If you learn to Optimise, it has two benefits. In hard times, it gets you through in a reliable fashion. This is what most people see, and is the reason many optimise their choices. What many miss, though, is that in good times it produces wildly better outcomes than arbitrary or cultural decision making.
A long time ago in my life now, there was a period that I had to optimise a great many things. Chiefly because I was a student who had to make rent and tuition with minimal help from my parents. The extent of the financial support I had included $1,000 a year towards my $9,000/year tuition, and none towards living costs. Thus, I had to get pretty lean in order to make things work. I worked a lot of weekends and evenings and ran a bloody tight ship budget wise. Inflation adjusted, I was making things work to a similar tune of the expenditures seen by Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme. His blog is a solid read if you have not read it before.
This, of course, builds skills. You quickly find that skills can oftentimes replace the expenditure of money. These skills do not so easily fade. So when I graduated and found myself with a large abundance of money, way more time than before, and a massively better life situation, I applied those same skills to that situation.
I was able to optimise for having an awesome relationship. For learning and growth. To a solid degree, for investing. In the last 12 months I have optimised for bodybuilding with massive success. The same mindset that got me through the harder times now exist in an environment of abundance, where they can cause life to catapult itself to heights I thought not possible.
Here are some example skills to make that more concrete:
- The ability to recognise your own blind spots. Doing something because “you always did it that way” does not make it the best option.
- Awareness of the why behind your actions.
- Mathematical and statistical understanding, which is applicable to many more choices than first meets the eye.
- The ability to reset, or to deal with an unfortunate scenario with a clear head.
- The ability to tolerate discomfort.
“But Whisper”, I hear you saying. “Those things have nothing to do with optimisation.”
Maybe at first glance. I would say the first thing I truly attempted to optimise was when I walked my nerd ass around the nearby grocery stores and online prices and found the cheapest way to get calories and nutrients per dollar. While this started as just a spreadsheet, what it built was an awareness of why I am doing what I do in the grocery store.
Now instead of optimising for calories per dollar, I can effortlessly take the same awareness and apply it to protein per day and how easy it will be to intake, optimising for both myself and my girlfriend so that we can easily maximise our gym returns. I can basically buy groceries without looking at the price, but you bet your ass I look at the protein content. No spreadsheet is needed for this, because the fundamental awareness of what I am buying in the grocery store, what it contains, and why I want it was built by the initial exercise. So we have salmon for dinner and steak the next, chicken a third day. Far cry from the beans and rice I so often had in college, but it is the same skills that make those choices.