The Optimization Trap
Are You Abandoning What Actually Works?
Last Tuesday, a friend told me she was hiring a performance coach. She’d already spent months optimizing her morning routine, reading productivity books, and testing new apps. The coach would help her find the missing piece. I asked what she’d stopped doing lately. She paused. “I used to run four times a week. That always helped.” She’d dropped it six months ago to make room for optimization.
We do this constantly. We know what works, yet we abandon it for something shinier, more complex, or simply new. The pattern shows up everywhere. Parents stop reading aloud to their children because they feel pressure to add educational apps. Leaders replace one-on-one conversations with efficiency tools. People who feel better when they sleep eight hours convince themselves they can function on six if they just find the right supplement.
The greatest risk is under-investing in what works. This holds across domains: relationships, health, learning, business, parenting. We chase marginal gains in untested territory while letting proven foundations erode. The result looks like progress but functions as sabotage.
When something works reliably, it becomes invisible. Psychologists call this habituation. Your brain stops registering familiar patterns as noteworthy. The morning walk that stabilizes your mood for years becomes so automatic you forget it’s doing anything at all. Then life gets busy. You skip a day, then a week. Only when anxiety creeps back do you remember what you’d let slip.
Research on behavioral maintenance shows this pattern clearly. In one study tracking people who successfully lost weight, those who maintained their loss for five years had something in common: they kept doing exactly what worked during the initial loss period. They weighed themselves regularly, tracked food intake, and exercised consistently. The people who regained weight typically tried to “upgrade” to more sophisticated or varied approaches. They’d mastered a system, then abandoned it for novelty.
The mechanism matters here. Your brain encodes successful behaviors through repeated dopamine signals. Do something, get a positive result, feel good. That sequence builds neural pathways. But the pathways require maintenance. Stop the behavior, and the connection weakens. Meanwhile, your brain’s novelty-seeking circuits stay active, always scanning for something different. Evolutionary logic explains this: organisms that kept exploring found new food sources when old ones dried up. But in modern life, where what works keeps working, novelty-seeking backfires.
Consider friendships. You have one friend you can call at 2 a.m., someone who knows your history and loves you anyway. The relationship works because you invested years building trust through consistent contact, shared experiences, and mutual support. Then you read an article about expanding your network. You start spending your limited social energy on networking events and LinkedIn connections. Six months later, you feel lonelier than before, and your actual friend feels neglected. You under-invested in what worked while over-investing in what sounded impressive.
We replace effective simple practices with complicated alternatives because complexity signals seriousness. If the solution seems too straightforward, we assume it lacks power. This thinking error costs us repeatedly.
Take sleep. Decades of research confirm that seven to nine hours of quality sleep improves virtually every health and performance metric: immune function, emotional regulation, memory consolidation, metabolic health, decision-making. The intervention is free and available to almost everyone. Yet sleep deprivation remains epidemic, while the market for sleep optimization products grows exponentially. People buy expensive mattresses, blackout curtains, white noise machines, and supplements rather than simply going to bed earlier. The sophisticated solutions let them avoid the boring truth: you need more time in bed, consistently, without your phone.
The pattern appears in parenting with particular force. Reading aloud to young children produces measurable gains in language development, attention span, emotional bonding, and later academic success. The research is unambiguous. Thirty minutes of shared reading daily creates compounding benefits over years. Yet many parents feel guilty that they’re only reading instead of doing something more intensive. They sign children up for enrichment programs, educational apps, and tutoring, then feel too exhausted at bedtime to read together. They’ve optimized their child’s schedule while under-investing in the single most effective intervention available to them.
Why do we do this? Partly because simple solutions feel inadequate to complex problems. You’re struggling in your marriage. Reading that couples who maintain weekly date nights report higher satisfaction sounds too easy. That advice might work for normal people, you think, but your situation has deeper issues. So you skip the date nights and sign up for intensive therapy, which helps but would help more if you also had protected time to enjoy each other’s company. The sophisticated intervention crowds out the simple one.
Status plays a role here too. “We hired a coach” sounds more impressive than “We kept doing what we knew worked.” There’s social pressure to demonstrate that you’re trying, which often means trying something new and visible rather than sustaining something less flashy but effective.
The mathematics of consistency produce results that feel like magic but stem from simple compounding. Small improvements multiplied over time create transformational outcomes. The challenge is that the early returns look modest enough to dismiss.
James Clear documented this principle across domains in his research on habits.
A one percent improvement repeated daily produces returns that exceed 37 times your starting point over a year.
That math sounds abstract until you apply it. Practice a skill for twenty minutes daily instead of erratic weekend sessions, and you’ll surpass weekend-only practitioners within months. The difference accelerates over years.
Consider meditation. Beginners often report that sitting for twenty minutes feels pointless. They’re restless, distracted, and gain little obvious benefit. So they stop or switch to something that promises faster results: breath-work apps, psychedelics, extreme experiences. Meanwhile, people who stick with basic meditation for years report fundamental shifts in emotional regulation, stress response, and self-awareness. The practice accumulates subtle changes that eventually cross a threshold into transformation.
The same logic applies to exercise. Walking thirty minutes daily produces cardiovascular benefits, metabolic improvements, and mood regulation. Intensity matters less than consistency. Yet people abandon walking programs because they seem insufficiently hardcore compared to high-intensity interval training or Cross Fit. They switch to the intense program, injure themselves or burn out, then quit entirely. They would have been healthier staying with what worked.
This is where discipline serves as a freedom device. You make a decision once: I will do this thing that works, repeatedly, regardless of how I feel. That decision removes hundreds of future decisions. You walk after breakfast. You read before bed. You call your mother on Sundays. The structure liberates you from constantly choosing, constantly wondering if there’s something better you should be doing. You invest in what works, and the returns compound quietly in the background while you direct your attention elsewhere.
Sustainable investment in what works requires an identity change. You must stop seeing yourself as someone who seeks solutions and start seeing yourself as someone who maintains systems.
Solution-seekers constantly search for the breakthrough: the diet that finally works, the morning routine that unlocks productivity, the communication strategy that fixes the relationship. They’re focused on discovery. System-maintainers recognize that the breakthrough usually happened already. They found what works. Now the task is sustaining it against entropy and novelty.
This distinction reshapes how you approach problems. When you’re struggling, the solution-seeker asks: What new approach should I try? The system-maintainer asks: Which effective practice did I abandon? Often you discover you already know the answer. You’re anxious because you stopped exercising. Your relationship feels distant because you stopped having weekly conversations without distractions. Your work feels meaningless because you stopped connecting daily tasks to your larger purpose.
The identity shift requires acknowledging that maintenance is creative work. We tend to valorize innovation while treating maintenance as mere care-taking. But keeping something alive and functional over years demands constant adaptation, attention, and skill. The parent who reads aloud every night for a decade is being creative: choosing books, adjusting to the child’s changing interests, creating voices and rituals that sustain engagement. The person who maintains a twenty-year meditation practice is being creative: working with resistance, deepening technique, integrating insights. Maintenance is where the real transformation occurs.
If under-investing in what works is the greatest risk, how do you protect against it? Several practices help.
First, make your investments visible. Track the practices that actually improve your life. This could be as simple as a checklist: exercised today, called a friend this week, read with the kids before bed. The tracking serves two functions. It reveals when you’re drifting from what works, and it provides evidence that the boring practice produces results. When you can see that your mood correlates clearly with exercise consistency, you’re less likely to abandon exercise for the next optimization trend.
Second, protect what works with structural barriers. Schedule the activity. Make it harder to skip than to do. Put your running shoes by the bed. Set the recurring lunch date with your spouse. Build the system so willpower becomes backup rather than strategy. You’re designing for your future self, who will be tired and tempted by easier options.
Third, study your own success. When something goes well, ask why. What were you doing then that you’ve stopped doing now? This reverse engineering often reveals that your best periods coincided with simple, consistent practices. You were sleeping enough, moving your body, connecting with people who matter. You’d built a foundation that supported flourishing. Then you decided you’d outgrown those basics.
Fourth, resist the optimization trap. Optimization makes sense at the margins: small adjustments to make effective practices more sustainable or enjoyable. But optimization thinking applied to foundations is usually self-sabotage. You have a morning routine that works. You wake at 6, exercise, then write for an hour. The routine has served you for years. Then you read an article about circadian rhythms and decide to wake at 5 instead. The change disrupts your sleep, you’re exhausted, and you stop exercising because you’re too tired. You optimized yourself out of what worked.
The counterintuitive move is to leave successful systems alone. They’re working. Your job is to protect them from your own improvement impulses.
The Long Game
Under-investment happens because results compound slowly. The costs of abandoning what works and the benefits of sustaining it both take time to reveal themselves. In the short term, you can skip the gym, ignore the friendship, and compromise on sleep without obvious consequence. By the time the damage becomes visible, the pattern is entrenched.
This is why identity matters so much. If you see yourself as someone who maintains what works, you make decisions differently. You’re playing a longer game. The question becomes: What does my life look like if I keep doing this for a decade? That time frame clarifies priorities quickly. Will the productivity app you’re excited about today still matter in ten years? Maybe, but probably less than the friendships you’d let atrophy while optimizing your workflow.
The greatest risk is under-investing in what works because the cost is invisible until it’s devastating. The marriage that dies from a thousand small withdrawals of attention. The health that collapses after years of sleep debt. The children who reach adulthood never having experienced the sustained attention of an unhurried parent. The career that stalls because you chased novelty instead of deepening expertise.
You already know what works. You’ve proven it to yourself repeatedly. The challenge is choosing it again today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. Choosing the boring walk over the exciting new class. Choosing the familiar friend over the networking event. Choosing the simple practice you’ve been doing for years over the sophisticated upgrade you just discovered.
That choice, repeated, is how transformation happens. Small, consistent moves in directions you’ve already proven fruitful. Building systems so the choice gets easier. Letting the returns compound.
Start with one thing. What works that you’ve been neglecting? Do it today. Set the conditions to do it tomorrow. Protect that investment from your own novelty-seeking impulses.
You become what you attend to. Aim clearly. Keep your aim. The results will speak for themselves.
Acknowledgement: This essay was inspired by Ron Shaich’s conversation with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project. Shaich’s maxim, “The greatest risk is under-investing in what works,” struck me as one of those rare ideas that clarifies everything once you hear it. His insights on long-term thinking, operational discipline, and the courage to stay committed to proven fundamentals shaped the thinking here. If you’re building anything that matters, the full interview is worth your time.