On Optimization

XL

2024.03.31

That question that will determine the course of your life is simple, elegant, brutal, efficient: What are you optimizing for?

Keeping with the theme, we’ll look at some items in my habit tracker as constraints on my path towards becoming the man who I want to be.

Objective Function

An objective function is effectively an equation in which you have a goal you want to minimize or maximize and have variables which you can subject to certain constraints. You’re flying a plane and need to get to an airport by a certain amount of time without killing anyone on board.

As a more specific, example, your diet could be represented with the following objective function:

Calories = Protein*Cal/g + Carbs*Cal/g+ Fat*Cal/g

In our watered down example, each Cal/g is a constant ratio for each of the macros—say 4 calories per gram of carb, as an example. So, all that you have direct control over is your Protein, Carb, and Fat intake. I know, this is an egregiously simplified model—where’s the Omega 6 to Omega 3 ratio, or the processed carbs vs unprocessed carbs?! The sacrifices we make to illustrate a point…

Still, let’s say you’re bulking and want to put on as much weight as possible–you’d maybe set up a range of acceptable Calories and maximize Protein within that band. Or, if you’re carb loading before a race, you’d maybe be maximizing carbs. On the other hand, if you’re doing Keto, we might just set a constraint that carbs can’t exceed 30 grams, give fat a minimum, and then keep calories in a range. 

All of these options stem from that simple question: what are you optimizing for? Is your diet meant to fuel you for a race, burn fat, or build prodigious amounts of muscle?

Life’s Objective Function

Life’s objective function might be like this: 

You = (Activity1*t1) + (Activity2*t2) + (Activity3*t3)....

You are the sum of everything you do times the time you spend doing it. Back to the good ole, tried and true notion that you are your actions.

Now this one can’t be mathematically modeled, because “You” is quite a hard thing to quantify, and it’s not always immediately obvious how it stems directly from what you do. Any attempts to actually turn this into math would probably be missing the point, just as many mathematical models around health miss the point. 

All that being said, it’s still a super interesting framework to view decisions from. And, given the fact that we’ve been talking about habits and habit trackers, it’s quite perfect for the current discussion. 

Who Do You Want To Be

To talk about your own personal hypothetical Objective Function, you’d first need to talk about what you want the output, YOU, to actually look like. 

In my case, I want to be a lot of different things. I want to have created value, contributed to GDP growth, had a positive impact on people’s lives, supported a robust and sustainable food and governance system, I want to have a loving wife and raised a lovely family, I’d like to own and live on a self sufficient regenerative farm, I’d like to have left a literary legacy aligned with truth, I’d want to have lived a long health-span, and I’ll want to have spent as little time as possible on cheap, unfulfilling things.

At face value, that’s an overwhelming to do list. If I were to try to “optimize” for all of that right now, I’d get nothing done. 

So, for the time being, I’ve selected one thing that I believe the bulk of the rest stem from, or, at the very least, enables the rest to come much more trivially. What I care about more than anything right now is cultivating my ability to makes systems that create and extract value.

“Competence” is a good way to put it… right now, I have a myopic focus on learning how to turn my effort and resources into more resources, an alchemy as old as time. “Entrepreneurship,” if you will, but that word has been bastardized by shills on the internet. I like Alchemy a bit better. 

I have full faith that if I learn how to do this, the other things will be subject to much fewer constraints in the future and, likewise, will be much more easy to obtain.

And, for various reasons, the success of Ultima is perfectly aligned with my primary goal.

The Priority

It’s been said that you only get one priority, and I couldn’t agree with this more. The priority is the primary goal. For me, this is maximizing the probability of Ultima succeeding through the efforts of myself and the team. 

What that implies, though, is that everything goes by the wayside for the priority. Someone has asked me what I’m willing to sacrifice to make Ultima work; the list was too long to enumerate. The better question is, what am I not willing to sacrifice to make it work? What is sacrosanct?

Well, I won’t sacrifice my character or principles to make it work, but, for me, this is a moot point, because I’ve internalized the belief that sacrificing my principles is mutually exclusive with maintaining the competence to create long term, sustainable systems. That’s possibly an entire other post. 

Outside of that, this is where the habit tracker comes in. Two of my habits in the tracker are pretty directly aligned with my Ultima goal: 1) quantity of deep work–don’t worry, it’s been steadily on the rise; 2) Not hitting the snooze button–get up and get after it.

However, since making the business successful is my primary driver right now, I simply think about it quite a lot and am constantly evaluating which actions will have the highest impact on the likelihood of my desired outcome. And then, if I’m behaving appropriately, I do them. I don’t need a habit tracker for that. There are some repeated to do’s, for sure, but they’re a fraction of what matters.

In a lot of ways, my habit tracker is a collection of minimums that help me maintain or steadily improve other qualities outside of winning in business that make me more of the person who I want to be.

Stay Fit with 23 Minutes a Day

A perfect example is my personal health. If you know me, you know I absolutely love working out and staying healthy. That being said, since the start of March, after the bike ride from hell, I haven’t been working out anywhere near as much as I'd like to.

I’ll spare the internet the shirtless pic, but, despite my reduced time under pressure, I still look pretty damn good.

That being said, one of the items on my habit tracker is to stretch for 20 minutes a day. 10 of those minutes I’ll do when I’m booting up in the morning, and the other 10 might be during calls or while reading or before bed when journaling. 

Additionally, an item in the habit tracker is pushups. I’ve worked up to 79 consecutive pushups with my feet elevated maybe 20 inches off the ground. This takes maybe another 3 minutes per day, but I know with pretty high certainty that it’s actually increasing my strength.

In addition to that, I’ve been running maybe once a week and going to the bjj gym which is within walking distance one or two times a week. For context, I’ve had plenty of periods where I was working out 10 times a week, so this really is abnormally low for me. 

That being said, I can sacrifice being in “peak” shape and all of the enjoyment I get from working out too much; making it a habit to spend a minimum time investment can still keep me in pretty decent shape.

That’s, of course, without mentioning the fact that I’ve been in Savannah, GA, which was carefully selected due to the relative sunniness and the walkability of the city. Being able to walk rather than drive to get my morning cup of joe and being able to do so in the sun also contribute to my overall sense of wellbeing and health. The best part is, I don’t have to put much more thought into it than that.

All of this is also without mentioning my similar approach to diet as an optimization function itself; that deserves another post on its own.

TL;DR, treating a few healthy habits as constraints (do at least 20 minutes of stretching a day) can vastly improve my worst case scenario in a minimally invasive and effortless manner.

Compounding

The priority gets served first. While making this decision inherently implies that you are willing to and will sacrifice a lot to allow the priority to thrive, habits can help you maintain the other things, too. After all, your life is your life, not actually a function to be optimized–the entirety of you contributes to every decision you make. 

When I’m healthy, I feel better, and I make less emotional and more patient decisions. When I’m reading things (another tracked habit), I have more context to pull from when making decisions or implementing plans. 

That being said, though, neither my health or reading will make me someone who can start a million or billion dollar business. The only way to do that is to start a million or billion dollar business. So, if needed, reading and some portion of my health will go. While the former has suffered in favor of action lately, I do think the latter can be maintained with pretty trivial investment.

While I believe you can’t have two priorities, I have noticed that outside of the priority, I tend to have the bandwidth to focus a decent amount of attention on one other thing at a time. In Savannah, I met a friend who became quite close quite quickly, and I’ve been spending a bit of time with her; in Costa Rica, I was spending a lot of time getting to know the people I was staying with. In NYC in the next week or two, I’m sure I’ll spend a lot of time catching up with people I haven’t seen in a bit and meeting new people, as well.

You can’t do everything, but you can do a lot, especially if you know what you care about and what it actually takes to get your minimum desired outcome.

I told you I’d write about habits, and I really only mentioned them in the last 1/3 of the post. That’s how I think, though; it may not be immediately visible, but a lot of my actions and decisions are what I view as an obvious consequence of my beliefs.

Live Deeply,