What are you optimising for?

Imagine you come to a crossroads.

There’s a sign with two arrows.

One points to:

MORE MONEY

The other points to:

MORE HAPPINESS

You look at the choice and think, surely more money will make me happier.

So you follow that path.

You work hard.

You get better at what you do.

You earn more.

Maybe you build a successful career. Maybe you start a business. Maybe you grow that business.

You reach places that an earlier version of you would have called success.

And for a while, it feels good.

Then one day you look around and think:

Is this it?

You thought getting here would feel different.

You thought you’d feel successful.

Instead, you’re tired.

Or bored.

Or restless.

Or maybe nothing is particularly wrong. Which somehow makes it even more confusing.

You’ve got what you thought you wanted.

You just don’t seem to want it anymore.

So you walk back down the mountain.

Eventually you arrive at the crossroads again.

But someone has changed the signs.

This time they say:

HAPPINESS

and

IMPACT

Happiness sounds appealing.

But perhaps it also feels a little self-indulgent.

You’ve got skills. Experience. Wisdom.

You want to do something useful with them.

You want your work to matter.

So you choose impact.

You start thinking about purpose.

Mission.

Legacy.

The problems you could solve.

The people you could help.

You might leave your corporate job.

Start something of your own.

Turn your business into a force for good.

And up the mountain you go again.

This one feels different.

More meaningful.

More worthy.

You can tell yourself a much better story about why you’re climbing it.

Then eventually another question appears.

Is this actually what I want?

And down you go again.

Back to the crossroads.

Only now the sign says:

WHAT YOU WANT

and

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS

This is where things get tricky.

Because the second one is much easier.

There is no shortage of people telling you what the world needs.

There are huge problems to solve.

People who need helping.

Causes worth fighting for.

Opportunities everywhere.

But the other arrow asks a much harder question.

What do I actually want?

I think a lot of us get stuck here.

Particularly those of us who are experienced and capable.

If you’ve spent decades becoming good at things, there are probably lots of places where you could be useful.

And when you don’t know what you want, usefulness can be seductive.

Someone needs your help.

You say yes.

There’s an interesting opportunity.

You say yes.

A problem needs solving.

You say yes.

And slowly your life fills up with things that matter.

Just not necessarily to you.

Maybe “what the world needs” can sometimes become a sophisticated way of avoiding the much more uncomfortable question:

What do I need?

Or:

What do I want?

I’ve been thinking about this through the lens of optimisation.

It’s a word we use a lot in business.

What are we optimising for?

Revenue?

Profit?

Growth?

Reach?

Efficiency?

If you choose the metric, you can make decisions around it.

But we rarely seem to ask the same question about our lives.

What are you optimising for?

Money?

Freedom?

Happiness?

Impact?

Status?

Security?

Meaning?

Time?

Adventure?

Belonging?

The problem is that most of us didn’t consciously choose.

We inherited the metric.

Get a good job.

Earn more.

Buy the house.

Build the business.

Grow the business.

Have more impact.

Become more successful.

And then we wonder why getting better at the game doesn’t necessarily make us feel better about playing it.

There’s another problem too.

I don’t think there’s one perfect metric.

I don’t want to choose between money and happiness.

I want both.

And impact.

And freedom.

And time with people I love.

And challenge.

And learning.

And friendship.

And fun.

The question isn’t which one of those things matters.

They all do.

The danger comes when we unconsciously maximise one at the expense of all the others.

If you optimise purely for money, you can end up with a very profitable life you don’t particularly enjoy.

If you optimise purely for impact, you can become incredibly useful while completely neglecting yourself.

Even optimising for happiness sounds strange.

Sometimes the things that matter most are difficult, uncomfortable and inconvenient.

Maybe life isn’t a single-objective optimisation problem.

Maybe it’s more like trying to find a combination that works for you.

Enough money.

Enough meaning.

Enough challenge.

Enough ease.

Enough impact.

Enough time.

And perhaps that combination changes as you do.

What made sense at 25 might not make sense at 45.

The mountain you desperately wanted to climb ten years ago may no longer be the mountain you want to be on.

That doesn’t mean the climb was a mistake.

You needed to go up there to discover what the view looked like.

Maybe that’s what the Messy Middle is.

Not finding the next mountain as quickly as possible.

But spending some time at the crossroads.

Looking back at where you’ve been.

Paying attention to what you’ve learned.

Questioning which signs you’ve been blindly following.

And deciding what matters now.

Perhaps eventually you return to the crossroads one last time.

But this time there are no arrows.

There’s just a blank sign.

On it are two questions:

What are you optimising for?

And is it actually yours?