All show and no pony.
The rise of performative optimisation.
Ever done the Robbins double?
Only truly high performers know about it let alone do it, and it’s part of the morning ritual that keeps them #elite as the rest of us struggle under the bone crushing yoke of our stunning mediocrity.
It works like this;
Get up at 4am and run a marathon
Then cold plunge, hot sauna and meditate
Kale smoothie, mantra, journalling and chakra alignment
Robbins double - Mel Robbins audiobook in one ear, Tony Robbins in the other, both at double speed.
Get all of this done before 6am
Selfie, hashtag, post.
Good God.
No one does this by the way, especially those posting that they do this. (the kale smoothie is the give away, no one’s getting one of those down).
Point is we have arrived at a moment where much of optimisation is purely performative. Which is not so much of a problem for those who know it’s all for show and vanity metrics on the ‘grams. The real danger is for the rest of serious folk who are genuinely trying to move up the ladder, but have lost sight of what we were trying to do accomplish in the first place.
So here’s my case for doing less, being more and understanding how and where to apply stress to the system.
Most complexity is unnecessary, but we manage it instead of removing it because deletion requires courage that addition doesn’t. - Shane Parrish
It’s one thing to do a thing, but another thing entirely to understand why.
I’m not here to bash cold plunges or saunas or journalling or meditation. They work, so does red light therapy, blue light blockers, Norwegian 4x4s and homeopathy, doesn’t mean you need to do everything (ok that last one was a red herring, homeopathy doesn’t do a damn thing). Sometimes you might need all of it, sometimes none of it.
Stress is a feature not a bug, it’s an adaptive tool in the system. Meaningful, purposeful stress will trigger valuable changes, from stronger bones, stronger immune system even a ‘stronger’ mind. But context matters and the dose makes the poison. Chronic purposeless stress doesn’t drive adaptation, it just drains resources and leaves you worse off than if you did nothing at all.
If you run 10 miles everyday, no matter what, because that’s what winners do, then you’re asking for a rapid lesson in asymmetric returns. Fitness takes a long time to build and not long to lose, the first rule of any fitness program is to stay in the game. An injury can not only derail you physically, it can abolish your hard earned progress and mentally leave you primed to totally overextend during your upcoming glorious unstoppable return to elite fitness.
If you run 10 miles everyday because that’s your meditation, it’s your mental inbox spam folder clean out, and your fitness signals when to back off or when to push - and you actually listen to it - then you’re in the box seat.
I love a good Huberman Lab podcast as much as the next early morning sunlight enjoyer but you can keep it real simple and still harvest the majority of the benefits. It’s incredibly easy to get lost following the crowd, committing to the latest hack because it makes sense and it only takes a few minutes per day and your Garmin says you should and you need to close the green circle on your Apple watch sleep metric and next thing you know your morning routine takes an hour and a half and if you miss it you spend the rest of the day feeling all sub-optimal and under-sunlit.
We avoid doing simple things that work because they don’t make us look smart.
Smart people feel stupid doing simple things, so we invent complicated alternatives that accomplish less but feel more intellectually satisfying.
Meanwhile, the people who dominate their fields are doing embarrassingly basic things, but they do them better than everyone else. - Shane Parrish
(yeah double quotes from SP today, every now and then he hits it out of the park)
From time to time check whether your ‘optimisation’ tools are actually doing what they say on the label.
Do they still serve you? Do you still need them? Could you access this another, easier, simpler way? Are you doing it because you need to or because you think everyone else expects you to do it?
How do I know if the tools are working?
Simple, break the system.
If you don’t do your morning routine, or don’t have your ‘proprietary blend’ daily greens or don’t do your anatomy shrinking cold plunge for a week - do you notice any change?
If you turn the system off and feel all akimbo after a week then we have managed to test and measure. Now add back and see what helps, and what doesn’t.
If you take a week off and feel fine (or even better) then we have information. A signal that maybe you need less noise.
Most of us need far less optimisation than we think.
Get your sleep.
Get your sunlight.
Eat your rainbow.
Move.
Call your Mum.
Get those things locked away and all the rest is on the margins.
Margins can be useful but only if the fundamentals are sorted and every tool serves a purpose.
Blind optimisation is performative.
Smart optimisation is far simpler than we think.
Choose wisely.
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