The Paradox of Efficiency:

If you could use one word to describe my life, it’s efficiency.

How do I accomplish the maximum amount of output for the least amount of input?

How do I make sure I spend as much as needed to maximize results, yet do it in as little time as possible so I can spend it on other things?

Here’s the great paradox.

Let’s say you’re efficient and you save yourself an hour by doing something. Good for you. Now what? What are you going to do with that spare time? Are you going to figure out how to leverage that time into something different?

Everything in my life has been amount maximizing my time. I listen to podcasts on 2x speed. I watch Youtube videos on 2x speed. I watch movies on Netflix and other streaming websites at 1.5x speed. I smiled when I saw Netflix added a speed category, because in my own my head, I thought ‘this is great, I don’t have to waste as much time watching this movie.’

I want to maximize my time. If my brain can digest the same amount of information in half the time, sign me up. Most people are hesitant to do it. They won’t try to speed up what they’re listening to. Have you ever tried?

In the beginning, your brain won’t know what’s going on. But after 5-10 minutes, your brain will slowly start to pickup on the conversation and track what’s happening. If you tune out and daydream for a bit, you may miss info but for most podcasts, a lot of the info is junk. It’s build up for a story or describing details in a specific event. It’s nice to know but it’s largely not important.

Are people like this? I’m sure some people are, but I’m sure a lot of people are not. How many podcasts do people listen to weekly in terms of the ones they’ve subscribed to? It’s an interesting research project. Are number of podcasts listened to regularly by people correlated with performance in an industry? My hypothesis is the people who listen to podcasts at 2x speed and subscribe to more podcasts are more efficient than the people that don’t because they want to maximize their time.

So what I listen to podcasts on 2x speed? Does that make me smarter than other people? Nope. Not doing it once or twice. But, considering I’ve been doing it for 9 years, that knowledge compounds. In the same amount of time someone would’ve had to listen to podcasts in one year, I have listened to double that amount in the same time and done it for 9 straight years. The knowledge I’ve gained in the moment or over a week is not significant but that knowledge compounds over 9 years.

Compounding – the 8th wonder of the world. People don’t realize its value. Wish everyone had a lesson on the power of this concept in grade school. I remember we did it as a math lesson once in grade 11 math. Spent maybe a week on the concept. But this needs to be taught in the context of personal finance, knowledge and life. If you do something consistently over long periods of time, eventually you’ll get to a place where you know more than others.

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When I was in university, I watched everything under the sun. When I say everything, I mean every new release on Netflix, every new TV show and every late night comedy sketch. I definitely enjoyed it but it was also because I wanted to know about these things so in case someone ever asked me about it, I had an answer.

Guess what I discovered? No one cares. I’ve gotten maybe a handful of questions about my pop culture knowledge and understanding of which celebrity or director contributed to which movie in my life. It never comes up.

This is the paradox I struggle with. By maximizing my time to learn about a subject area, I could learn a lot about that specific subject. I could tell you who was dating who, which producer produced what movie, what director had a movie coming up, what happened on the late night talk show circuit, etc. It didn’t matter, because no one cares.

I maximized my time by watching all of these shows, but for what? To know more about a specific subject than the next person? Congratulations Anish, no one cares.

That was a great lesson. You have to do things for you. You have to do things you enjoy because it doesn’t matter what other people think of you. As long as you’re comfortable making the decisions and learning about the subject areas that interest you, other people’s opinions are irrelevant.

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Efficiency can also rob you of serendipity. Not knowing what’s going to happen or having a plan for something. If you’re so focused on being efficient, you sometimes forget to look up. As Ferris Buehler said, ‘Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.’ You need serendipity in your life. You need things to not go exactly as planned.

That’s where you learn. Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you wanted. Life never happens the way you intend. Although you can try and account for every variable under the sun, there will always be things you are not prepared for.

There are 2 ways you can look at that. Most people are scared because they don’t know what the future holds and they get anxious. But the smarter people understand that chance is part of the fun of life.

You can’t predict the future. No one can. People can make assumptions and bets on the future, but those ideas are often wrong. Black swan events, as coined by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, are unpredictable events that go beyond what is normally expected in a situation and have potentially severe consequences. They happen all the time throughout history. People don’t understand how often they happen.

But that’s comforting to me. I can’t predict the future so why not just focus on now. Yes, plan for the future and account for what could happen, but be flexible. Go where life takes you.

When I was told I could become a doctor straight out of high school, I didn’t believe it. When I given an opportunity to live in Scotland for 6 years, my younger self would’ve never believed me. When I was presented with an opportunity to leave medicine, I took it. When I was given an opportunity to move halfway around the world to Amsterdam for a job, I jumped in headfirst.

All of these opportunities I didn’t plan for. I could have never known years before if these things were going to happen.

That’s the thing with efficiency. That’s the thing with planning. There’s only so much planning you can do and so much time you can save.

The greatest moments in life happen when you least expect it. The greatest experiences happen when you don’t know what’s coming.

Stop being so efficient all the time.

Let life happen and enjoy the ride.