From Self-Improvement to Optimisation

Dom Mazetti has a good line about “The day you want to get big is the day you will be forever small”. Because no matter how big you get, something will always need working on, some bro will always have a bigger set of that muscle than you do.

I wonder. Is the day we go into self-improvement the day we will be forever unworthy? That we will have the nagging sense that we need to improve something else about us that is simply not good enough. Since we cannot be perfect, we can always improve. So how much improvement is enough?

Self-improvement has two purposes: first, to get rid of damaging or grossly sub-optimal habits and replace them with good habits; second, to take on new habits that will make us more informed, interesting, resilient, employable, healthier, better company and so on and on.

‘Lift weights’ contains within in the injunction ‘stop being a lazy slouch’. ‘Quit eating junk’ forces us to look for better food to eat. ‘Read books’ tears us away from the TV and the Internet. And so on.

Self-improvement stops when we’ve dumped the bad habits and replaced them with better, though possibly not optimal, ones.

Keep that up, and it’s maintenance mode. After that, it’s about optimising.

Getting your body fat down from 30%+ to around 20% is self-improvement. Getting down to 15% is optimising, and for looks at that. (Google it: Special ops have around 18% because any lower and you don’t have the reserves to wait for the submarine to come back the next night after the first pick-up has to be abandoned.)

Trying out for the local soccer or basketball team is more than exercising, it’s an interest. The work you will have to do to be good enough for a reasonable team will require some performance improvements and specific skills: this sounds like optimisation.

Reading some books on the history of food is maintenance. Reading a book on knife skills and using them is optimisation.

Throwing out garish branded clothes and getting some low-key trousers and shirts where the brand is tucked away inside, this is self-improvement. Custom suits are optimisation. https://twitter.com/michaelporfirio

I suspect I’ve been in maintenance mode for a while now, and need to get a little optimisation going on somewhere. I’ll tell you this: it’s not going to involve the gym. As I’ve said before and will say again, call my nephew when you’re doing what I’m doing at my age. I feel the need for some optimisation in some new direction and that may feel gratuitous.