Stop Optimizing Everything
The Amplified Impact Podcast
August 13th, 2023
Today’s a dive into a twist of fate that got me thinking.
Remember that “hero to villain” quote? Well, it’s got company in my top quotes.
I stumbled upon Tim Ferriss, the “Four Hour Work Week” guy.
He’s been the optimization maestro, but guess what? He’s intentionally unoptimizing his life now.
It hit home.
I’ve swung from ADHD chaos to optimization central.
It worked, but I sensed there’s more.
Tim’s journey and mine aligned…less but better.
Happiness isn’t a perfectly polished life; it’s embracing the messiness.
So, here’s the takeaway: Balance.
Optimize when needed, but let life surprise you.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“I think happiness is a result of having problems worth solving and then making progress towards solving those problems.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
You either die the hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain. This is one of my favorite quotes maybe of all time. I think it’s from the Dark Knight. Christopher Nolan’s batman adaptation. And I got to thinking about it this morning because I was cruising around the social medias as I do in the morning, just kind of getting the pulse, the lay of the land, seeing what’s out there. And I saw this interview that Tim Ferriss had done. I can’t remember who he was actually being interviewed by but Tim Ferriss, if you’re not familiar, wrote the Four Hour Work Week way back in the early two thousand s and at the time that whole idea of automating your business with VAS, being able to travel internationally to reduce your expenses and then drop shipping things. This was a very novel concept back then.
Anthony Vicino:
So that book, The Four Hour Work Week, I think helped a lot of people reconceptualize what the modern workforce could look like as an entrepreneur in particular. Nowadays it’s so common to see nomadic entrepreneurship and young kids with their laptops off in the beach in know, making their money while dropshipping and do all these things right? So we take it for granted now, but Tim Ferriss in a lot of ways really was the OG. And what’s been so fascinating about watching his journey over the years is he wrote that book, he started his podcast and it was very popular. There’s a good chance that you’ve heard Tim Ferriss at some point in your life, or heard of him at least. So very, very popular guy. And what he’s really carved out a niche over the last decade or so has been the guy who’s all about optimization, like human optimization, really tinkering with his body, trying to figure out what are the minimum number of inputs that have the largest output or effect on your life. And so he wrote things like The Four Hour Chef or The Four Hour Body and things like that, where he’s just this biohacker. And in fact, in a lot of ways he might be one of the first people with celebrity types that we looked to and said like he was a biohacker.
Anthony Vicino:
He just talks about this so often on his podcast and in his blog and his writings that he very much became synonymous with this idea of optimization. And even in his intro on his podcast, it’s all about, I think part of it says like, I am Human 2.0 or something like that. When I saw this interview that he was doing Hit my feed, he was talking about how he is intentionally trying to unoptimize his life these days. Like he is making a conscious effort to not do things so systematically, so rigidly, so routinely, and instead leaving more room for the unoptimized. And this is really interesting to me because I’ve kind of gone through a similar ebb and flow and seeing him at a similar point in his journey now of like, oh, maybe I’ve over indexed on optimization, maybe it’s time now to leave a little bit more room for the messiness of life to fill in. This is something that I’ve been tinkering with in the last year and a half or so. So if you know my story, a lot of it revolved around how in my younger years, I really struggled with ADHD and structure, right? Like I did not live any kind of optimized life. I was just kind of living from moment to moment like Peter Pan.
Anthony Vicino:
And that did not do me a lot of good. And so then to solve for that issue, I had to go the complete opposite direction. If I was coming from a life of no structure, no systems, no optimization, I overindexed, maybe not over, but I indexed very heavily for how do I routinize routineize or systematize my life habitualize. It in a way that I can optimize my potential. And so that’s really what I’ve been doing for the last decade. And it’s worked, it worked really, really well in building different businesses and just like tapping into this potential that I thought that I had inside. And so not going to say optimization is not a good thing. It is.
Anthony Vicino:
But there comes a point maybe where we become slaves to that system or we’re trying to over optimize every little thing. And one of the realizations I’ve had in the last year is that the over optimized life is typically not the happiest life. You can be optimized, you can be happy, you can be messy, there’s all sorts of ways that you can function in the world, but the over optimized life does not tend to be the happiest one. And so I’ve just been leaving a little bit more room in my life for serendipity for that messiness while still trying to maintain a certain level of optimization around certain things, trying to figure out what are those fewest number of inputs that really matter, that pursuit of less but better. This has been a refrain. This is like the phrase of the year for me, less but better. And it’s really to get to this core of like, how can I lead not the most optimized life, but just the most fulfilling life, the most purpose driven, the most meaningful, the one that I enjoy the most or I find the most value in. And it’s not a product of how much can you output and how dialed in are your systems.
Anthony Vicino:
And so I share this because in the beginning, depending on where you are in your journey, you probably need to implement more systems, more structure, more routine, and move towards that optimized existence, but then realize that humans aren’t optimal creatures. We weren’t designed in the savannah to have all of our needs met in the cleanest, easiest way possible. There’s a certain amount of struggle and strife that we need to go through to be able to achieve. I think happiness I think happiness is a result of having problems worth solving and then making progress towards solving those problems. And then as you solve that problem, you don’t just achieve the summit of happiness now, you just have different problems to solve, ideally better problems to solve, but problems still. So if we try to optimize our life to reduce all problems, you’re going to get into this sterile sort of existence. What I was finding for myself maybe three or four years ago was that just wasn’t like, as fulfilling as I wanted it to be. I didn’t want to just be a hamster on the wheel doing exactly what’s in front of me.
Anthony Vicino:
And not to say that there’s anything wrong with that. I think there’s times and there’s seasons for these things in life, and I’m just at that point right now where I’m just kind of going with the flow a little bit more. So hopefully this brings you a little bit of value, a new perspective or a different perspective depending on where you are in your journey. Hopefully this helped you out a little bit or gave you something to think about. I appreciate you guys, as always, being here, but we’ll catch you back around these parts tomorrow. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.
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