An essay

On optimizing yourself
into a corner

“I don’t want to do this anymore.”

A friend told me that recently. The thing he doesn’t want to do anymore is the thing he spent twenty years building. The company works, the family is intact, the reputation is real. He wasn’t being dramatic when he said it. He said it the way you’d read a lab result.

I couldn’t make his life add up to his sentence. Then I stopped looking at his life and looked at his Tuesday.

The thesis

You can’t cure a disease you’ve misdiagnosed.

Busy is true, and it tells you nothing.

A dozen worlds before dinner

By nine he has answered a board member, signed a school form, put out a hiring fire, skimmed a feed full of strangers’ opinions, and left a friend’s text sitting unanswered for the fourth day, the one he keeps meaning to answer well and therefore doesn’t answer at all.

Board memberneeds an answer

School formdue today

Hiring fireout by 9 a.m.

The feedstrangers’ opinions

The textday four

That’s five worlds and it isn’t nine a.m. By dinner he’ll have visited a dozen. None of them touch. The board member doesn’t know his kid’s name. The school doesn’t care about the board. The feed doesn’t know him at all. Every world wants more of him than it gets, so he ends each day owing something to someone, and starts the next one behind.

Ask how he’s doing and he says busy, which is true and tells you nothing. He is failing every sphere by a little while being told from every direction that he’s killing it, and nothing gets enough of him to be satisfied: not the company, the family, the friend, or him.

The fixes

You can’t cure a disease you’ve misdiagnosed.

We do have a volume problem. It’s not the one we think. We are not consuming more information than anyone at any other point in history, and we have the same amount of attention. What’s new is that we’re dealing with unrelated ideas that pile on top of each other and create incoherence in our experience. We diagnosed it as too much, and the cure for too much is obvious.

F1We optimized the day

Time blocking, inbox zero, the calendar audit, and when the systems weren’t enough, the guilt genre: no email in bed, no email at dinner, no email in the meeting about email. We read those books. We bought them for our teams, which is what you do with a book that’s about you. Some of it helped. But the tighter the schedule got, the more worlds fit inside it.

F2We optimized what we take in

The feed learned what holds us, and the answer began arriving before the question had finished forming. Curiosity used to cost a walk, a conversation, a book you had to find. Now we can be interested in everything for about forty-seven seconds, which researchers say is the average stretch we last on any one screen. Because it feels like learning, we barely notice how rarely it adds up to knowing.

F3We optimized relationships

Network wider. Treat each connection as an investment. Prune the ones that don’t return. That misunderstands what relationships are for. The ones that give us security and honesty are usually the ones Lewis called unnecessary, the ones that return nothing you could enter in a ledger. A circle also does something a portfolio cannot: every time it gathers, several bonds grow stronger.

F4The logical end: remove the people

The humans are the friction; the model doesn’t complain or quit or need context twice. We spent a century trying to optimize people out of work. The tools finally got good enough to aim the old premise at ourselves: the company of one, building everything alone with a mirror that charges by the token.

The backlash to all this is work-life balance. It’s just as much a Faustian bargain as the hustle it’s reacting to. Underneath “work less” is the same optimization pointed the other way: be the perfect parent, the perfect spouse, the perfect physical specimen. The other spheres of your life need more of you too. We are made to work, to produce, to do hard things, and trading effort for leisure gives us less.

Line up the calendar, the feed, the network, and the balance plan. Each assumes the broken unit is you, alone, and the repair is you, alone.

What the fixes can’t touch

The fixes were aimed at capacity, and capacity was never the shortage. You can execute a perfectly engineered week and reach Friday unable to say what it was for.

A farmer three hundred years ago spent every drop of attention he had, same as us. But the weather decided the crop, the crop fed the family, and the family belonged to a place he would die in. His life was hard in ways we’ve forgotten, but one thing bore on the next. He was one man in one world.

My friend is a dozen men in a dozen worlds, moving among them all day. So are most of us, give or take a world.

And stay divided long enough and it reaches who you take yourself to be: you can perform in every world and be known in none of them.

Three thousand years ago, a man with a king’s resources ran the experiment. Solomon tried every pleasure, project, and kind of mastery available to him. The word he kept returning to gets translated from Hebrew as vanity, though it sits closer to vapor. He wasn’t preaching. He was reporting. We keep running the same experiment with better tools.

Not overloaded.
Divided.

The way back

Three disciplines help with the slow work of getting undivided.

Discipline 01

Attention

Attention comes first, because that’s where the dividing starts.

For most of human history, what we could attend to was mostly what was near. Reaching farther took effort. Now the phone can keep us alarmed all day about things we cannot touch. Some walls help, but attention is more than walling the world out. It is choosing what deserves you and turning toward it.

For leaders, that choice spreads; people learn what matters by watching what gets their attention.

Discipline 02

Curiosity

Curiosity dies in a way most people miss, because what kills it feels like competence.

Constructive curiosity holds two things together: I don’t know, and I can learn. Success can turn the second into “I already know,” which feels almost identical from the inside. Confidence feels the same whether you’re seeing clearly or living inside a distorted picture of reality. Someone else has to check your vision.

Curiosity also needs security. Pressure doesn’t make people less intelligent. It makes them less curious.

Discipline 03

Friendship

Stay long enough and the impressive version disappears.

Friendship is the one thing that can’t survive being optimized. We drift toward wide, shallow networks because deep friendship asks more of us, and quick vulnerability can create the feeling of being known without the years in which someone actually knows you, including the unimpressive version.

What you want is small and hard to fake: a handful of people who run alongside you for decades, who need nothing from you, who would think the same of you if the whole thing folded tomorrow. Lewis put friendship among the things that have no survival value, and then said they are what make survival worth having.

Whatever the good life turns out to be,

you’re not going to
get there alone.

See how this fits into the whole →

Curt speaks about this.→ Keynotes

On optimizing yourselfinto a corner