Life Optimization Before The Apocalypse
Yeah, sure the world may be ending, but that doesn't mean you can't end it on a high note, right?
Seeing as it's quite apparent that we might be living in the end times, there are a lot of us that go around with unfulfilled dreams and have made no progress towards them. Why is this? Is it for a lack of willpower? Is it for a lack of ability to make those dreams happen? No, I believe it is a lack of optimization of one's life. Because of the short time constraints that we possibly operate on when it comes to how much time we may have in civilized society before the breakdown, I would like to take a moment to elucidate others on the concept of optimizing their life while they still can.
Life optimization is a practice that has been followed time and time again by those who live in regimented structures like the military, professional athletes, and that one occasional businessman who has what it takes to go from a tiny field salesman to a super-regional powerhouse of deal closing. The practice involves taking every facet of your life that you can and making the most out of the time as well as activities that you use at time on in order to best position yourself to achieve a long-term goal. There are very few shortcuts that can be taken in this practice and it involves an intense amount of focus & self-scrutiny however, it makes getting where you want to be in life metaphorically speaking child's play.
what does living optimally look like? To many people it would be a state of existence where you have essentially maximized all of your parameters that have any bearing on your life. No pun intended but I believe that this is a maximalist interpretation, as being in a state of optimal existence does not always have to be all or none. There are many times in which you can optimize things within a certain frame of time, and you can say that you are living optimally in terms of what you have to work with. Simply put, optimal living for you today may not be optimal living for you a year into the future.
Optimal living tends to be a very niche subject that people dive into because everybody thinks it's a waste of time and instead it may be better to just fly by the seat of one's pants. In fact, I would actually argue that a lot more people than you would think operate in this style but it's not really ideal hence why you see so many people unhappy, unfulfilled, living life for meaningless pleasures rather than actually setting and achieving goals. They lack the framework necessary to begin to operate in a goal-oriented manner which means that they're going to be aimless for the duration of life. This is no way to live given that we only have so many heartbeats within us and so many minutes of life that we are allowed to live for. I highly doubt that you would want to live your life or a large portion of it in a stagnant malaise where you waste time, energy, and resources simply subsisting because you don't know where you want to go or how to get there.
Due to this phenomenon, I believe that there's a simple lesson or set of rules that you can operate based on which will allow you to live more optimally within the means that your current situation allows. This means that you don't have to necessarily maximize everything about your life down to the minutes spent working, the number of reps that you accomplish in the gym, or even one’s adherence to a strict budget while making sure that you are profiting at every end. I believe that this is simply unrealistic and it's more of a hindrance because people want to always find that right time to dive in rather than just getting started optimizing their situation as they go and fine-tuning it down the line.
That point brings me to the first lesson that I believe we can all stand to learn which is to: just get out there and do it.
What do I mean by just doing it? Have I sold out in partnered with Nike? I wish, work camps in China or not, that would put me one step closer to optimizing everything about my life. But no, this is not a reference to Nike. What I mean by just doing it is that you need to be able to say "enough is enough, I'm going to get started tomorrow and plan little by little." To a lot of people that may sound like flying by the seat of your pants and you may have a point there, but it's not the same thing insofar as what we're trying to do when we just do it. Just doing it involves jumping into a new routine or starting to take the steps in setting up the framework by which we will be able to begin optimizing every aspect of our life. That means if I want to start a new workout routine, I'm not going to wait until New Year's or some arbitrary point of reset to get going. What this means is that I'm going to go after it starting the next day after spending maybe a few minutes looking up a workout that I can quickly do and then from then on, I will slowly adjust and add new exercises and build a plan around that workout after I've logged a good week and started to establish a routine. This can also work with money when you want to set up a budget and then start living by that budget. You don't have to wait until the next paycheck. Sometimes you can fit into place a financial strategy which can be done on the fly, and you can use prior data from past pay periods to estimate out everything. But the main point is that you are getting started on it rather than hesitating when turning to procrastinating which will then turn into stagnating because you never actually get going.
The next step which ties into the first because it is done concurrently is to never stop learning. I know a lot of people like to take some time to decompress or maybe get their mind off of the rigors of the day, but if you want to live in optimal lifestyle where everything is operating at peak performance levels within your life then you cannot have too many of these moments of respite as they will simply turn into new engaging in time wasting or deleterious activities. Instead, when you get started on a new pursuit in hopes of optimizing your life, your free time should probably be spent reflecting and then finding instructional materials which can help you learn what you're doing wrong and optimize that specific activity within your efforts to optimize your entire life. This means that you should be delving into communities centered around things like self-improvement (although I would hazard against going too far into the self-improvement rabbit hole if you're not the type that needs a lot of mental motivation as typically self-improvement communities are just large-scale mental masturbation orgies.) If you've decided that the optimal state for your life means getting involved in rental real estate ownership then that means that you had best be spending the lion's share of your time researching the rules, regulations, and hacks to owning your first rental property. What sense would it make to spend your time listening to music or playing games when you have a goal which may literally allot you more time in the future kick back and relax doing those activities. It's a steep investment but it's a front-loaded one which eventually pays back its weight in gold and opportunities. Do things like listen to podcast, find YouTube channels centered around that pursuit, read books like the good old boys used to do. Sometimes you can even go to networking events where you can meet and talk to people who are on all ends of the experience spectrum in regard to whatever new activity that you're delving in (Provided you are following step one correctly) I'll delve into this a little bit more in the next section.
The old saying goes, it's not what you know but who you know. Now this is usually a phrase you within business and employment but when you look at those two areas, they're probably areas in which we've managed to optimize the processes the best that we can, given our constraints technologically as well as intellectually. That being said that makes this a perfect nugget for us to pull from as we would literally be getting the information from a place that has implemented strategies to optimize a process successfully. Back to the point at hand though, you need to be able to network properly if you are to successfully take that next step in optimizing your life. Now I'm not telling you to go and jump into all the communities and start being vocal and networking immediately when you haven't not yet gotten the experience that you need to provide value on the topic of choice that you're hoping to join the community of. What I'm saying is that after you have hit a plateau in your areas of understanding in that one aspect of your journey to optimize your life, or maybe you haven't hit a plateau but you're nearing a point where the amount you’re able to learn is slowing down significantly, then it may be time to find others and use them as a resource.
When it comes to finding people who can help you become successful at a given task or area, the best place to look is in a community of people who are simply passionate about said topic. This means that If I want to learn investment because I want to be able to not only optimize my own cash flow from a stance of my personal investments, but then I would like to be able to make additional money by teaching other people how to invest or investing for them, then I'm going to look for a top flight group of investment professionals who like to spend their free time talking about investment (Kek). This is almost a self-sorting sample when you think about the prerequisites for what you need to be good in a current field. These people already are engaging in the pursuit but are also passionate enough about it to spend their free time talking in an online form or maybe a channel on telegram about the subject further.
Now I never advise anybody to go into a community as a newbie with almost no knowledge because you will never be taken seriously, and people will shy away from possible partnerships or opportunities to work hands on with you when it comes to your given area of interest because you will always be "the new guy." This is why I always advise for anyone who wants to become entrenched within a community very quickly, to identify the power players and then after you have gained a sufficient enough of knowledge from those people from afar, then begin to develop a unique skill set or strategy that might bring value to said person in a way that they do not have. What this does is simple, it allows you to be able to approach and demonstrate not only enough knowledge of their teachings and strategies so that you have a form of common ground, but also allows you to entice them with your particularly unique skill set that they lack. By doing this you have now created a bridge by which partnerships and greater information sharing between you and other people can flourish. It is at this point that you will now see your proficiency in whatever topic or community that you have decided to carry the strategy out in metastasize into almost every facet of your daily free time usage as we as humans strive to do what we are good at. That activity will now cease to be work and become a form of enjoyment for you allowing you to continue to optimize your ability to perform an eventually automate the tasks around that pursuit.
So, to tie that back into life optimization, when we are seeking to optimize our life in terms of becoming proficient at an activity and building a schedule around that activity so that we can eventually reach the goal of having desired proficiency in said activity, you must be able to take the steps that I have outlined and streamline them into a daily process for your free time. If I were to paint a realistic picture, a lot of this would be happening while you are also working your W-2 job and so being very judicious with your time usage becomes that more important. But assuming that the pursuit that you're trying to incorporate into your life and fully optimize is one that can bring you money, you might be able to eventually reallocate some of the time within your daily time budget from your W-2. Once you've hit a point of sustainability in the desired activity of your choice you will then find other pursuits to conquer and incorporate the same life optimization strategy around it, now balancing time between not only your W-2, daily hygienic practices, rest, and newly acquired interest/activity until you have hit a point where you have no more time within the day. It’s at this point that you must now consider the possibility of automation of your newfound activity. (Assuming it is something that actually can be automated and is worth the investment in deploying that strategy.) From that point on, if there are no minor tweaks that we could make in our daily schdule to free up time, we would need to conduct a personal green energy audit. (See my article on that.)
It is by this repetitive implementation of optimization > automation that we would eventually find ourselves hitting a point to where we’ve reduced our aimless meandering time to next to nothing and are beasts of productivity. From that point on, you can begin to either automate the rest of your interests if they’re able to sustain you financially and spend your time in pursuit of debauchery or discovery & then go experience life as a newly ascended and optimized human. (For the time being.)
There is no peak or limit to the amount of optimization that you can do to your life to make sure that you’re getting the most out of the time we have left on this earth and the truth is, once you get started, optimizing may end up becoming an addicting if not compulsive activity. Do be careful not to get too far in the weeds but make sure that you do touch grass in terms of getting out there and putting this into work as the change in the quality of life you’ll gain in doing so is unparalleled.
Also, if you have already been doing life-optimization practices or have successfully optimized your life, leave a comment below and let us know your experiences.