What are you optimizing for?

Recently, there was a podcast that stirred some controversy online (as they tend to do). Stephen Bartlett, entrepreneur and host of the “Diary of a CEO,” noted that one time he had 2-3 glasses of wine and it “ruined his life for three days.” Predictably, the internet spun itself up, producing endless memes and hot takes but also a pertinent debate: has the pursuit of ‘optimization’ gone too far?

In business circles, “optimization” has been a buzzword and a philosophy for the past ~two decades, as increased access to personalized data has enabled companies to better target their consumers with relevant ads. As a result, budgets now skew toward more predictable outcomes. The old adage, “half of my marketing is working, I just don’t know which half,” no longer rings true. We know exactly what each dollar in produces on the way out. And surely that is valuable to brands hoping to maximize their investments. They can be assured of their performance and thus command greater respect at board meetings and with investor communities.

Humanity thrives on the unexpected.

Still, a problem remains. Consumers, being human after all, are not always so linear, so predictable in their behavior. In optimizing for the most predictable outcomes, we miss out on the magic of it all. The unexpected phenomenon. The unbridled fun. The stories that artfully dodge the algorithms and reach audiences anyway.

Someone I have become a big fan of recently is Anthony Po, co-founder and chief creative officer of Pufferfish, an agency that produces viral experiences and stories. Perhaps you heard of one of their more famous ones, the “Timothée Chalamet look-a-like contest,” held in 2024 in New York City. Po put up 100 basic posters around New York to promote the event, and more than 10,000 people showed up, including the aforementioned actor himself.

Now, if you talk with Anthony, as I had the chance to do recently in Miami at the POSSIBLE event, it is clear this young man understands his audiences. It’s not a mistake. His approach is scientific, and his team is at the bleeding edge of social technology and trends. Still, their success is also about taking some chances. Believing in an idea based solely on its creative merit and its ability to connect people with shared ideals. Many established brand leaders have forgotten how to go out on a limb in an era of data-driven decision-making. Increasingly, this reality extends beyond corporations, as well.

This is the same reason why the stories coming out of the World Cup, like Glasgow and Boston becoming official sister cities, have resonated so much.

And why we collectively shared nearly two weeks of wonder and celebration during the Artemis II mission earlier this year.

Because these stories were not about provable outcomes, but about joy, community, and achievement. Uniquely human qualities.

Wellness vs. living well.

Driven by podcasts and social media, this obsession with optimization has moved from boardrooms into households, as wellness influencers build massive followings by sharing their perspectives and “expertise” on longevity (often coupled with their own supplements that “doctors don’t want you to know about”). As an aside, I know a few doctors, and none of them wish their patients didn’t know about something that would make them healthier. But I digress.

Bryan Johnson is one of the leading voices on the longevity movement. Embraced by affluent people globally looking to extend their healthy lifespans, Johnson markets himself as the most “measured man in the world” in terms of biometrics and espouses his lofty mission, “don’t die,” through his company, Blueprint.

Now, I should stop and say, I actually admire Bryan Johnson. He is using his enormous wealth to openly study his own biology and share the findings with his audience. He conducts strict experiments on himself to judge the impact of various exercise and dietary protocols and then crafts products and content that empowers the rest of us to act on the ones that show efficacy. His content comes across as genuine. Society needs folks willing to be extreme in the pursuit of knowledge, that is how we inch further along and continue to innovate - especially as it will not be me who is giving up the pleasures of day-to-day life as a way to study my biomarkers.

In a recent series that Johnson posted about his trip to Australia to visit his girlfriend’s family, he strongly advised to his audience against traveling - especially to other timezones - noting that it took 18 days for his circadian rhythm to recover. According to Johnson, long-distance travel is “barbaric” to the body.

Now, for those of you who do travel a lot, you can understand the spirit of the message. Travel can be hard to recover from, spending time stuck in airports, adjusting to new sleep schedules, staying on your preferred diet or exercise regimen. And yet, seeing the world will never get old for me. The experiences I’ve had abroad, meeting new people and indulging in other cultures, have shaped my perspective on many concepts. Travel has reminded me that the world is big and my problems are often smaller than I realize. It has given me stories that I tell at dinner parties and hopefully one day to my children.

When it comes to this topic, I tend to agree more with the late, great Anthony Bourdain, who once said,

“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”

As a society, it seems we have largely lost the ability to sense, and appreciate, nuance.

Everything from politics, to business, to health, is positioned as a binary: right or wrong. But life is not so simple. As others have pointed out, if you are tracking every single biomarker all day long, then what kind of life are you even preserving?

Consider the “tyranny of the shoulds,” a psychological term coined by Karen Horney in the 1950s that essentially points to the endless downward spiral that comes from creating unrealistic expectations for ourselves.

You should eat well, and exercise on a schedule, and avoid alcohol, and, and, and…

But we are human. And we falter, by design. When every creator in our feeds is telling us how they’ve perfected their optimization practice, it will leave us feeling lesser than.

And yet, for our health as in business, we cannot improve what cannot be measured. More data on our diets, sleep, exercise, recovery, etc., and enhanced models that provide personalized plans and prescriptions, will help us live better lives for a longer period of time.

For our health and for our businesses, balance is the answer. A balanced diet and balanced investment, moving regularly, tracking what matters - and forgetting what doesn’t.

Most importantly, leaving room for the literal or figurative glass of wine (or 2) and the trip to a new culture with friends, if for no other reason than that’s what we’re here for in the first place.

Photo by William Warby on Unsplash.