If you pick a finite game, a particular question with a known set of rules on a fixed platform, you can optimise for it.
“How do I win at chess?”
“How can I grow my list?”
“How do I get more social media likes and followers?”
You can create a list of tactics, and if these are mastered, you can maybe win at that game.
As we can see though – to do this, we are having to “narrow” down to a specific framework.
When we focus on “optimising,” the scope of our question becomes small and fixed.
What if we didn’t try to optimise?
What if, instead, we tried to find interesting solutions to new and interesting problems?
Sometimes when we try to optimise, we get so caught up in a fixed (popular) framework or problem set, that we can’t even see the more important questions at hand.