“I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.”
Jeff Bezos, 2012
I broke my meditation practice many times over fifteen years.
Each time, it started the same way. The practice was working well. So I started poking at it. Maybe I could shorten it. Maybe I could substitute something more efficient.
Then things fell apart.
- Anxiety crept back
- Sleep degraded
- Decisions got worse
The gap between the change and the consequence was one to two weeks. Long enough that I attributed the decline to something else.
I took the benefit for granted because the practice was working. And the time invested looked easy to trim because it took time I wanted for other work.
That’s the optimization trap. A working system you’ve stopped crediting. A small change you make to try to ‘improve’ things. A feedback loop that’s delayed enough that you blame it on something else.
The defense I built is to take a religious-like approach to certain habits. Once I’ve seen enough, I stop touching them. I’ve been burned too many times.
Hard to vary means I stop debating it each day. The question shifts from “is this worth doing today?” to “it’s time.”
I stopped treating these practices as habits to optimize. I started treating them as prerequisites for everything else.
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What’s the last working thing you broke by trying to improve it?
