“How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long term ambitions?” Chris Dixon asks in a post called “Climbing the wrong hill.” He relates the story of a young investment banker who, after already putting in his notice to go work at a tech startup, got baited into staying at the company he hated. More money, more responsibility—more time spent climbing the wrong hill.
Hill climbing is a common problem in mathematics: Dropped into a random, perhaps foggy terrain, how can you find the highest hill? Many algorithms offer an answer to this problem, but some are better than others. If you simply go higher every time you can go higher, for example, you might end up on the nearest hill but not necessarily the highest one.
While the best algorithms solve the problem with a good amount of randomness or repeated ascents before making a decision, when it comes to our careers, we might not want to throw darts in the dark or start from scratch over and over again. Life is short, after all.
Thankfully, we have a benefit the algorithms don’t, Dixon says: We can clearly see the landscape surrounding us. We know what hill we’re on, and if we don’t like it or conclude it to not be high enough, we can most likely point to a higher, better hill right from where we stand. The problem, then, is not differentiating between local maxima and global maxima, as the not-highest and highest hills are called in mathematical terms. The problem is getting down from whatever hill we’re on.
“There is a natural human tendency to make the next step an upward one,” Chris writes. Rather than slide down the hill we exerted so much effort to scale, we’ll keep climbing—even when we already know it’s not the hill we want to die on. While we all struggle with the magnetic pull of short-term thinking, “this effect seems to be even stronger in more ambitious people,” Chris suggests. Ironically, the very drive to excel prevents them from excelling at what they truly care about. It’s too hard to let go of the current hill.
While discussing Chris’s piece, my fiancée and I realized his theory applies well beyond careers. Whether you’re planning a vacation, playing video games as a hobby, or booking a restaurant, there’ll always be both local and global maxima. You can book the first hotel that looks decent in your target area or search for hours to find the very best deal. You can beat a game’s main story over the weekend or play for weeks until you’ve unlocked every achievement. And you can either go to the pizza place around the corner or compare Google ratings for 20 minutes, then take a 15-minute drive for the best slice in town.
While the ego problem always remains—can you admit your mistake when the pizza at the five-star place actually tastes like rubber, and then go look for a better one?—we do have a choice in which algorithm we want to run: Are we seeking a local or a global maximum on this particular occasion? In honor of the mathematical terms, my fiancée and I decided to call it “Laximizing”—settling for good enough—and “Glaximizing”—chasing perfection at all costs.
In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz suggested that laximizing—being a “satisficer,” as he called it—is better for our happiness in most areas of life. If you worry too much about minor choices, you’ll end up spending most of your time worrying altogether, and that can never make for a contented life. At the same time, it won’t do to laximize your entire life, will it? You’ll suffer from a lack of meaning, feeling challenged, and, going back to Dixon’s idea, possibly climbing a hill atop which you’ll only find misery.
But which algorithm to run where? As we were learning to use our newly found terminology, my fiancée and I realized we tend to use different strategies in different arenas. While I was self-employed, I used to glaximize my job. If the work wasn’t good enough, I wouldn’t ship it. Now that I work full-time for someone else, it’s my creative writing time I’m glaximizing. Financial incentives have moved into the background, but the art itself? No compromises! I’ll take my time and do it right, even if it takes me forever to write my next book.
My partner, meanwhile, used to glaximize her career until a few years ago. She would go above and beyond at work and keep changing jobs every two years or so to find the next rung on the ladder. Now, she has held the same job for multiple years and tries to get the absolute most out of her spare time. Planning weekend activities, traveling, figuring out which nice restaurants to visit—she’d rather have quality experiences than just more of them.
When it comes to laximizing vs. glaximizing, it’s useful to know where you and your loved ones differ. You’ll avoid conflict and be able to divide and conquer. I like my bathrooms spotless and my movies highly rated, so I’ll deal with those things. My fiancée, meanwhile, is the planning master undefeated in spreadsheeting and putting together bigger events. Wherever the other wants to lead, each of us can go with the flow, and where one might obsess a little too much, the other can be the kite line tethering them back to the ground.
Most of all, however, we can help each other ask the right questions: Is this the right hill you’re climbing? And are you following a formula that’s in line with how important this issue is to you?
Whether it is for pizza, jobs, or hotels, the majority of people often competes for the same mediocre options. At times, settling for average can be a valid strategy, but if it doesn’t come with ease and speed, then why laximize in the first place? Similarly, while glaximizing is important where we’re determined to climb the highest hill, it can lead us astray in battles which are barely worth fighting to begin with.
Who you marry, where you live, why you get out of bed in the morning—for the big decisions, Chris’s advice remains rock solid: “When you find the highest hill, don’t waste any more time on the current hill no matter how much better the next step up might appear.”
And for everything else? Make sure you lift the fog from the misty valley that is life. Know where to laximize, where to glaximize, and which approach the people you care about bring to which occasion. This way, no matter how lengthy or consequential a decision, at least you’ll make it with open eyes—and isn’t that always the first step to not getting in our own way?