Everyone loves to talk about optimization. The term gets thrown around by business leaders, fitness influencers, and engineers too. It brings to mind peak performance, getting the best out of yourself, and eliminating inefficiencies. But humans are complex, and when you optimize one part of a system, you face tradeoffs in others.

A few examples:

If I (Brad) optimize my life for writing a great book, the time and energy I have for strength training, friends, podcasting, reading, and even family will suffer. If I optimize my life for family, then my output at work will diminish. If I optimize my life for performance as an athlete, I’ll be increasingly fatigued when it comes time to write and play with my kids, and the quality of both will deteriorate.

The same pattern that applies to life as a whole also applies to smaller and more defined projects. If Steve is designing a training program for an athlete and he wants to focus on optimizing a specific quality, say, muscular endurance, then there is going to be some sacrificing of other qualities, such as speed and power. It’s why we periodize training: we can’t maximize every quality at the same time. Good training is an ongoing balancing act of multiple factors, all of which interact.

It is easy to optimize for a specific variable. It is much harder to optimize across an entire system.

Herein lies a massive blind-spot in performance, personal development, and fitness. You’ve got podcast hosts doing three-hour deep dives on a single variable of living and how to optimize it one week, and then switching to the next single variable of living and how to optimize it the following week, ad infinitum. After one year, you could end up with 52 protocols for optimization, which, taken together, result in a sub-optimal life.

(As an aside, this is core to the business model of many optimization podcasts. Every week offers you a dopamine hit because you learned something bright and shiny and new. But because each protocol, routine, or hack is impossible to fit together as a whole, life doesn’t improve. So what happens? people keep coming back for more. It’s why we take a completely different approach in our podcast, FAREWELL, focusing more on the nuance of how the pieces fit together, and also just having fun and interesting conversations.)

So when you think about optimizing, don’t just think about optimizing for a single variable. Think about optimizing for the entire system. Here, two key concepts come into play: tradeoffs and minimum effective doses.

Tradeoffs mean that when you divert time, attention, and energy to one component of life, you are taking away from others. Part of being a mature adult is acknowledging that these tradeoffs will always exist and that it’s important to re-evaluate them regularly.

Minimum effective doses imply that you never want to leave important parts of the system completely neglected, even when you are deprioritizing them.

If you normally have family dinners five nights per week but are going into a busy season with work and evening meetings, maybe your minimum effective dose becomes three family dinners per week. It’s a hard rule and constraint: Even when I am optimizing for work, I don’t ever let family dinners go below three nights per week.

Maybe you are optimizing for fitness and sport performance, so your time for reading books is reduced as a result. But if reading is important to you, you’d define a minimum effective dose. If you’d been reading for an hour per day, maybe a threshold you never go below is 20 minutes per day.

If you are a runner focusing on speed, but don’t want to completely lose the qualities associated with tempo workouts, perhaps during your speed training block you go from one tempo run per week to one tempo run per month. That becomes the minimum effective dose. In each of these examples, you are acknowledging the reality that emphasizing one activity or quality means deemphasizing others, all the while making sure you never leave anything important behind. (It’s at the heart of our ​key training principles.​)

A key idea for progress in a complex system is to identify what you are building versus what you are maintaining.

Nothing important ever completely goes away, but the emphasis shifts with the seasonality of life. In base training, you go from lots of easy running with a touch of faster work, to the opposite mixture when it comes time to race. As a writer, when in creative mode, you have an abundance of deep work, with just enough social media presence to remind people you exist. When a book comes out, however, it’s spending way too much time on the internet, with just enough deep work to keep you from losing your sanity. For each season of your work (and life), decide what you are building, what you are maintaining, and what minimum effective doses are required to ensure that whatever you are maintaining doesn’t deteriorate too much.

“If I optimize for one quality, what tradeoffs am I making, what other qualities do I want to make sure I don’t leave behind, and what are the minimum effective doses for those qualities?”

Anyone can optimize for a single variable and have the rest of their life look like a train wreck

It’s much harder (and more important) to optimize for the entire system—but that’s where true performance, satisfaction, and sustainable excellence reside.

– Brad and Steve