An Optimizer's Guide to Life: A Mindset that Transcends Digital Marketing

Let’s flashback to when you were first figuring out your career path. When you were in college or even high school, people would ask you what you wanted to do when you graduated. More than likely, you had an answer because it was expected that you have a plan for what you wanted to do with your life.

However, once you had an internship or started studying what you envisioned doing, you might have changed your mind. It was not enough to visualize yourself in a certain job or listen to what people told you about a career choice. You had to try it out for yourself in order to see if it was a good fit for you.

Maybe it was exactly what you thought, or it might have been completely different than your expectations. Nonetheless, you had to test out different jobs until you found the right one.

Think about the last time you decided to eat healthier. Rather than making small changes to your regular eating habits, like slowly cutting out a few unhealthy items here and there, you may have been sold on the latest and greatest life-changing diet. You probably dreaded the days leading up to the time when you started it, and while you were eating "healthy," you probably hated your life and counted the days until you were finished—if you even had the dedication to see it through the end.

When you completed your diet, you probably thought you deserved a special treat and slipped into your old habits again. Drastic changes sound great in theory, and it’s one of the reasons quick weight loss plans and self-proclaimed miracle drinks sound so appealing. However, a much more feasible and effective process for reaching healthy eating habits is to introduce small changes over time.

We can apply the same logic to exercising. If you never worked out and decided to run a marathon tomorrow, the results would not be pleasant. The odds of you completing the race would be slim, and even worse, it would discourage you from wanting to work out in the future. Conversely, if you set a goal to run for a few minutes this week and a few minutes longer next week, or even tested different exercises to see what you enjoyed doing, you would slowly make gains and get into better shape.

The optimizer mindset can be applied to finding and getting good at a new hobby as well. To find the activities you love doing, you have to try lots of different things. Some people are musically talented, other people are gifted athletes, and some people are both. If the only hobby you ever tried was playing the guitar, your true passion could be playing baseball, but you would never know that if you only took guitar lessons.

The fact of the matter is that you don’t know what you enjoy until you test it. Then, once you do find the hobbies you enjoy, you might want to get better at them. You’ll do that by testing small changes to your technique and see what helps you improve. Everyone is unique, so you have to constantly test your approach in order to keep your craft in top shape.

There’s a good chance that you already apply this mindset when managing people at work, but you may not think of it in the same way. If you are a good manager, then you are constantly looking for ways to maximize the performance and efficiency of your employees. When someone new starts, you might test different techniques for managing that person because no two employees are the same. You will test different management strategies and give them different projects to find what they’re good at.

Once you establish a standard management style and deliverables, employees will have expectations for the job. If you drastically changed expectations overnight without giving your employees time to adjust, they would not be very happy. You would be disappointed with their performance and may have to fire some of them. Even worse, if the change was too disruptive, you may have to rebuild the entire department.

There are countless ways that you can apply the optimizer mindset to your daily life. The primary thing to remember is that you can reduce the risk associated with lifestyle changes when you introduce change in small increments. Quick, drastic changes are idealistic, but they are very risky. Big changes are possible, but they take time.

As you may know, the digital marketing landscape has changed. We have numerous tools that enable us to apply an agile approach to digital marketing. With today’s technology, our web design team can test small changes and measure small improvements to our websites and marketing campaigns. We no longer have to undergo complete redesigns of our websites to increase conversions and risk being burned by a drastic, expensive process.

If this is all unfamiliar to you and seems a bit overwhelming, that’s ok. We can help make incremental improvements in your organization. Simply fill out our contact form, and we can help bring your organization into the future.