Ali Abdaal writing The Optimisation Paradox edition of his newsletter:
There’s nothing wrong with optimising something for growth, and “treating it like a business”. But it comes with the trade-off that, usually, the thing becomes a little less fun.
It doesn’t matter what you like doing, the moment you get reasonably good at it someone will say “I bet you could make some money doing that”. Should you choose to, it is at that point the fun will be sucked out of it.
Perhaps not straight away. It might take a few weeks or months. Perhaps longer. At some point, whilst trying to streamline it or maximise profits, you will realise you don’t enjoy doing this thing any more. You will realise that not everything needs to be monetised, and you will miss the old days of doing it for fun.
Like a sponge, if given free rein, our actions will suck all the fun out of everything. Ali quotes a ‘game designer’ from a video he has watched. What video and what game designer we don’t know, he said, “Left unchecked, players will optimise the fun out of the game they’re playing”.
Which, as Ali says, is an interesting quote (just not quite enough to write down who said it) because it cuts right to the heart of our unhealthy trait to ruin everything we enjoy by doing too much of it. My tendency, as Ali has found out, is to do this with podcasts. Start spending too much time on audio editing, recording too much, and lose sight of what really matters — the conversation.
I also say this fairly often about writing because I have seen it happen to friends of mine that now need to pay the bills by publishing. All the writing they did because they enjoyed it and moulded their craft, grinds to a holt. I guess, who on earth wants to do things for free, when they can get paid for it. Well, we all should.
For far too many years of my life, I was seeking ideas to boost the things I could get done. At first, it was tips for better conversion rates, better management styles and more recently it’s pure productivity “getting things done” advice. When you digest this kind of thing for even a short period of time, you begin to realise there is no hack for hard work.
In the least few years, self-help advice has exploded to become a multi-billion pound industry. What was once an occasional presentation and a few books in a store has ballooned to everything from podcasts, seminars and month long courses. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, self-improvement is one of the most important things to do. However, most of the content being produced is not to make you better, it is solely to convince you there is a hack to ‘success’ and to attain it you just need to do this one thing.
That one thing is usually buying their course (at just £1995), but that’s not the point of this post. The fact that people believe there is a hack to everything is really the issue. Everyone wants a quick, easy fix. 5 minute abs, diet pills, a stupid morning routine — whatever it is you are trying to achieve, all these ‘hacks’ are a waste of time.
Everyone who is successful has worked hard (and perhaps had a few leg ups) and there is no replacement for it. I had a long conversation around this topic with my son once, when he was asking about shortcuts to wherever it was we were driving. I explained to him that there is no such thing as a shortcut, at all. There might be ways that appear shorter, or might shave some time off sometimes in very specific circumstances, but they simply don’t exist. They can’t exist. Otherwise, they would just be ‘the way’.
Much like trying to look for backstreets or quiet roads when you are driving, there are no hacks to get to places faster. You can pick up tips, learn different ways, but ultimately, you need to do the work and get to wherever it is you want to go, yourself.
There are some mornings you get up, feel so under the weather from illness that you can’t face the world. Not to mention, you shouldn’t be spreading your infliction around to the rest of the workforce — so you ring in ill. Spending the day resting and recuperating instead. What if the opposite were true and you could pull a healthy?
I stumbled on this idea as a meme reel on Instagram, but I think they are on to something. I might be the only one here, but I get these days when I feel well rested and ready to do something, but instead I have to deal with the daily grind of 8 (at least) hours of work. I wish I could call in and just say, “I feel too good today and don’t want to waste it. I’m pulling a healthy”.
I could then do whatever it is that makes me happy and enjoy the feeling. Instead of having to deal with the enjoyment sponges that every work place has. Or waste my energy on tasks that make other people money instead of going for a run and soaking in some sunshine.
The world would be a much better place if we could pull a healthy. Go on. You know you want to.
Whenever anyone asks me how I write so much, my default answer used to be because I read so much. The words from other people producing content I enjoyed, be it on the web or in a book, never failed to give my pause of thought and inspiration to write them out. Not all of them were published, but I got to the stage where I was constantly putting things on my blog — currently, not so much.
I’m struggling to see the point in publishing many posts outside of those that form quickly. I’m still scribbling all the time. Opening Ulysses or Apple notes to write some ideas down, but there is very little motivation to turn it into something publishable. As much as I love blogging, and love that more people are doing it than I have even known, I’m struggling.
I’ve read some great things already this year, but it feels as if the rate of content produced has ramped up, but the quality is slipping. It seems like I need a shift in my reading to offset those that just produce content quickly and cheaply, potentially with AI, for clicks.
The great thing is, I don’t do this for anything apart from myself. There is no demand on me putting my asinine thoughts on my blog, to earn my paycheque. So I have the freedom to step back whenever I want to, and presently my online life is getting very little attention.
Evan Sheehan in their post
:I wonder what the alternative looks like. A tool that helps you remember the sites you like to visit so that you can browse them at your leisure, but that doesn’t create a commitment to read—or at least look at—absolutely everything that is published on all of those sites.
At first, this seemed like a crazy idea, but the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. I read 99% of the blogs I follow in my favourite app Matter. Which is great in that it boils websites down to the basic content and makes it easier to read. However, it removes all personality and expression from personal websites.
The idea above is not as crazy as it sounds. Before Facebook invented ‘the feed’ I remember keeping a bookmark list of my friends' pages that I would check in on every so often and it’s wonderful when the internet goes full circle. Making the same list of my favourite blogs to check and enjoy the revelry of their website brings life back into the web.
I just hope it doesn’t fuel my tendency to fiddle with my blog’s CSS every five minutes!