The Pointless Peak

Noptimizing

We made up a word on the podcast and I have been unbearable about it ever since.

Stoptimizing. Then noptimizing. I've been walking around the house deploying both, at Jana, repeatedly, for two days.

She got it the first time. It was mildly funny the first time. It has not improved.

Which makes it funnier to me, obviously, because the only audience I need for that joke is me, and I'm extremely receptive.

That's the most pointless thing I've done this week and I'd like it entered into the record.

Everything got a score

Jana got an Apple Watch a few months back, after decades of not wearing a watch, because she wanted to be healthier.

Now she walks the dog and checks her step count. She reads a book and the watch tells her to get up and move, which is a strange thing for a book to be interrupted by. She started keeping a list of what she's read, so the reading has a record now.

There was a toothbrushing app. Both of us had it. You hold your phone while you brush so it can grade your coverage, and we were, and I want to be precise here, failing at brushing our teeth.

We deleted it.

But the score didn't leave with the app. That's the part worth noticing. You can uninstall the thing and the habit of grading yourself stays, and then a walk with the dog has a number attached to it whether or not anything is counting.

The couch

So Jana started escaping to the couch under a heating blanket, where she says she feels like a chicken nugget.

Not because she's tired. Because it's the one place in the house where nothing is being measured.

And then she'd sit there feeling guilty about it, which means even the safe zone came with a score.

That's a strange thing to build for yourself. A refuge from evaluation that you then evaluate yourself inside of.

Where it actually costs something

Here's the part I hadn't thought about until she said it on the recording, and it's different from being generally over-optimized.

Jana's an artist. It's where her best ideas come from, and I mean that operationally, the good ones show up while she's got a pen in her hand.

And at some point the question changed. Not "what do I want to make." Now it's how do I monetize this, how do I get it in a gallery, how do I build it into the business, how do I turn it into part of the keynote, can I get a sponsor.

She spent the last two weeks making an art wheel for a sponsor. Which is good work and it's also work.

The piano's worse. She plays, she's written a few songs, and she'll tell you they're not good. They were fun. Then AI showed up and can produce something better than her songs in thirty seconds.

So she stopped going over to the piano to tootle around.

That's the actual loss. Nobody took the piano. She just can't find the reason to sit down at it anymore, because the reason used to be that it was fun and now there's a better product available in half a minute.

The piano's right there. That's the whole problem. The banana is Jana's first water ski. The painting is Sassy, who ran this house for eighteen years.

.

The pointless peak

So that's the thing we named. Everybody talks about peak performance. We're proposing the pointless peak.

Climb something that goes nowhere. On purpose.

Not as a recovery strategy so you can perform better afterward, because that's just optimization wearing a bathrobe. Actually pointless. No outcome, no record, nothing to show anybody.

It's still pointless	It's turned into work
Nobody's going to see it.	You're thinking about where to post it.
You're allowed to be bad at it.	You've compared yourself to somebody who's good at it.
It isn't recovery for anything.	You're calling it self-care so it counts as productive.
Nothing counted it.	There's a number attached, even if no app is running.

Skiing like a rookie

Here's the evidence, and it's the part that makes this practical rather than nice.

When Jana started water skiing she had no idea what she was doing. She'd go out, try things, watch skiers who were better than her and think she might be able to do that, and fall down a lot.

She broke records doing that. People were asking what on earth she was doing out there.

She wasn't afraid to fail, is what she was doing. There was no score yet.

Now she'll tell you she feels pressure to go break another record or enter another contest, rather than just going out to mess around on the water. Same lake. Same skis. Different relationship to it entirely.

Every big thing that's happened to us came out of the version where we were enjoying it. World championship. Hall of Fame. Mindvalley stages. Every one of those arrived during a stretch where we'd stopped grinding and started playing.

Which feels too simple to be the answer, and I've stopped arguing with it.

Screw it, let's do it

Richard Branson wrote a book with that title and I think it's most of his secret.

He has enough money now to not care what anybody thinks. But he didn't always, and he was like that before the money, which means it's the cause rather than the result.

We had a small version of this last week. Jana said she didn't have the bandwidth for Toastmasters on Saturday, where you draw your role out of a hat when you walk in, thirteen or fourteen possibilities, could be a speech. She has a big presentation Friday and we're hosting events Friday and Sunday.

I put both our names in anyway.

She asked why I would do that to her. The answer is that I didn't care, in the good way, and the deciding was costing her more than the speech would.

The bookend

There's one rule on all of this and Jana caught it at the end.

Be as pointless as you want. Be authentic while you're doing it.

That's the only thing with a point, and it's the thing that makes everything else safe to do badly.

She went out after we recorded and did something expensive to her hair. She wasn't sure what color. Peach was on the table. Blueberry came up.

We have a major event in four days.

Screw it.

The Living Lucky® Practice

Exercise: find one tracker, app, or list currently grading something that used to be fun. Turn it off for a week.

Reflection question: what did I used to do for no reason that now has a purpose attached to it?

Journal prompt: what would I make if nobody could ever see it, buy it, or rate it?

Action: do one pointless thing today. It cannot be preparation for anything.

Frequently asked questions

What is the pointless peak?

Doing something purely for the doing, with no goal, metric, or plan to monetize it. It's the counterweight to peak performance, and the test is whether you could explain the point of it. If you can, it isn't pointless yet.

Why does tracking everything make things less enjoyable?

Because a number changes what you're doing. A walk becomes a step count, a book becomes a list entry, and your attention moves from the thing to the measurement of the thing. The activity is identical and the experience isn't.

What's wrong with monetizing a hobby?

Nothing, if you want to. The cost is that the hobby stops being the place where nothing is at stake, and that place is where a lot of people do their best thinking. Once the art has a business case, you've lost the room you were going there to find.

Why do I feel guilty relaxing?

Because you've been rewarded for output long enough that the absence of it registers as failure. The guilt isn't a signal about whether you should be resting. It's a habit with no information in it.

What does "screw it, let's do it" actually mean in practice?

Taking action before you've finished deciding whether it's worth it. Most of the cost of a small opportunity is in the deliberating, and for anything low-stakes, the deliberating is worth more than the outcome either way.

Does doing things for fun actually produce better results?

It has for us, consistently enough that we stopped treating it as a coincidence. Every significant thing that's happened to us arrived during a stretch when we were enjoying ourselves rather than grinding. I can't explain the mechanism and I've got the pattern.

We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 37.

We Create Our Luck®.