It annoys me when people warn against "over optimizing." Optimization is the only thing in life that matters to me - and it should be the most important thing to you as well.

When you just read that, you probably thought something along the lines of, "oh boy, get a load of this guy." As eye-roll worthy as it sounds, thinking about optimization as you make your daily decisions will end up helping you better align your actions in life with what you actually want.

To make it clear, I am not saying "obviously everyone should spend all their time doing whatever they can to get as rich as possible" or something clearly extreme that most people wouldn't want to live like. Focus on "optimizing" does not inherently lead to an unbalanced life. For most people, an optimal life is as close to balanced as possible.

Consider a hypothetical man, Joe, who's favorite thing to do is go fishing. You might think I'm saying Joe should meticulously plan out all of his time off to go fishing as much as possible. Or you might think I'd say he should quit his job and go fish all day every day and figure out the details later.

I probably wouldn't advocate for either of those unless Joe is a very particular kind of person though; even if you have a favorite thing, it's extremely unlikely its the only thing in life you care about. Fishing might be Joe's favorite activity, but he probably likes spending time with his family as well. He also likely likes tasty meals, good rest in a comfy bed, being in good health, watching a good show or movie, and all the other basic human things we all generally care about.

Unfortunately, we don't all have finite time and money, so we need to make tradeoffs and prioritize some of our wants over others. Joe may need to decide if he'd rather stay up later fishing when he's really in the zone or go back home so he can get a full 8 hours of sleep. Or he might need to decide whether he'll go part time at work so he will have more free time for fishing, even if it means he has to cut back on his spending.

The correct decision is the one that optimizes Joe's goals, weighing each by how important it is to him and how much each goal will be advanced by each choice. Trying to do this in pure mathematics where you sit down and assign number values to how much you care about every aspect of your life and doing calculations whenever you need to make a choice will help, but you don't need to go that far. Unless being a massive nerd (me) is something you care about, it isn't worth the time to do it because you can figure out the right answer most of the time by just thinking about it a bit, unless you're making a really big complicated decision.

With just a bit of practice, you can get into a habit of questioning if your actions are in alignment with your most important goals and adjusting course if not. It might sound dumb and obvious, but we make most of our decisions on heuristic without thinking about them that much, and the habit of running them through a truncated goals matrix in your mind might cause you to change more behavior than you'd expect.

But we can go deeper than that. The next thing to figure out is how to pick what our goals should be?

There are two types of goals. First, there are terminal goals which we don't really get to choose. They are the goals that we intrinsically reach for just because we want them. They don't quite come from nothing, but they aren't based in logic either. You can't reason your way to having a terminal goal.

But terminal goals aren't random and arbitrary. You don't meet many people who's purpose in life is counting to 6 on repeat all day or taste testing different kinds of wood. People's terminal goals are driven by emotion and inspiration. They're often rooted in the well-being of the people we love or finely honing a craft we've built up over decades.

Some people don't have firmly held terminal goals. They often end up leaning on base human desires like possessions, eating, sex, social attention, or lounging as the core drivers for their life. Base human desires are often fairly intertwined with terminal goals that sound elevated too though. A peak athlete might truly care about improving at their sport above all else, but the money and attention their proficiency affords them is a part of the equation.

To be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with having base human desires as terminal goals or even the only thing you care about. There's even nothing inherently wrong with the wood tasting terminal goal. Your terminal goals don't even need to include happiness, or family, or even survival. Terminal goals stand on their own without justification. They are what they are, and can only be changed or overwritten by a stronger inspirational force than the one that instilled them.

The other type of goals are instrumental goals - the goals we derive as steps on the path to achieving our terminal goals. They are the goals of optimization. The better you get at setting and achieving your instrumental goals, the closer you get to your true purpose in life - your terminal goals.

There are some instrumental goals that are extremely useful for the vast majority of terminal goals. The biggest that come to mind to me are time, money, health, and connections. Unless you have a really esoteric terminal goal, keeping your free time, finances, health, and social connections as strong as possible will help you achieve more of your terminal goals.

That's why I think explaining how to help people improve at those goals is a worthwhile endeavor I'll continue at, but it's not trivial to achieve them. You might make sacrifices for some over others. You could spend more time at work to improve your financial well being, but at the cost of free time and social connections for example. There are no free lunches, and optimizing is more about making the correct tradeoffs for your terminal goals.

You should also be wary that you don't lose sight of your terminal goals and mistake an instrumental goal for one. Very few people have a terminal goal of wealth, but it is often pursued as if it is because people forget what they're working for. After working hard for a long of their stretch, they find themself unfulfilled because they got caught up in chasing an instrumental goal instead of a terminal one.

Take inventory of what your true terminal goals are. Ruthlessly optimize one your instrumental goals to serve them. Repeat.

That's all there is to life.