There are legions of self-help and productivity gurus ready to sell you the next best system to hack your life to perfection. They come bearing the tantalising promise of a life that ticks along like clockwork. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an advocate for building robust systems to operate your life. Yet, the game of chasing optimisation can also be a subtle form of procrastination.
It looks great from the outside. You’re busily working away and collecting new productivity hacks. Striving for a sliver more productivity. It has fantastic optics to someone who isn’t observing you too closely. However, this search for optimisation still isn’t the real work that you must do.
Using myself as an example — I could spend days, weeks or months building an incredible system for how to write. Someone looking over my shoulder would see someone buried in the study of YouTube tutorials, how-to’s, and newsletters. But if I haven’t written a single article in this time, what’s the point? An endless search for better tools and greater efficiency leads to no productivity at all. It’s all an elegant, beautiful distraction.
This is a stage that many on the path of self-actualisation get stuck at, commonly known as tutorial hell. I’d go further and call it optimisation hell. The novice believes that what separates them from success is having the best tools and best systems to get the job done. Attaining these becomes their new quest, instead of the pursuit of self-improvement itself.
Here’s a harsh truth.
If it were as simple as just acquiring the best systems and tools, then the richest amongst us would also be the best in any given domain they chose. The one with the best camera would be the best photographer. The one able to afford the best personal trainers and nutrition would be in the best physical shape. The one able to enlist the best psychologists and spiritual practitioners would have the most sound mental state.
You already know this isn’t true. I don’t need to even provide any examples for you to know that money alone will not buy you victory. It’s self-evident. The world is rife with rich assholes utterly unable to manage themselves as humans. Money is great, but it’s not everything. So if it’s not systems and tools alone, then what do you actually need?
Well, it’s simple.
You do not need all the tools, knowledge, experience and systems to get from A (your current level) to Z (your ultimate, highest, actualised self). If you already had all of these, then you would already be at Z. The game of life is not designed for you to have everything early on in the game.
What you need are the tools to get from A (your current level) to B (a “level” just beyond A). The journey from A to B will give you the tools and experience to get from B to C, and so on. You secure your growth in small leaps, not massive victories. There’s a quote from The 12-Week Year by Brian Moran & Michael Lennington that I love:
“Greatness is not achieved when a great result is reached, but long before that, when an individual makes the choice to do what is necessary to become great”.
Real progress doesn’t look sexy, it looks incremental. Greatness is had in simple acts, not in singular, dramatic triumphs.
This is why victory requires far less than you think. You do not need complex systems, perfect knowledge or incredible tools. You only need systems and tools which are good enough to take a single step in your journey. Not perfect. Good enough.
Some of the best knowledge, tools and systems can only be achieved through experience. As I’ve written about in “How Overthinking Is Destroying Your Dreams”, many people are stuck in Plato’s Cave. If you are at point A, then any ideas that you have about points B, C, D, E, and all the way through to Z exist in pure theory. Like being stuck in Plato’s Cave, the only way you will find truth is through action and experience. Not with thought.
Here’s an example to ground this discussion. Let’s imagine that you’ve never lifted weights before in your life. Before you start training, you decide to immerse yourself in incessant research on the art of lifting weights...
The optimal rest periods between training sets.
The best tempo for each repetition.
The best supplementation.
The optimal amount of days a week to train.
The best protein intake.
How to recover from a squat, deadlift, bench week where you’ve maxed out on every lift.
Etcetera.
While this is all somewhat useful information, it’s also still theoretical to you. The best you can hope for is to build a flimsy hypothesis with this knowledge. You have no idea how your body will actually cope with being pushed to its limits. You have no idea what level of protein intake you could actually get away with and still recover. You don’t actually know exactly how many days a week of training you will be able to tolerate, and so on.
The only tools you would actually need are a basic training program, a basic understanding of technique, and some consistency and intensity. That’s it. Build, iterate and troubleshoot from there. No results? Focus on diet. Still stuck? Maybe it’s your sleep. All of this is crucial feedback and information for your journey of growth. You could not attain this knowledge any other way than by simply doing the work.
People want to get fancy before they’re even playing the game.
You can apply this principle to any other discipline or life path you see fit. Start with the fundamentals. Doesn’t work? Troubleshoot and iterate. That doesn’t work? Rinse and repeat. Troubleshoot and iterate again. It’s simple, not sexy. And that’s why people don’t do it.
The basics are the basics for a reason — because they work, and because they’re foundational. Here’s a few examples of the basics pushed to their extreme:
Roger Gracie, of the legendary Gracie family who developed Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. One of his signature techniques (that he’s won world championships with) is the “closed guard” — a technique taught to white belts during their first classes.
Floyd Mayweather Jr, arguably the best defensive boxer of all time, uses the “shoulder roll” as the cornerstone of his defense. A simple technique that any beginner can do, but that he has honed to a knife’s edge.
Joe Rogan has built a podcasting career in essence by applying the same, basic conversation techniques honed over 15 years. He’s not a genius. He is, in many respects, an everyman. A relatable human able to have basic, relatable and human conversations thousands of times over.
The moral of the story? Don’t get fancy before you’re fancy. The basics are good enough for the greats. It’s simple, but not easy.
On top of being effective, basic approaches are more robust than complex ones, and easier to put into play. If you need 5 different tracking & productivity apps, a cold plunge, a sauna, 30 minutes of affirmations and to sacrifice your first-born child before you can start your day, what happens when one of these systems breaks? What happens if one app doesn’t work? Or the sauna isn’t working? Or you forget your affirmations?
Complexity in systems and tools like this lead to fragility. Worse still, they soak up valuable cognitive resources that you could use elsewhere. Do not get lost in optimisation hell.
Have a goal? Today is the day to start. Do something towards it. Film your first YouTube video with your 5 year old iPhone. Run around the block in your beat up old running shoes. Do a 15 minute yoga flow from an instructional on Instagram. Something, anything. You don’t need perfection. You just need to start.
Good luck.