By Alexis Louise Reda
Optimality is a measured, focused effort progressed over time – it is not the most output you can achieve at once.
Achieving optimality is not necessarily doing the absolute best and most you can do – that, by definition, is “absolute optimality”. It is great, but it does not correlate with maintaining desired outcomes such as dependable progress mid-term or long-term. We have other functions that demand energy in our lives, you know. Therefore what is more worth caring about is more often “relative optimality”: the most you can do WITH CONSIDERATION of all the other things you must dedicate energy for in your day, in your life. So don’t feel like you have to hurt after your workout or leave the computer with a headache and eyeache and buttache to have achieved something “optimally”, because that’s a fallacy. Even athletes 100% dedicated to their sport know that they cannot be their best by going 100% effort every session. In intelligent weight training, you don’t push to failure more than I’d say 20% of the time – and those events are programmed at very specific intervals in a training cycle (analogous to a life cycle). They will get you to another level, but never in isolation – never without the prerequisite of doing focus-based, quality repetitions relatively much farther away from maximum effort, around 80% of the time. This is focused action that results in providing just enough of a stimulus to get a positive training effect – an adaptation to the skill you are practicing that will make you better over time. Why not consider this for everything else in life, too?
Knowing thy tendencies is number one in gauging optimality of any endeavor at any point in time. There are many different personalities out there – even many personalities within one person under different circumstances. Be perceptive of these in yourself. A person who is highly motivated may overshoot and do too much work to the point they experience physical degradation without even realizing, and then mistake it for success or progress when really what gives them that feeling is just having satisfied their compulsion. Compulsion here is skewing their perception of what amount of work is optimal to get things done the best and/or the quickest. Without the feeling of taking constant action, they don’t feel good enough. Others may say they are the severely undermotivated type (though they still have desires for something more), but in actuality, their personal goals are simply too much to bear alongside other tasks they’ve chosen to accept in their lives at this moment.
So for both sample people above, toning down their expectations and subsequent outputs may be the uncanny answer to better progress. How? The overachiever who sees things with an all-or-nothing attitude may find this hard to swallow, as they feel that cutting back on workload would not result in optimizing that which the work is geared towards; but if they are otherwise burnt out, or have many other goals which they strive for simultaneously, this is indeed optimal in that context. Shifting focus to rewiring their mindset about what they value and what they desire IN THE CONTEXT of their lives may introduce a healthy amount of compassion towards themselves, broadening their perspective on life and enabling a deeper understanding that indirectly fosters intrinsic motivation that ensures steadier, more reliable progress – hence, optimality – all without necessarily increasing effort.
By now you can likely see how context is key in determining the optimality of your actions for anything in your life. It is all too easy to take things – especially things that are really important to you – out of context, and see them through the lens of another person whose only job in life is to do that thing which you aspire to do very well. There are people like that – but in that case there are many things missing from their life experience that you are thankfully able to have. Unfortunately our subconscious mind syphons these negative-comparative perspectives out of the environments you observe passively, so it’s not your fault. You are already on top of your game if you simply become aware that no one else – not even someone very similar to you – has your life. Knowing this, it makes a lot of sense to program your activities, rest times, and mindsets around your own triggers that affect your expectations and motivations, given the unique array of tasks you’ve chosen to embark on.
Another thing I hope you realize is the complexity of this situation. As I write this, I notice that everything I say can potentially come with an alternative or caveat. This is simply because if you were to calculate how many variations there are in pairing every personality tendency with every possible combination of desires they may have, with an infinite amount of unique triggers that affect emotional stability or mental perception surrounding every one of those desires, and then account for all the other variables requiring energy in one person’s life, you will quickly realize how infinite this whole thing seems, thus how virtually impossible the complete satisfaction of my argument is. I can generalize all I want – which in a way, I must – but therein, too, lies the fallacy of optimality: I will never serve everybody with this blog, but I can summarize information in a way that can hopefully nudge up a lot of people’s outlook on what it means to manifest something of value to your values. If you’ve achieved a broad enough perspective on what it means to essentially exist in life with all your greatest desires in their relative place on the shifting scale of importance, congratulations – and you have also realized that you can never be objectively certain that all of your efforts are funneling into the best (“optimal”) results. So how do you really know? Well… truth be told, when you are not noticeably lacking in any facet of your life (unless strategically putting things temporarily on the back burner), and you thus have identified a structure (or lack thereof) of engagements which make you vital and joyful, then kid yourself not, you are “in the soup” of making progress, and ANY progress IN THAT STATE…is optimal progress.