Growing up, school drilled into us that life is a series of levels. You pass one, you move to the next. It’s all laid out: do well on this test, get into that school, land a job. Every step has rules, and you win by optimizing within those rules.

And we got good at that game. We figured out how to study for the A, how to ace the interview, how to tick the boxes that define success in those structured environments. Optimization worked because the rules were clear and the goals were predefined.

But here's where it breaks down: life outside those systems doesn’t work that way. The world doesn’t hand you a syllabus when you're trying to create something new. When you're ambitious, when you want to work in uncharted territory (invent something, build a business, explore an idea no one handed to you), the map is gone. The levels are gone. There are no clear checklists, no rubrics, no guaranteed rewards for your effort.

And still, that old muscle kicks in: optimize. For what, though? When you're chasing clarity where none exists, you fall into a trap. Instead of moving forward freely, you start scanning for failure. You start managing threats. You play not to lose. You optimize for what feels familiar: avoiding mistakes, looking good, staying in safe zones.

But real work, the meaningful kind, the creative kind, demands wandering. It demands uncertainty, curiosity, play. It needs you to make peace with not knowing, not having it all figured out. There’s no performance review for originality, no grading curve for invention.

The problem is, school taught us to fear failure and treat ambiguity as something to eliminate. But doing anything truly interesting means walking straight into both. You can’t optimize your way to originality. You have to get lost, take wrong turns, waste time (all the things that look inefficient but are actually the only way to find something real).

So yeah, optimization works, but only when the path is already laid out. If you're trying to create the path, you need a different mindset entirely. Less efficiency, more exploration. Less trying to win the game, more trying to figure out what game is worth playing in the first place.

There’s no algorithm for originality, no shortcut for real work. The trouble with optimization is that it assumes you already know the rules.