Through the first half of 2024 I tried learning to drive, and my instructor drilled this mindset into me through how he spoke and reacted to errors. It’s taken me a long time to untangle that attitude out of my head, where I can think clearly, judging myself on my own standards for acceptable errors, and not the hypothetical standards of voices that don’t care about me. Being unable to do anything without doubting or questioning myself was soul destroying.

People like him are horrid traps for optimisers. They’re pointing out errors, and being so desperate to improve you’re encouraged to keep listening and value them greater instead of tuning their overeagerness out.

There’s an irony that actually getting hung up on minor comments and suggestions is in itself poor optimisation since the error becomes a distraction instead of a learning point.

I'm really hard on myself even for small things like missing a turn that takes me 5 minutes out of the way. Or making a minor mistake in my morning breakfast routine that I've been optimizing for 3 years. It's just how I'm wired.

Thing is, over-optimizing is not optimizing. "No plan survives contact with reality", as it is said. Optimal strategies in games, for instance, include lots of adaptive branches to deal with the suboptimal reality of what actually happens - otherwise the plan is really fragile.

(Having said that, restarting a game over and over in order to force your one perfect linear optimal plan to eventually work out can be lots of fun. But this is not an option in real life.)

While I'm on the cheesy aphorisms, I'll throw in "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans". But that one's too pragmatic, I think. It's not as if we have zero control. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "life is what happens while you're busy making loosely similar plans".

I think the antidote is to intentionally avoid routines to optimize. Cultivating an objective of variety helps break out of the mundanity-loop. (caveat: everything in moderation, including moderation)

For me work stuff bothers me like making a mistake/looking dumb. But also when other people make mistakes I don't judge them that harshly/don't obsess over it as opposed to myself.

You can think of it as "just how I'm wired" if that helps, but these things are tendencies not absolutes. I've been similarly harsh with myself in the past and now I do that less frequently with lower harshness even though I know it's a natural tendency.

It is possible to lessen the effect of these things if you put effort into it.

OK, now I'm being harsh with myself about how I'm failing to get better at not being harsh with myself.

What if you were to optimize for happiness, resilience, and peace of mind?