The best car. The best computer. The best chair. The best travel advice books. It’s easy to demand the best, and advertising is suggesting you can easily get the best, if you just spend the money for this one product that is totally the best compared to these others.

“The best” implies optimization towards a certain goal. And it is this goal that is different for many people. What is the best computer? Is it the fastest computer? Or one that you can bring with you, and lasts the longest? Or maybe it’s the one you can afford easily? Any optimization has to have a goal, and optimizing towards more than one is nigh impossible. So, for one person, the best computer is a monster desktop PC containing as much CPU cores, memory, and storage as they can buy, while someone else’s best computer is the one they can put into their pocket.

And it’s not just objects where one can aspire to possess the best. You can also worry about the best way to donate money to maximize your charitable impact: The Most Efficient Way to Save a Life.

This obsession with optimization can easily become a goal unto itself, and as the emerging services industry shows, we can become so obsessed with optimizing our lives, we forget about what we’re actually working and living for. Even worse: being obsessed with efficiency is a problem of a stagnating economy: Our Economy Is Obsessed with Efficiency and Terrible at Everything Else.

And, of course, optimization implies one thing: measurement. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure. This poses an interesting problem to people who work in jobs or do things that are hard or impossible to measure. How do you optimize an artist? What metrics do you use to measure their efficiency, and whether your optimization measures are having any effect? And this applies not just to art, but to all areas where creativity is a component. So all this obsession with optimizing your work or social life might be counterproductive after all: Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business.

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