At high school I had a classmate I sometimes went to McDonald’s with. He ordered the same thing every time: two Big Macs, two large portions of fries, two sachets of mayonnaise and a hot apple pie.
And then, always, with the revelation of a man who has just found the solution to an internal conflict that has been eating at him for weeks, he would ask for a Coca Cola, hesitate for two seconds and say:
“You know what, actually make it a Coke Zero, no sugar.” And he would underline it: “no sugar.”
And we, children with very little emotional education at that age, would look at each other and burst out laughing.
Do not misunderstand, we were not laughing at what he had ordered. None of us was the most disciplined or the best educated on nutrition at that age, we were having Big Macs too. We laughed because the absurdity of the situation was very obvious to us.
It struck us, intuitively, that after ordering food for three people, the last thing you should be worrying about is whether the Coke has sugar in it. Because at that point it does not really make a difference.
It is not as if you had been on a Mediterranean diet for five years and your only problem was the occasional full sugar Coke every fortnight, which you now wanted to optimise as well.
Why you optimise constantly and still do not feel in control
We live in a world where we are bombarded daily with techniques, tools, protocols and methods for becoming more efficient. It is easy to end up believing that in order to perform in your job you absolutely have to be up to date with all of them.
Whether it is business, a job, sport or the role of a parent, it seems the latest gadget, a course of ayahuasca and the newest episode of Diary of a CEO are all you were missing.
It is easy to fool yourself that this is why you do not get everything you want in life, why what you do never feels like enough, why you keep dropping one of the thirty pins you are trying to juggle at once.
Today I am here to tell you that those things are exactly why you are not succeeding. That all this over-optimising contributes to the problem, it does not help you solve it.
That if you recognise yourself in the above, you are starting from the wrong premise.
That you are spending most of the little energy you have on things that make you less efficient, more tired and more likely to fail.
Here is how it looks from where I sit
In my work as a change strategist, over the last 13+ years I have worked with many people who perform at a high level in their fields.
I have worked with C level executives, VPs and managers across Western Europe. I have worked with professionals who are among the best in the world at what they do. Pianists, elite athletes, professional poker players, engineers who launch satellites into space, stand up comedians, several multimillionaires, and also with people in ordinary jobs, juggling several roles at once: husband, wife, mother or father, while doing everything they can to do their job or run their business as well as possible.
All of these people I end up working with want to perform in one form or another. That is why we end up working together.
You probably know this already: when you are, say, an elite athlete, you end up competing against the best in the world. The differences between first and second place are so small that if you are competing against someone of equal ability, one wrong thought at the wrong moment can cost you the podium.
The same goes for the wrong swimming goggles, or imperfect hair removal, if you are a competitive swimmer.
If you are a concert pianist, one imperfectly struck note matters. Same if you are a professional dancer.
Same when you negotiate multi million euro contracts daily.
Same when you play professional poker for tens or hundreds of thousands of euros and you have a fraction of a second to catch every microexpression on the face of the person in front of you.
But guess what
Most people are not at that level. A significant number of my clients are not there yet, even though they have the potential to be.
They want to perform, they get above average results, but they still have a long way to climb before the difference in performance is decided by optimisations of that kind.
The gap between them and the person in first place is not 0.3% more performance and efficiency. It is more likely a gap of 80%.
I do not say that as a criticism. There is simply an enormous amount of potential there that has not yet been realised. Most of my daily work is helping people grow and reach that potential. But to have any hope of reaching it, you first need to admit that you are not exactly where you would like to be.
If you are someone who tries to get to the gym three times a week and manages twice, and then goes out and has two glasses of wine with half a packet of cigarettes, I have bad news: no amount of conscientiously taken Omega 3 or vitamin D can compensate for the damage smoking does.
No ice bath or massage, done daily for the rest of your life, gives you back the energy and the life that alcohol takes from you. You still come out negative.
And no, two episodes of Diary of a CEO listened to before falling asleep do not compensate for the unresolved stress and high functioning anxiety that spike your cortisol five times a day.
All of these make you feel better in the moment, they make you feel that you did not only harm yourself but also did some good things for yourself. But in the big scheme of things they change almost nothing. Not for you.
Because all these optimisations, all the supplements and gadgets, each give you an edge of 0.1% to 0.2% on your overall performance.
Do twenty such optimisations daily and you get 2% more in results.
If tomorrow you are racing Usain Bolt and last year you were ten milliseconds off his time, then yes, those 2% will make you world champion.
But if you are not extremely close to Usain Bolt’s level, those 2% bring you a negligible benefit.
You will no longer be 213,415th in the world. You will be 209,120th.
Is that progress? It is.
Is it worth the effort and the discipline you spend keeping it up? Most likely not.
So should we stop trying to improve anything at all?
No, that is not what I am saying.
What I am saying is that you first need to fix the basics, the non negotiables, the things that make you drive with the handbrake on, and only then look at the things that can bring you 0.1% improvements.
The more efficient path is to concentrate all your energy on making the major optimisations first, the ones that take you to 90% performance. After that, no worries, we can go and race Usain Bolt.
What the numbers say about regulating your nervous system and your sleep
People have got used to asking whether Bolt takes cold showers or micro-doses, but what they do not see is that athletes at that level have not been on social media until midnight one single evening in the last twenty years.
They do not touch alcohol, not even on their birthday.
And they do exercises for regulating their emotional states and their nervous system five times a day. At fixed hours. Daily. For twenty years.
These are not randomly chosen examples.
If you regulated your sleep, for instance, you would gain between 9% and 20% in daily efficiency. Across all tasks. From that one change alone.
There are studies. Look them up.
If you already sleep well enough, you could still gain 9% just from optimising your sleep. An optimisation which, by the way, is not done by checking your Oura ring or your Garmin three times a day, but by fixing the level of stress in your life and by not spending so many hours on your phone in the evening. This from someone who has had an Oura ring since launch and tracked his sleep with two devices simultaneously, for years.
There are methods of regulating the nervous system that increase productivity by 32%. From a single tool.
And on physical condition and movement, I will not even start. You can take all the supplements, vitamins and ice baths in the world, perfectly and consistently, for ten years, and you still will not get the increase in health and performance that comes from a few thousand extra steps a day, five kilos less body weight, or less abdominal fat.
A few centimetres less around the waist increase life expectancy by three years in men and five in women.
Meanwhile, people prefer to count 0.1% sticks, one at a time, trying not to drop them because there are so many.
They fool themselves that they are better and more efficient, when what they are actually doing is avoiding the obvious inefficiencies right in front of them, the problems that genuinely matter and that, once solved, would revolutionise their life, their productivity and their performance.
When you want to enter a race and your car is missing two wheels entirely, obsessing over the perfect adjustment of the rear view mirror is pointless. You will lose the race.
There is no doubt about that.
So what should I do now?
It is simple.
Look at the main factors that limit people’s performance:
- sleep
- stress, and the management of emotions and thoughts
- physical condition
- relationships, especially your relationship with your partner
- dependencies: alcohol, smoking, the phone, weed, workaholism, binge eating
Now choose one single thing. One.
Regulate your nervous system. Fix your sleep. Solve the smoking problem. Or the alcohol one. Or the compulsive eating at 11pm. Or that toxic relationship in your life.
Concentrate all your resources on solving that one problem.
Do not stop until it is completely solved. Make it the only priority in your life. Invest in acquiring the skills that will help you solve it.
Then move to the next one.
And you will be ahead of everyone taking twelve vitamins and supplements a day, doing ice baths, eating only grass fed beef and having an ayahuasca session once a month instead of therapy.
Solve any one of these problems and you will simply crush them on performance, fulfilment and happiness. They do not stand a chance.
Not because they are not trying. They are trying.
But because they are working on the wrong things. Because they avoid attacking the areas that genuinely count and that would genuinely make the difference, and comfort themselves by lighting scented sticks around the house and reciting mantras while smelling essential oils.
Full disclosure
To be clear, you could say I have some personal biases here. Because in recent years I have helped high achievers with:
- regulating the nervous system
- improving sleep and reducing stress through hypnosis
- managing the pressure generated by performance
- emotional regulation techniques with immediate effect
- reducing overthinking
- quitting smoking
- getting rid of phobias
BUT it is not because I do this job that I see things this way. It is the other way round. I chose to work on exactly these subjects because I observed, over 13+ years of experience, that if I help someone solve one of these problems, I have impacted their life ten times more than if I help them with any other small optimisation.
Because people have all the resources they need to manage their life and take their own decisions. It is just that those resources are often buried under a dysregulated nervous system and a lack of sleep that they medicate with coffee, tobacco and energy drinks.
And I have seen hundreds of times that once you solve these problems, people can achieve just about anything they set out to achieve in life.
About the author
Andrei Roșca is a change strategist working one to one with founders, C level executives and senior managers who perform well on the outside while carrying a constant internal load. The work is nervous system regulation under real pressure, not motivation and not mindset. 13+ years of practice, 510+ clients, 8120+ individual sessions, through Whisper, Center for Strategic Change. Sessions are online, in English or in Romanian.
If this described your situation, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.