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Three, two, one. Welcome to Jim's Take episode 163. It's time to stop optimizing.
I know it sounds counterintuitive. I know it's probably the opposite of what I've told you, but I'm exhausted with the optimization. I find it obnoxious.
We've gone too far, and I think it's time to start trusting ourselves. I'm going to tell you more about it today, why I think we need to stop with the data, or at least put a pause on it. Do we, must we optimize everything? I find it exhausting, and we're measuring everything, and we're tracking our calories, and our sleep score, and our body battery, and our steps, and the amount of protein we're taking, and we're doing this, and we're doing that.
I feel like I've never had more data on how I'm living, but less peace. I can't enjoy where I am, and what I'm doing, and everything else. Somehow, I feel worse with all of the information that I'm getting.
I know I've always talked about, you know, oh, we can always be better. We can always improve. We can always do this, and I agree with that, but we're turning ourselves into machines.
We're getting all this data and say, oh, well, I missed that. Oh, I missed that. Oh, I missed that.
Oh, maybe I could do this better. We're missing everything that's right in front of us. We've forgotten how to live.
At least I have, and I'm ripping the Band-Aid on it. I find myself now just pining for serenity, and I want to sleep well at night. That's it, and I don't want to worry about did I hit this number, did I hit that number, and let me take a look at all these numbers, and you know, was my day up to snuff for what my dashboard, and my watch, and my, you know, calorie app, and everything else is telling me, and did I hit it? Did I not? And oftentimes when you're tracking so many things, you can't hit everything, and so you feel miserable because you missed something, and I have found that I want to eliminate this nagging that I can always be better.
Yes, I know I can always be better. We can always improve. We can do all of these types of things.
We can, yes, we can, you know, make good decisions, and live well, and eat right, and do all that stuff, but maybe, just maybe, you're doing well enough. Maybe you're doing just a great job right now, and you're just looking on the fringe, and I feel like a lot of the optimization, and the curiosity we have on how to be better, we look at other people, and look how great they are, and I want to be that way, and there are no shortcuts, of course, and all those other things, but maybe it's just little tiny things on the fringe that we just have to experiment with because when we let the dashboards, and the numbers, and everything else affect us, it's eliminating our ability to be present, and the optimization, it feels good, right? The workshopping, and everything else, and we should probably talk about optimization, what I mean by that. Like, we're constantly workshopping ourselves, but we're not changing behavior, right? We're always just identifying what's not good.
We're identifying what's wrong, and say, oh, well, I have to improve this, and oh, we have to, and now it gets added to the constant list of things we have to do, the work list, the home list, and everything else. We're just giving this illusion of control, of saying, oh, I optimized this, this is great, but we're not really committing to anything really major change, and I know the point of it is, it's a noble effort to say, you know what? If I track my calories, I can eat right, I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to look great in a bathing suit, and everything's going to be wonderful, but it doesn't get to this kind of, you know what? Sometimes you just need to eat a cookie, and that's okay, right? We love talking about systems, we love talking about frameworks, we love talking about all of these types of things, but what I found, and this was probably goes back to when I was a big drinker, right? I would workshop everything, and I would have all the answers, and I would tweak all the stuff in my mind, and the next day, it went back to, you know, nothing changed, and we're still where we sit, and if we're not deciding anything or really changing anything, we're just tweaking this constant workshop, you know, forever, but we're never really gaining it, we're never quite crossing that finish line, we're never just saying, you know what? Today's a good day, and that's great, you know what? Maybe I don't have to do my checklist of 50 things, maybe I'm just going to go for a walk at lunch, and that's nice, because it's sunny out, and I'm going to enjoy my day, maybe I just have to be present with my kids, rather than having my watch buzz every time it tells me that I haven't moved in an hour and a half, or something like that, like whatever the buzzes are. I've gone back to analog, I'm purely analog now, I've got some cheap analog Timex watch, it's phenomenal, less information, and I have so much more peace.
I'm not saying don't be healthy, I'm not saying don't, you know, all that, but there's a balance, right? There is this kind of window, gray area, between like the Brian Johnsons of the world, who are just, you know, don't even eat food, they just take their pills, and their supplements, and everything else, they don't take any sugar, or anything, and that's great, right? A model of science, but there's a lot of gray area between the Brian Johnsons of the world, and like a debilitative crackhead, who's just throwing their lives away, right? And we have to figure out where in that gray area, realistically, we want to be, because you can't enjoy your time, and I found when I had the watch, and I was doing all that stuff, it ruined my day, because it was telling me things that were true, or weren't true, I don't know, but I'd wake up, and it would tell me that I had a bad sleep score, I'm like, oh, well, I guess today's shot, or I'd wake
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up feeling really good, but it said my body battery was at 42%, and I'm like, I guess I'm exhausted then, okay, so now I'm exhausted, and it hits you in the subconscious, it hits you down below, where you're like, all right, well, I guess I woke up, and I'm tired, so I guess this day's kind of, you know, somewhat shot, and can I really do anything, and you know, oh, I missed my workout upload, and oh my goodness, what's going to happen there, and you know, I was told I was tired, but I wasn't really tired, I'm told I'm this, but I didn't feel that way, and I found that, you know, when I became this kind of machine data operated dashboard type of person, I wasn't trusting myself, right, at what point can we just ask ourselves, how do you feel, and we have to ask ourselves these types of questions, because the data that's going to read biomarkers, and everything else, yeah, there's probably some validity to some of it, but there's a lot it doesn't know, and it needs to get better, and I just want to wake up, I want to do my work, I want to have a good day, and I want to go to sleep, and sleep well, like that's really ultimately, that's it, so I don't want to measure well, I want to live well, and too many things, like the technology was becoming my boss, and I hate authority, as I've talked about this, you know, many, many times, I'm hostile to authority, and if the AI, and the technology, and everything else is becoming my boss, I hate it, don't tell me what I am, let me determine what I am, that's where I went, and so what I've decided, and this will be a quick episode, because I just, you know, think about all the stuff you're tracking, right, did I work out today, did I do this today, I was supposed to do these five things today, and you know, these 10 things here, and I have to do this before breakfast, and did I take my supplements in the morning, and you know, did I get enough protein in my three meals, and I have to get 110 grams of protein, I have to do this, and then it became just a kind of cover for me, just not making the decisions I needed to make, right, if I eat the foods that I should be eating, I don't need to track shit, right, I just need to stop being a pig, I know I can't eat donuts, so why am I eating a donut, can, oh, can I sneak in this donut, will that keep me under calories, everything else, and it's making us into these types of machines where I couldn't enjoy the things I wanted to enjoy. Now some people have to live within parameters, I'm the type of person who has to live within parameters, I get that, right, like it's why I don't drink, I don't have one drink, I have 15 drinks, like fine, get it, I don't have one cookie, I have the sleeve of cookies, fine, I get it, I don't really tell myself no very, very well, and so I'm really kind of an all or nothing type of person, but there are plenty of people out there who are not, and they're tracking everything they feel good about in the posting and all that, but it's not
just your home life too, it's your work life, because, and I see this a lot in the workplace with the optimization at work, it's preventing decisions from being made, so we'll go from life, we'll go to work, because they're both, you know, one and the same and everything else, you know, we've got, you know, the dashboards, can we get more data, can we get more data, we're not going to make a decision until we get more data, and all the dashboards are doing are allowing us to not make the decisions we have to make, so we hide behind them, we're saying, oh, well, the data says this, and oftentimes you look at the data and say, you know what, it doesn't really kind of track to me, right, if I were to sit and kind of think about it, Jeff Bezos has a good example of this, I saw in an interview one time, and I'm not a fan, but the guy's good at work, like optimizing, right, I mean, he's the optimization guy, they put a dashboard in front of him talking about hold times for Amazon or something, and he said, this doesn't track, like, you've got all these data, hundreds of numbers on here, and so he said, the wait time is too long, I know it, even though the dashboards tell me it's not, so we picked it up and called, and it went to his gut, and the answer was there, he goes, your dashboards are garbage, and a lot of the things, yeah, we can track a lot of things, and there's a saying in corporate, how do you change something if you can't measure it, how, you know, can anything really happen if you can't measure it, and how do you know you're winning, and how you know all that, we need to give some capacity, some freedom, some agency to people to trust their guts, and we don't need new systems, new frameworks, new productivity hacks, we have all of these types of things, we're trying to implement these systems on people that aren't natural to the way that they try to work, and we're eliminating that type of flexibility for the human kind of component, and I think it's dangerous, it's dangerous for productivity, yes, it's dangerous for morale, it's dangerous for culture, it's dangerous for all these other types of things, but you can leapfrog a lot of this data just by trusting your gut, and are we allowing the workshopping to prevent us from making progress and decisions, because we're afraid of owning these types of decisions, well, if I make this decision, I can't back it up with the data, then I'm going to get in trouble, and all this other stuff, so we have this low-level anxiety, we know something needs to happen, but we're waiting for the data to support it, and we have these systems in place, in the workplace, and everything else that punishes people for making decisions because they didn't have the data, and we're impacting the leaders and people we want, we're talking on one side of our mouth to say, make the decisions, you have the autonomy, you have the work to do it, but you better cover your ass, and I don't think we need more data, I think we've got plenty of data, yeah, you can have data running in the background and everything else, but it's leading to indecision, and indecision is loud, it's a drag on culture, we're losing credibility, we're losing this ability to say, you know what, we don't need to refine it, we just need to take action, and I'm going to be the person to kind of stick my head up, and take that risk, and we're avoiding risk everywhere, but there is good, there are good things that come from risk, right, that's what creativity is, we have this kind of social risk, and can we make it, and can we do it, and let's try this thing and see what comes back, and test it out, and this is a leadership challenge on can we drive this throughout our organization to take those safe types of risks, leaders say they want it, but behavior doesn't really match it, right, and say well you better have the data to back it up, and that's not not really good, information is important, yes, but I would argue now the dashboards are becoming too much, and we get lost in this mundane type of detail, where we don't trust ourselves, we don't trust our decisions, and I think decision-making, and the thinking behind our decisions, that's what separates good leaders from others, and it's not always going to be found in the dashboard, it's not always going to be found in your watch, or your app, or your little mood ring, or whatever the hell people are wearing now to kind of give us the data on am I doing well enough, right, you're doing well enough, and you don't have to convince yourself, we're trying to find these external things to convince ourselves that we're doing well enough, and we kind of have it at work, because we have this social rejection idea at work, and we're afraid of the risk, but we've incorporated that to ourselves, where we don't trust ourselves, and now we're looking for data so that we can believe ourselves that we're doing well enough for ourselves, and that's not really going to work, it doesn't work for me, and so it's I would argue you don't need a better system, we need a moment where we stop optimizing, and poking our head up, and saying look I've been slogging for a long time, am I in a good spot, yeah I'm doing I'm actually doing really really well, look at what I accomplished, look at this kind of good stuff, all right what's next, and can I go take another kind of risk, can I accomplish something, what's really really important, when we're being dictated on the decisions we have to make, and the things we have to track, and measure, and everything else, we're not really solving problems, and so if I were to leave with questions, I love leaving every episode with questions, is you know what decision do you need to make that you're avoiding, what problems are you actually solving, if you have to make a decision, what are you afraid of from making that decision to take some kind of step, or at least take some kind of progress, what what are you waiting on to make a decision, or progress, or something else, or just to enjoy your day, and the the data is making us exhausted, and there's something that you know when you become a lot of the clients I work with, I don't work with people under a certain age typically, because they don't have the experiences to live with the lessons that they've had to make these types of decisions, and risks, that's where learning, and growth, and everything comes from, we have to take these difficult risks, and we learn from them, and we live with them, and we adjust based on those, and if we're constantly waiting for data to tell us it's okay to move, the world has left you behind, right, the world rewards people who take risks, so stop it with the data, yes data is important to a point, but don't let it ruin your life, and enjoy your life, go have a cupcake, have a cookie, go have a piece of cheesecake, it's worth it every once in a while, right, enjoy it, enjoy really good food, go out have stay out late with some friends, and have really good social interaction, and camaraderie, and fellowship, right, because you don't have to wake up at four o'clock in the morning every day, I love waking up at four o'clock in the morning, but sometimes I just want to sleep until six, that's okay, right, you're not a failure if you're not doing these types of things, figure out what you're going to enjoy, and when you're enjoying yourself, you surround yourself with other people who enjoy being around people like you, and all of a sudden things just kind of work itself out, right, just got to chill the hell out everybody, and enjoy your day, that's it, that's my thought for the week, stop optimizing, start trusting yourself, and enjoy yourself, have a good life, enjoy, have a wonderful week, I'll talk to everybody soon, thanks.
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