Improvement Is Optimization

There’s a lot of focus in personal development around doing the new things that create new results. And necessarily so because many people are feeling held back or stuck and need support getting started.

However, the majority of improvement doesn’t happen by going from doing nothing to doing something... It happens when you take doing something to doing something a lot better.

This is the process of optimization. Optimization uses feedback to implement adjustments that improve the results produced. It’s an iterative process where, one attempt after the next, you learn a bit more about what works and what doesn’t. To fully embrace optimization, you need a growth mindset. Those who see ‘failure’ and falling short as a lesson and not criticism can take the insights of falling short to be better prepared for the next attempt.

Optimization is the far better route to getting high-quality results, especially when compared to the alternative of starting and stopping. Fits and starts stalls progress and causes you to not acquire the lessons, awareness, skill development, or experience you need to actually improve. You start from square one over and over again instead of building off of the traction you already have.

For just about anything in life, it’s not a matter of if something works or not. It’s about how well something works. And through optimization you can fine-tune your approach to make it work better.

If anything, this is another reason why it’s important to get started before you’re ready. It’s the trial and error of the process of doing it that makes you more ready. Those learnings compound over time, but they don’t even get the chance to start growing if you don’t get started with them.

So this is the overall recommendation to create improvement in your life: Get started before you’re ready and stick it out for longer than you think, because you’re picking up incremental improvements along the way that are positioning you to succeed very soon.

This is what it takes to become world class! No secrets, just doing more of the right things more often.