The Single Best Optimization You Can Make In 2026

I had the opportunity to interact with an old version of myself recently. No drugs were involved. A simulacrum of a previous commit of self showed up to give a lecture at a conference I was attending.

She was intense.

Intense is the most common adjective my friends and family use to describe me.

Her dissertation was on optimization of humans. Mine was on optimization of systems.

She was fired up and passionate about her work as one must be in order to weather the trials of writing a dissertation then defending it from a committee of experts. The research was excellent. She presented information on optimization of health including sleep/wake cycles, the importance of recovery, importance of maintaining adequate muscle mass, and the essential need for a lot of zone 2 cardio and a bit of zone 5 every week. I was hyper aligned. I love optimization. I’ve employed a lot of the optimizations she mentioned in her talk over the past few years and have significantly improved my health

...until I didn’t.

What Computer Systems Can Teach You About Humans

When designing computer systems there is really just one problem to solve.

It may seem like there’s hundreds of issues; what database, do we cache, what coding language, etc. But there’s really just one singular issue that all of these other questions are subordinate to.

Which tradeoffs make more sense?

Since I am very grateful to have just gotten back to the US yesterday from Europe I will illustrate the point through the lens of McDonald’s. (I am a US maximallist.)

Let’s say you live in the small farm town of Bowling Green, Ohio and you want to introduce the local people to delicious burgers. You decide to put in a single McDonald’s location in the town center. That McDonald’s cranks out tons of burgers and it’s an overnight success. One day the gas goes out in the building though. All of a sudden your singular McDonald’s location can’t grill burgers, or deep fry potatoes (are they fries or potatoes prior to deep frying?). You have a single point of failure.

If you had put in two or even three McDonald’s locations spaced around Bowling Green people would have simply gone to another location if they were craving a Big Mac. On its face, this seems like the superior strategy but is it? If you own three McDonalds restaurants you now have 3x the HR issues, 3x the staff to hire, 3x the utility bills, and so on. You have introduced complexity.

Your core tradeoff, whether it be McDonald’s locations or massively scaling SaaS applications, is between redundancy and complexity (reminiscent of CAP theorem but I believe even that is derivative of the redundancy/complexity tradeoff).

WTF It Was Staring Me In The Face!

I have been relentlessly optimizing every aspect of my life for over a decade now. I’ve seen my health improve, relationships, paycheck, job satisfaction, and many other parameters. But there was a tradeoff and I couldn’t see it because I was in the eye of the storm.

I have introduced an insane amount of complexity into my life.

Fuck.

I didn’t want to be rude during the lecture last week, anyone that has recently finished a PhD deserves a break from answering hard questions at least for a year or two, but I wish I would have asked one thing to the relentless health optimization guru standing on the stage and that is, “Why are you optimizing these things?” Instead I started asking myself as I travelled an unfamiliar country. Such travels have a way of unblocking new avenues of self inquiry and discovery as we very much outsource our thinking into physical parts of the world.

Self Extremism

I am an extremist. Not in the political sense (maybe a bit but who isn’t these days?) but in the general life sense. I’m the type of guy that will eliminate bread entirely from my diet if I read a couple of studies suggesting that it will negatively impact my 5K time (I don’t compete in 5K races, but, you never know right?) In some ways I am a caricature of myself and I am somewhat self aware of this, more so since my recent realization.

I am resisting the urge to jettison all systems in my life and just live serendipitously in the moment even though I desperately want to. Instead I’m just cultivating a general awareness of when I’m optimizing and briefly pausing to ask myself, “Is this optimization worth it for me? Like actually? Like if I had to explain it to a stranger would the logic make some sense?”

Here’s a great one I found recently that I hope serves as an example that might help you find some of your own.

I am building a community online. I have logical reasons for doing this. I’d like to directly provide value to my community via my ideas and coaching. I’ve been able to largely do this via a traditional employer over the past n years and plan on continuing to do so, but there’s always a looming spectre of company policies, politics, a paycheck, and other extenuating factors. I do my best coaching and idea-sharing when I don’t have to worry about anything other than my ideas being useful and actionable to a community, no middle man, no bureaucracy.

Okay, so, logical goal, check.

How am I going about this goal? Mostly by exhausting myself optimizing everything. I am tired folks. I post about a billion youtube shorts a week, I film 2-3 long form videos, I edit those videos myself, I write here on substack, and I turn most of my long form vids into podcast episodes. I make notes and titles and make sure those are somewhat keyword optimized so people actually see them. It is a full time job outside of my other full time jobs as an engineering manager, a father, and a husband. Oh yeah, and I feel sad that I’m not more involved with the church, because, where would I get the time from? Also friends? Yeah occasionally when time permits but it usually falls off my disordered list of priorities.

This is “correct” in the eyes of our culture. I’m HUSTLING trying to make myself. It’s applauded on social media, maybe you think it’s cool, reader, but it is not cool, it is dumb!

But the goal is legit and deeply held and true to who I am and what I want.

So instead of giving into my extremist tendencies and cutting out any online presence whatsoever I asked myself, “If I wasn’t trying to grow an audience what would I do?” and the answer was real fucking simple and bubbled up instantly, “I’d write!”

Mostly this is a general trend in my life. If I could write and not talk to anyone until about noon and then be social afternoon/evening I think life would be pretty good. I actually know this to be true because it’s how I was living when I was all-but-dissertation in my doctoral program.

So I’m cutting out YouTube-specific effort for about a month and seeing how that fits. I’m gonna write, I’m gonna screen record myself writing and post that to the channel, but I’m not making any new youtube videos this month. I’m not measuring anything as a result of this experience. I know I’ll be happier doing this and that my writing quality will improve.

Maybe you’d accuse me of being lazy (I certainly do but am learning to sit with that voice instead of responding to it with action) but I genuinely ask myself, if I am building my own community, why would I even do it if I don’t love doing it? It would be much better to fail instead of just opting for some golden handcuffs, why would you build a life you don’t love?

Mindplague

Once you understand that this is the gist of so much of our modern era you will see this pattern everywhere! Another notable example is Bryan Johnson, the “longevity guru” who wants to live to...100, 200, forever, who knows? If I could talk to him I’d be really curious to know why he wants to live longer? Like what is the exact reasoning? What can’t you get done in 70 years that you’d like an additional 30 or eternity to complete?

You see this with the rabid focus of MBA types to pursue efficiency over all through LLMs. Why would we improve efficiency? Has anyone properly considered the tradeoffs of this?

Another lethally direct question to ask yourself (or others) when hyper-optimizing everything is, “What am I losing by doing this?”

I am a man of faith. I am an Orthodox Christian but you don’t have to be for this to make sense and have some value for you. I am so anxious when I get sick with a virus. I worry about missing work and “falling behind”, about not making enough content for my youtube channel, about not being energetic enough with my daughter. It is extremely egocentric and narcissistic behavior but our culture applauds it. David Goggins invites us to terrorize and bully ourselves into DOING MORE with the motto, “CAN’T HURT ME”. It turns out everyone can be hurt and that might be the most precious thing in our modern era!

When I have a virus, the duration and intensity of the virus is mostly out of my control. Other than resting, there’s not much you can do other than wait the thing out. You can “push through” and try to work and get some lifting in but you’ll just prolong it. I try to use it now, when God grants me the grace to do so, to give up my own will. I try to exercise a little gratitude that God has given me a time out from my “productivity” and “success”. He has humbled me by reminding me that no matter how desperately I grasp for absolute control of this world it is very much not in my control. I pray to heal quickly, of course, but above that, at least on a good day, I pray for God’s will to be done. If that makes you uncomfortable, this general viewpoint seems largely compatible with most faith traditions which by their essence reject the things of the world for higher order things.

My thesis is that the amount of control and hyperoptimization we see in the world is a direct result of man’s anxiety and loss of faith (again, whether that be Christian or otherwise). It’s a desperate attempt by our animal survival-brain to try and wrangle a world that is chaotic, and at this point far beyond our conscious understanding, into a neat box that sits quaintly in the palm of our hand, just waiting to have our own will imposed on it. This is an illusion.

What I hope to ignite in you, dear reader, is a drive to question your own systems. To take a look at yourself, as objective as your ego permits, and to ask yourself, “Why am I trying to improve this thing in my life? Does the cost today outweigh the hypothetical future benefit?”