What Are You Maximizing For?
Life consists of competing values. How do you choose?
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately—and I'm not sure I have a great answer yet.
Like many interesting philosophical questions, it appears to be simple but usually isn't.
Well, let's back up—it can be simple in certain circumstances. A business might say "We're maximizing for profit, or for new customer acquisition," and that's fair enough. When you know your objective, you make choices accordingly.
But I think it's much more interesting on a personal level.
Consider the question at face value:
What are you maximizing for?
The challenge lies in the choice of verb. When you maximize, you naturally favor one set of actions over another.
The key issue is you must engage with competing values. You can’t simply say, “Oh, I’m maximizing for life-work balance” or some other platitude. By choosing one thing, you’re forsaking (or at least minimizing) another!
Putting a bunch of things in a list—family, work, health, etc.—doesn’t quite work for this question either. You can care about all of them but you can’t maximize for all of them.
To go back to the business analogy:
If a business maximizes for growth, it pursues that goal at all reasonable costs
If a business maximizes for customer acquisition, it does everything it can to bring in new customers, even if they aren’t likely to be the best customers or stick around for long
If a business maximizes for profit, it might cancel or fire unprofitable customers, close off revenue streams that aren’t as profitable as others, and so on
Each of these strategies forces important choices in strategy and operations. (And while they sometimes change in the life cycle of the business, they can’t co-exist. You can only maximize one strategy at a time.)
You Are Not a Business
You might not like thinking of yourself like a business. That’s okay! You can still use the model to consider what you maximize for in your life—or what you might choose to, if you haven’t thought like this before.
As I said, I’m not sure what my answer would be at the moment. I tend to work in bursts of recurring project cycles. I have seasons where I’m particularly focused on a book, a business, an event, or something else.
For the past few years I’ve also paid much more attention to wellness and relationships—which, again, is good, but not really maximizing.
Prior to that, I think I would have said one of two things:
Maximizing for challenge: earlier in my life, I went all-in on challenge. I visited every country in the world, I started a career as an author and speaker (I once gave 80 talks in a year), and I generally tried to do hard things
Maximizing for impact: As I transitioned away from full-time travel and more toward the leadership role of giving talks and supporting communities, I focused more on making things that could be helpful to others
These days I’m still challenging myself in different ways. After running consistently for two decades, a few months ago I ran my fastest race ever and qualified for the Boston Marathon. That was cool—but I don’t think I could honestly say challenge is what I’m choosing for the sake of itself, or more than anything else. On the travel side of things, most of my trips these days are pretty easy!
Similarly, while I’m still interested in impact, I can now see that there’s a good bit of ego wrapped up in that as a target. After all, we can’t control the impact of anything we do. We can only control the inputs, or what we put in. You run the risk of relying on vanity metrics if you make impact the main thing.
Nevertheless, I do still (very much) value the sense of making something that ends up being helpful to other people. So despite the ego critique, I’m not ready to write off impact entirely.
Clearly I’m still figuring out a new answer to this question for myself, so I’ll keep thinking about it.
Maximizing Is Optional
Of course, you don’t need to maximize anything. You can go through life perfectly fine just doing the best you can with traditional goals, priorities, and values. I think about these kinds of things a good bit, and I’m not sure I’ve ever properly thought through what I’m maximizing for.
But perhaps that’s why I find the question so interesting: because I do think about these things a lot, and I’ve never considered it from this angle.
What do you think about maximizing? And how would you answer the question in the post title?
Why maximizing rather than optimizing?
Reading some other comments here, it seems that life circumstances push us into working out which values to choose, although I have never thought about it in terms of maximising. For me it has been having a child with additional needs. Our family life was difficult for years and we struggled to live a 'normal' life. It was only when we decided to forge our own path that my partner and I sat down and discussed the core values for our family. We decided that having a calm home where we all feel connected to each other was the most important thing and anything that didn't serve that had to go. We are maximising for calm and connection and our life is so much better for it.