I spend the majority of my time walking around like a Chrome browser with too many tabs open. Metrics are a guilty pleasure. Looking at dashboards and tracking growth, subscribers, bounce rate, compass rate, etc… the tools are getting better all the time. It’s easy to be hooked, especially because you probably believed compass rate is a thing even though I just made it up. But Noah Kagan does something different: he ignores 99% of his business. And it works.

Before I get to this example, here’s how I think he got here. Noah’s established a few trends on his blog OkDork.com that all follow the mantra of doing more with less. Pareto’s law is to find the 20% of things that drive 80% of growth and forget the rest. Noah’s law is to go for the .1%. A great example is in collecting email addresses: Noah tried removing everything from a website except for a sentence and an email opt-in. It sounded crazy before it worked, but now it’s standard practice for great opt-in rates.

But the real reason we’re here: he grew an entire business on one metric. As his team grew at Sumome.com, Noah trained his team to be obsessed with one thing. He built a one-metric dashboard to drive this home, telling his team that the only thing that mattered was having their app reach one billion people by the end of the year. Everything else was just noise.

The greatest lesson we can learn from Noah is his ability to quiet inner noise. As humans we wrongly assume that the biggest distractions from our work from from external things. “Damn those tweets, I can’t get anything done around here!” In reality, as Daniel Goleman explains in his book Focus, inner emotional dialogue causes much more resistance: “It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds” Goleman writes.

With every metric you track, you add complexity and more opportunities for inner dialogue. But less metrics means less questions, and that brings a lot of clarity and focus to any goal. In a team setting, as Noah demonstrates, it goes even further: “When doing something new, we’d just ask ‘Does this help us toward that goal?’ If it didn’t, we wouldn’t do it.”