often points toward leverage.
#hmm + #wow — something surprised you and worked better than expected. That is not merely luck. It may be your inner loop showing you a natural fit worth exploring further.
#hmm + #ouch + #wow — all three together. Rare. When it happens, don’t move past it. That signal deserves your full attention. It may deserve your next project.
The more tags cluster together, the greater the potential. Not linearly. Exponentially.
That is why times of great change — as disturbing and disorienting as they are — also produce the greatest concentration of compounding signals.
When institutions shift, when markets reorganize, when the rules change without a memo — #hmm, #ouch, and #wow appear everywhere at once.
Most people experience that as overwhelm.
High-agency individuals running the inner feedback loop experience it as signal density.
The disruption is not the whole problem. It may also be the most target-rich environment your inner loop will ever operate in.
The people who capture consistently during times of change — who don’t let autopilot wash away what they are noticing — are the ones who emerge from disruption with direction while others are still trying to find their footing.
That is not luck. That is the practice working as designed.
Your Review Practice
Capture is daily. Review can be weekly, monthly, or whenever you sense the need.
Ask three questions in sequence.
1. What is this?
Read through what you captured without judgment. Let the day, week, or moment play back. Don’t force meaning too quickly. Just look at the signals.
What made you pause? What created drag? What gave you energy? What surprised you? What kept showing up?
2. What does this mean?
Now look for patterns. Which signals repeated? Where did energy consistently rise? Where did it consistently fall? What #ouch kept appearing that you kept moving past? What #hmm kept coming back? What #wow deserves more attention than you gave it?
This is where capture becomes review. You are no longer collecting fragments. You are looking for shape.
3. What does this mean for me — right now?
This is the question institutions rarely build in.
Not: what does this mean in general? Not: what should a high-agency individual do with this information?
But: what does this mean for me… given my wiring, my situation, my season, and my direction right now?
That last question is where the inner feedback loop becomes personal.
And personal is where it becomes actionable.
Making It Precise
The three-question review gets you to meaning.
But meaning alone does not always tell you which direction to move.
That is where your volitional wiring becomes the final layer of precision.
Your #hmm signals will often cluster around the kinds of problems, opportunities, and questions that match how you naturally initiate. It’s OK to notice problems, because a problem is just another opportunity.
Your #ouch signals often map to misalignment between how you are wired to operate and what the current situation demands.
Your #wow signals often appear where your natural wiring is operating freely.
When you understand your conative profile — how you initiate, decide, and persist — the signals stop being vague and start having a structural explanation.
The Kolbe A Index measures this layer directly. It is the diagnostic that turns your inner feedback loop from a feeling into a reading.
Not just: what did I notice.
But: why did it register.
That is what precision gives you.
The Cascade
Capture → Review → Realization → Direction → Action → Transformation.
Break the chain at any point and the loop stops working.
No capture — no data for review. No review — no realization. No realization — no direction. No direction — no meaningful action. No action — no transformation.
Autopilot wins by default at every stage where the practice breaks down.
It usually breaks down earliest at capture. Because the external feedback loop never required it. And the institution never taught it.
That is why last week’s essay came first.
And that is why this one matters.
The inner feedback loop is not a single practice. It is a system. Each layer depends on the one before it.
The Upstream Work
Drucker’s seven sources of innovation do not answer themselves in a single sitting.
They reveal themselves over time — through the accumulated evidence of your #hmm, #ouch, and #wow signals reviewed consistently and honestly.
The inner feedback loop is how you answer Drucker’s questions with data instead of guesswork.
Not once.
Continuously.
One tag at a time.
Something caught your attention.
Don’t let it go.