What are you really optimizing for? How to Avoid the Wrong Success
From the Happiness PhD Project with Jackson Kerchis...
“My advice for you — the advice I wish I could have given my younger self — is this: Before getting swept up in the competitions that define so much of life, ask yourself whether you even want the prize on offer.”
I came across this quote the other day, and I think it gets at the essence of engineering a happy life. It comes back to this question…
What am I optimizing for?
It’s so easy to get wrapped up in getting ahead in the game you’re playing that you may forget that (A) it’s a game or (B) why you are actually playing it. Consequently, you can start to optimize for the wrong things.
Optimize means to make the best or most effective use of something. In this context it’s sort of like what you’re trying to achieve through your approach. If you’re planning your Friday night you could optimize for budget: stay in and cook dinner; optimize for health: go to the gym and sauna; optimize for fun: throw a party; optimize for productivity: check your email and go to bed early.
What you optimize drives what you do.
The trick is not losing sight of this fact.
Think of a chef who says “I want to create the most interesting and flavorful food possible!” That is, of course, a reasonable thing to optimize for as a chef. So, she starts her career and notices the chef down the block has some pretty intense menu items like deconstructed risotto and caviar. She notices they serve bite-size portions with incredibly intense flavor (the true 5-star experience).
After a couple of years she is serving the most extreme of the pretentious Michelin star meals and no one likes her restaurant anymore. Why?
Well, she kept optimizing for more interesting and more intense flavor: more, more, more.
But to the opening lines of this essay, she didn’t ask why? She didn’t consider what she was truly after. Why did she want to make for more interesting and flavorful food?
It wasn’t for the sake of flavor and interest alone, it was to create meals people really enjoy and bring them together through food. If she had remembered that was really what she was optimizing for, then she would have been better off.
In business this is sometimes known as Goodhart’s Law.
This states that when “a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Think of a hair salon trying to be more efficient. They measure the average time it takes to do a haircut: 28 minutes. This is a great measure to keep an eye on as you encourage your stylists to work efficiently. For every additional appointment you get done in a day you make another $50 or so.
But what if that measure becomes the target? You have your stylists cutting hair as quickly as possible. Well, you can see how that may end poorly for your customers.
Similar reasoning applies with weight loss. You can imagine someone trying to lose weight so they don’t eat or drink any water for 24 hours and they cut their hair. Then they say, “oh look the number went down, I’ve lost weight!” It’s true they lost weight, but probably not in the way they wanted.
So often in our personal lives we run into Goodhart’s Law.
Now back to our chef, she over-indexed to winning some game of the fanciest, most novel restaurant. She didn’t stop to consider if she even wanted the prize on offer.
Joseph Campbell says, “Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.”
Haven’t we all seen this play out before?
We all know “the rat race”. But frankly it’s not a fair title. Because most people, at least at the start, do not enter this race knowing it will make rats out of them. They don’t set out to trade their personal lives for wealth (some do). For most, there is just a certain societal pressure to achieve and have a “good career” and be “successful”.
And the models for success we are given are often those at the front of the pack – running towards the prize on offer that no one has stopped to consider if they want.
So let’s say you enter into this race.
You might think “okay, I want to make partner at the consulting firm or VP at the company.” Great, so you jump in and pretty quickly you find it’s the type of place where “from the outside everyone wanted to get into, but on the inside, everybody wanted to leave.”
There are two directions this may go based on people I’ve encountered in my life.
Person A never really asks “what am I optimizing for?”
He just wants to be the CEO — the big prize. So he works 80-hour weeks going through all the various departments to really learn the company. Then he gets promoted. And he thinks – “okay, I just need to sacrifice for a couple years then I’ll get to be VP.” A couple years go by and he has missed out on his daughter’s formative years but now he’s the VP and in an amazing spot.
He has stock in the company and as it grows through acquisitions, he can easily make hundreds of thousands. So he keeps going for a few more years, missing out on most of his second child’s years. Then finally he is the owner/operator of the company. He did it!
But there’s so much pressure, everything runs through him. He can’t take a day off.
And maybe he goes to the doctor one day. The doc says “hey this spot is a little weird looking.” It turns out it’s cancer.
And in that moment it all crashes into reality. What’s he going to say?
“It all happened so fast! Did I just waste my life? Lord please give me more time, I promise I won’t waste it…”
Well, you just had 20 years — what did you do with that? You thought you made it but all you made was a fool of yourself.
Compare this with a wise young lady who gets into a top management consulting firm. What is she optimizing for?
Well she wants to earn a great income and set up her professional career but at the end of the day it’s about financial freedom to maximize her quality of life. She works hard for a few years. Then they are ready to bump her up to senior manager and she says how about this: “instead of the 25% raise, just pay me the same amount but cut my hours by 25%.” Why?
Because she knows she is optimizing for financial freedom and quality of life as her path to happiness. She already has the financial security making like $120,000. So now she wants more freedom.
They work something out and she works about 35 hours per week instead of 50. She continues to do pretty well and 3 years later she makes the same “promotion”. She’s now working about 20 hours per week making $150,000. She has time to hang with her kids all afternoon and frequently takes long getaways to her favorite travel spots.
Because of her part time status she’ll never make VP, she’ll never be the CEO. She lost the rat race. And in doing so she won the game of life. She looked at the prize on offer and instead of competing, she quit. She decided to optimize for happiness.
So I’m not telling you can’t be the CEO or be the best at your thing or be rich and famous. (Although it may be worth noting Jim Carrey’s commentary: “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it's not the answer.”)
My point is before you start the race and as you run it you need be sure you want what’s at the finish line. You need to understand at all times – what am I optimizing for?
And I suggest it’s not success, money, status, views, productivity, etc. I suggest you optimize for happiness.
Your happiness nerd,
Jackson