Over Optimization

I almost blew up something good this week. Something that was working. I won’t get into the specifics, but the short version is: I identified a situation that was maybe 85-90% of what I wanted, and instead of leaving it alone, I spent real energy trying to close the gap to 100%. By the time I caught myself, I’d created more problems than I’d solved.

The worst part? I’ve done this before. A lot.

I have this reflex. When things are going well, my brain doesn’t relax. It starts scanning. What could be better? What’s at risk? What should I be working on next? I treat every feeling as a problem to solve and every realization becomes an action item. Feel something, then fix something. It’s basically unconscious at this point.

I experience effort as an investment and I’m always running a kind of portfolio optimization in my head. Where does the next unit of energy generate the most return? Rest has to be “recovery.” Reading has to be “better than TV.” Even contentment has to be a quarterly goal or it doesn’t feel like it counts.

For most of my career, this has been useful. It’s the thing that keeps me in motion. But I’m starting to notice the places where it breaks down.

I think I know where it started.

Earlier in my career I went through a stretch where work was too easy. I wasn’t challenged, I wasn’t growing, and I got deeply, uncomfortably bored. It was one of the worst professional stretches I can remember. And I took a lesson from it: comfort is dangerous. If I let things get too comfortable, I’ll end up back there.

Wrong lesson.

The problem wasn’t comfort. It was purposelessness. I didn’t have anything I cared about enough to work hard on. I wasn’t bored because things were easy. I was bored because nothing mattered. But I misread the signal, and that misreading has been running quietly in the background for years. It built this belief that if I ever fully relax, I’ll lose the thing that makes me effective.

So I keep optimizing. Keep scanning. Keep tinkering with situations that are already working.

The cost doesn’t show up as some dramatic crisis. It’s subtler than that. I’ve been trying to solve a stress-eating pattern for over a decade. I’ve tried a nutritionist, medication, tracking, meal planning, etc. I’ve thrown every tactical intervention I can think of at it, and none of them have stuck. I’m starting to realize that’s because the root issue isn’t nutrition. It’s that my nervous system doesn’t know how to be at rest. Hard to fix an eating problem when the actual problem is that your body thinks it’s always supposed to be doing something.

And here’s what gets me. I already feel contentment. I feel it all the time. In the garage working on something with my son. On the baseball field coaching. On the couch with my wife on a Friday night. The feeling shows up regularly.

But my mind interrupts it. Every time. Usually within a few minutes. It pulls me back to the planning table before the feeling has a chance to settle. Like there’s a background process that says, “Okay, nice. Now what should you be working on?”

I sat with that for a while this week. If my worth is always located in the future, the present moment never gets to be enough on its own terms.

So I’ve been rethinking the whole frame. Comfort isn’t the enemy. Purposelessness is. And those are very different things. I can be rested, financially stable, and comfortable AND deeply engaged in work that matters to me. I don’t need chaos or scarcity to have drive. I just need a worthy problem.

And the 80-90% thing. An 80-90% situation that I leave alone will almost always serve me better than a 100% situation I burned energy or relationships to create. My brain wants the 100%. It always wants the 100%. But the cost of chasing that last 10% is real, and I haven’t been honest with myself about it.

I started working with a therapist. Not because something is broken. Because a pattern that has resisted fifteen years of self-awareness probably deserves a different tool. I’m blocking more time in my schedule for creative work, time to let my brain wander and think on things. That sounds simple but it’s genuinely uncomfortable for me. I’m practicing the muscle of not grinding.

I’m not trying to kill the optimizer. That’s who I am and it works in a lot of places. I’m just trying to get better at noticing when I’m optimizing something that doesn’t need to be optimized.

#HappyLearning