What are You Optimizing For?

Read time: 5 minutes

Quick update: I’m shifting The Ascend Archives Friday Edition to Saturdays. Same structure where I share insights from the brightest minds in business and life and how I'm applying them to my life. But after doing a time audit on my weeks, I found it’s easier for me to send this on Saturdays. Thanks for following along on the journey!

It’s been a few months since I’ve talked about one of my favorite guys, Sahil Bloom.

He just announced his book is available for pre-order, The Five Types of Wealth. He’s been writing this book for 2-3 years so I’m excited to see what wisdom he’s gonna drop.

I stumbled into his YouTube page this week. It’s cool to see when successful people in one area pursue other areas. Sahil has one of the biggest creator newsletters in the world but his YouTube channel is tiny compared to others. My client Matt Choi gets more views and has more subscribers.

But Sahil is looking to grow and take on new challenges.

I watched a few of his behind-the-scene videos where he talks life and business with his personal trainer and a look at his 3-day retreat with his business partner and chief of staff.

As always Sahil got me thinking. Here are my takeaways.

What are you optimizing for?

Distractions are everywhere.

The promotion at work. The ice cream at the grocery store. Trivia night with friends. The 10 day vacation to Spain. The finale of Below Deck Mediterranean (best show on Bravo if you haven’t seen it).

These “distractions” aren’t inherently good or bad. They just are. It all depends on what we are optimizing for as to whether they are a distraction or traction towards what we want.

When I’m in peak training for a race, trivia night is a distraction because I have a 2 hour bike ride in the morning. But when I’m prioritizing meeting new people and building relationships, going to trivia night is a great way to do that.

That’s why it’s so important to consistently come back to this question. We have different seasons of life so what we are optimizing for is constantly changing. Before we know it, we are spending extra hours at work to get the promotion at the job that we didn’t want to stay at in the first place.

A few things I’m optimizing for right now:

• Doing work that I enjoy

• Becoming a faster runner

• Building muscle to stay fit

• Creating space to think, learn, and write

• Meeting interesting people and having interesting conversations

Are you using potential or kinetic energy?

Potential energy is yet to be released.

Kinetic energy is from current motion.

Sahil sees potential energy as the skills and knowledge we are building for some use in the future. Kinetic energy is the skills and knowledge we are using in the present. We get dopamine hits from using kinetic energy, but it acts as a distraction for most people from pursuing their maximum potential energy.

Sahil told his 27-year-old personal trainer that his work as a personal trainer is using kinetic energy. If the trainer wanted more money, he could continue to trade time for money to get more personal training clients. Or he could leverage potential energy to develop a new skill set that allows him to make 10x the money he ever could charging $100/hour for his time as a trainer.

This is counterintuitive to what we are taught in school. The most coveted jobs are doctors, lawyers, consultants, and bankers. All people who trade their time for money. But entrepreneurship, investing, and online businesses flip this idea on its head. How do we get exponential returns while reducing our time spent working?

Sahil has written a newsletter twice a week for 3+ years straight. Never missing a week. In 2021, sponsors paid $500 per newsletter. Today, they pay $10,000 per newsletter. That’s not because he spends 20x more hours writing it. It’s because he developed skills in email marketing and content creation to exponentially grow his newsletter to over 750,000 readers. He used potential energy.

For me, I have no intentions of getting as big as Sahil, but writing these newsletters and improving my storytelling is a form of potential energy. I don’t know exactly what it will be used for yet. I also think building relationships with smart, interesting people is a form of potential energy. I have a lot of conversations that don’t seem groundbreaking in the moment but who knows what those relationships could turn into 5 years down the road.

Quitting vs Pivoting

There’s a difference between giving up due to laziness and strategically quitting to pursue other alternatives. Sahil calls it quitting vs pivoting. I think this topic is more nuanced than that (Here is my deep dive on quitting).

But generally, I agree that quitting, pivoting, or whatever you call it is important. This shows up in big ways like dropping out of school, leaving a relationship, or quitting a job. It also shows up in small ways like me deciding to move my newsletter to Saturday. I told myself at the beginning of the year that every Tuesday and Friday for an entire year, I’d send out a newsletter. But things change when we get new data. So I’m pivoting to Saturdays.

This aligns with the new mindset I developed this year of acting like a scientist. Life can be viewed as a series of experiments to test what works and what doesn’t. When I think about it like that, it takes a lot of pressure off and makes quitting things that aren’t working a lot easier.

The Four Types of Luck

Sahil’s trainer asked about hard work vs luck. Sahil mentioned that according to neurologist and Zen Buddhist James Austin, there are four types of luck:

1. Blind Luck: Truly random occurrences.

2. Luck from Motion: Created through hustle, movement, and collisions.

3. Luck from Awareness: Created through specific skill that makes it easier for you to spot the lucky events.

4. Luck from Uniqueness: Created through unique combinations of skills that attract luck to you.

I love how this framework puts some logic around luck.

It was blind luck that I was born into a great family in the United States and have access to hundreds of opportunities that people in other parts of the world don’t. I consider getting into the University of Michigan luck from motion. I worked hard, got good grades, and was a leader in my community which set me up to get admitted to a highly selective school. I consider my [limited] success as an entrepreneur in the past 6 months luck from awareness. I developed communication, writing, project management, and organizational skills that allowed me to spot an opportunity in the creator economy to add value and make money. Those skills helped me spot the opportunity to reach out to my first client Matt and get the ball rolling.

I don’t have a great example of luck from uniqueness. I think it takes time to develop our unique “zone of genius”. I’m still in the early stages of developing mine but eventually I’ll get to the point where opportunities and relationships flow to me.

Happy Saturday from sunny Austin!

Thank you for reading! As always please reply and let me know what resonated, what didn’t, or what you question. I love chatting about this stuff!

Cheers,

Andrew