It was probably good that your parents made some mistakes. If they were flawless at every turn, how would you have turned out? Probably insufferable.

A little inefficiency is good. Some character, a dose of chaos, a touch of shabbiness. These beat back the suffocating blandness, the unbearable sterility of perfection.

The cult of optimization is killing us. Silicon Valley optimizes morning routines down to the second; the granola gurus obsess over purging every perceivable harm out of their bloodstream; the biohackers tailor their lives around the 2,000 biomarkers every day. They’re all pursuing some theoretical maximum while missing the actual point - living.

To break the chains of optimization, you should just wing it sometimes and live a little.

Hell, some mistakes can sometimes lead you to your biggest successes. Ina Garten is famous for saying “you never know your good breaks from your bad ones.”

In some cases, flaws can aid in your survival. The last of its kind, an old-growth redwood tree out in Oakland, California, nicknamed “Old Survivor”, is over five-hundred years old. This was no thanks to any tricks or Darwinist strength.

It survived the Gold Rush era because it was considered useless for human consumption. Morgan Housel has written how evolution spent billions of years testing and proving the idea that having some inefficiency is good. Billions of species have gone extinct over millions of years, and oftentimes they had simply inadvertently over-optimized for a specific quality. Old Survivor’s inefficiency was its salvation.

“The stress of trying to be perfect will kill you faster than your imperfections.” - Alex Hormozi

Remember COVID? Yikes. But do you remember the supply chain chaos? It brutally exposed the Achilles Heel of our just-in-time (JIT) supply management - just in time to fail. We forget: our world is tied together with these “efficiency knots” so tight that pulling one thread can unravel everything.

Jeff Bezos understood this paradox. He coined "divine discontent" - the phenomenon where each new standard of excellence (2-day shipping becomes 1-day) instantly becomes the baseline expectation. Companies chase an ever-receding horizon of perfection, a constantly moving target. It sounds exhausting, but Bezos saw opportunity in the endless chase. Amazon thrives not despite the impossibility of perfection, but because of it.

Endless business opportunities are there for the companies who are optimizing to infinity, but as COVID proved, even companies like Amazon who pursue perfection couldn’t escape the inefficiencies of our systems.

Inefficiency is built into your DNA, your parents, your everything. Not every mistake is perfect, but every perfection is bound to lead to a mistake.

“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough.” - Tim Ferriss

While some slack is necessary, we also bear witness to the consequences of inefficiency taken to the extreme, as brutally demonstrated by our current administration’s FAFO political methods. Because of the GOP’s inability to resist cutting Affordable Care Act (ACA) provisions, the FAA had to resort to reducing the number of flights starting November 7th. And don’t forget the rollercoaster effects on our supply chains from Trump playing “red light green light” with tariffs.

We shouldn’t accept every inefficiency in our systems, but we also shouldn’t seek to purge every perceived inefficiency, either.

Jazz was born from experimentation with the "wrong" notes, and innovation comes from inefficient tinkering during wasted free time.

There’s utility in inefficiency as there is beauty in impermanence.

“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice}