I’m a pretty routine-oriented person, but not in the regimented, hyper-vigilant way successful people tend to be routine-oriented. I haven’t actively designed my daily regimen for wealth or an enviable physique – mine is more like the grass that’s been worn away diagonally connecting two perpendicular stretches of sidewalk. It’s all about what’s easiest and “most efficient” based on what’s required of me each day. 

What’s interesting about the successful person’s approach and the lazy person’s approach, is the fact they’re both forms of optimization. Both involve removing obstacles that get in the way of efficiently achieving your goal, even if one is geared toward “achievement” and the other is more focused on “getting by.”

Both versions also come with something that goes hand-in-hand with optimization: opportunity costs. 

Are You Capping Your Potential?

It’s pretty easy to spot some opportunity costs in the lazy routine (my routine) as I’ve ultimately “optimized” for an easier life: I could be making a bigger name for myself, I could be in (much) better shape, I could have a bigger retirement account, etc. But the successful routine is also likely sacrificing things like some measure of fully-unplugged time with loved ones, personal flexibility, time to pursue hobby interests (without the pressure of turning it into another side hustle), etc. 

The direct, zero-sum, trade-off correlations aren’t hard to spot, but that’s not the end of the opportunity costs that come with optimization. Sometimes, we’ve optimized our way to such tight efficiency that we’ve actually capped our potential well short of where we could have gotten had we explored some expanded paths beyond the one we’ve locked ourselves into.  

A Real-World Example: Optimization at the Cost of Opportunity

Let’s look at a practical example. Years ago, I had an ecommerce client who came to me with a handful of specific, prioritized goals. The two most important goals: achieving sales outside of their home state while hitting a 1.5 return on ad spend (ROAS).

Beyond those, they had some other lower-priority goals that were designed to help ensure they were staying on track in case it took some time to hit their primary goals: a target average order value (AOV) and a target cost per acquisition (CPA). Now, I don’t remember exactly what those AOV and CPA targets were, but let’s just say $15 and $10 respectively for ease of illustration. 

Within just a couple of weeks, my ads were generating sales all over the country at a 4-5 ROAS and an average order value like 6x their initial target. HOWEVER, those numbers came at about double the original target CPA of $10.

Looking at the big picture, who cares? If you’re making $85 more per order than you planned on, you can easily afford to spend an extra $10 per sale, right? Not for these guys. 

Sales were booming and revenue was way beyond what they had hoped, but they couldn’t get over that CPA being “so high.” They insisted on getting back down to the $10 they had imagined (without any real-world testing), so we began optimizing and tightening the strategy to hit that newly-elevated-in-priority goal. And guess what happened? We optimized our way down to their CPA goal, but our sales volume and overall profitability went down with it.

The client was happy, because we were still outperforming the original ROAS and AOV targets, but they were leaving so much on the table because our optimization was so finely-tuned toward their unambitious dream. 

The Infinity Mirror Effect

I’m in no way trying to argue against optimization, but I do think there’s a point of not only diminished returns, but diminished potential. It’s easy to optimize for what you know, and actually make your funnel so tight that a bigger future can’t even squeeze its way through.

We call this the infinity mirror effect — when you optimize based only on what already works, you end up chasing reflections of past success until you lose sight of anything new. In short: if you optimize without ideation, you optimize yourself to zero, not to growth.

So how do you make sure you haven’t over-optimized? Testing. 

Flipping Infinity in Your Favor

Now, there’s a good chance that testing has been one of the primary catalysts of your over-optimization. In my professional life of advertising, this might look like A/B testing ad creative, landing pages, messaging, etc.

On a personal level, this might be testing different macro ratios’ impact on your weight, testing bedtime routine adjustments and their impact on your sleep, testing how many times you can check your email at the dinner table without your family protesting, etc. In any case, these little tests often lead to a tightening of the screws based on finding the winning variant. You test that winner against another slightly nuanced variant, declare a winner, rinse and repeat. Before you know it, your tests have become so minuscule that you’re barely seeing a difference in performance between variants. Data is great at confirmation, but not as great at surfacing unknowns. You need a brain for that. 

This isn’t the type of testing I’m talking about. I’m talking about testing that pushes you well outside of your comfort zone. Testing that breaks the convention of what you’ve become confident in. Testing without imagination is just busywork. If you want to grow, you have to ask the right questions.

When you expand your thinking, really leaning into ideation to determine your next tests, you’re also expanding your opportunities. You flip from the infinitesimal to the infinite. If that feels a little scary, here are some safe bets that focus on expansion vs. retraction: 

• You’ve kept your weight in check for 5 years on a 1,200 calorie diet, but you’re exhausted all the time. What happens when you eat 3,500 calories and finally have enough energy to take a hike or hit the gym?
• You only market to Boomer CEOs in business journals because “they’re the decision makers.” What happens when you expand your marketing to their Gen Z personal assistants on TikTok who are told by their CEO bosses to research a solution? 
• You won’t take weekends off because you’re struggling to get through your tasks while working round the clock. What happens if you give yourself a full weekend to recharge so you can take on your tasks with a clear head? 
• You stopped advertising in a DMA that didn’t convert well for you 10 years ago. What happens if you try again now that it’s become an “it city” that people have been flocking to over the past 5 years?

Optimization Without Testing is Dead

Sure, you may find that your test is an abysmal failure. But you might also strike gold and discover that someone you thought was completely out of the question is easily attainable. The most likely scenario is that you find something in the middle: another path for incremental optimization that expands the optimization work you’ve already done. That doesn’t sound quite so risky now, does it? 

A wise man named James once said that faith without works is dead. A much less wise man named Daniel would tell you that optimization without testing is dead too.