The Trade-Off of Pure Efficiency Optimization
What we give up when we choose efficiency as our only metric to judge decision making.
I played college football at two schools, each with their own distinctly different types of systems and institutions.
The first school, somewhere near the pinnacle of college football, had resources, personnel and facilities that far exceeded anything I had ever seen. It had athletes and recruits that were considered some of the most likely NFL prospects. The coaches were at the top of their careers, destination jobs as they were often called in an industry where you’re looking for a new job every year until you aren’t.
The second, a resilient smaller program, that won a lot of games and developed a lot of players, but did so with less resources, more unassuming and unlikely athletes and coaches who had loftier goals and itchy feet.
These differences perpetuated a different style of strength and conditioning, and my intention for this short essay is to contrast the philosophical underpinnings of these two strength and conditioning programs and extrapolate it to our personal lives.
The second school realized it was smaller, realized it was at a disadvantage against its opponents and launched a program designed to be maximally efficient, and exhaustively planned. They wanted to maximize rest and recovery in concert with exercise to create the largest possible gains in their less fully developed athletes.
There were endless presentations on sleep, nutrition, diet, water consumption, stretching, rest, relaxation, etc. We had full days where we would come into the weight room with the sole intention of expertly tailored stretches and recovery tactics designed to maximize muscle gains. There were timed rests in between sets, and a carefully planned rep range and bespoke weight for each player for every single exercise. Speed work was distilled to the mechanics of running, and each player's weaknesses bore out expertly designed stretches intended to perfect these mechanics. Agility was non existent, as it was argued to me that scientifically your agility is based on the strength of your legs which gave them the ability to move your body and change direction more gracefully and faster. Conditioning was never very challenging. If we were running, we had a lot of time to make our sprints and had a speed we couldn’t surpass. Sometimes “conditioning” just included the route running and pass catching we would have done anyway. They had a set number of steps they wanted us to take and a set amount of time with heart rates elevated over a certain number that they didn’t want us to surpass. Many players saw substantial gains, including myself, and the program without a doubt had its effect, there was only one problem, it wasn’t hard enough.
The first school, which still considered development important, took a more militaristic approach. Yes they did mention recovery and rest but the program was not nearly as scientific or as centrally planned. The most important part was that everyday they were going to beat you down. You were going to reach the precipice of what you felt you were humanly capable of doing, and then you would be dismissed. The coaches from the smaller programs often commented about the lack of wisdom in this, because it didn’t allow enough recovery to reach maximal gains. They believed it just broke your body down. I am not nearly as qualified as they are to discuss that but I’m sure to some extent they’re right, although I can say I still made many substantial gains under the system.
At the first school not everyone could make it through the workouts everyday and in fact many “fell out” and would have to come back and retry from the beginning of that drill or if their heart was deemed insufficient, restart the entire workout from the beginning. Everyday we “warmed-up” with some physical agility, and speed drills, that pushed us to the brink before the workout began. Everyone would be dripping sweat and some even throwing up. We’d then jog into the weight room for a lift that lasted an hour and moved at such a fast pace and involved such demanding exercises that it allowed no one to catch their breath. Immediately upon ending we would sprint from the weight room following the head strength coach to one of various unknown locations where we’d be subject to a few more drills, and then the cu de gras, we would finish with a lung crushing gut wrenching conditioning session.
This was the part that always violently stirred the butterflies in my stomach. I can remember coming into the locker room and seeing the group before mine sprinting the stadium steps or the ramps that lead from the ground floor entrance to the nose bleeds and feeling my heart sink. You always knew that you would have to confront yourself every single conditioning session. You would have to wrestle with your own will to succeed, and persevere.
And I was not alone, one former player, who went on to NFL success once told me that he threw up after every lift in anticipation of the conditioning, with the added bonus of emptying his stomach before he did something likely to turn it inside out. This was acceptable so long as the staff didn’t see it or he did not bend over to do so. Bending over was always a bridge too far and always led to “falling out,” though we had only ever seen it happen a few times.
A possibly exaggerated story of a former number 1 overall draft pick being “Sparta kicked” out of a garage door by the head strength coach whilst throwing up and subsequently being told to “come back at three” as the overhead door closed behind him, scarred most away from the ill-fated bend over. Falling out was a virtual death sentence. You would lose the confidence of your teammates, and the strength coaches and would have an added eye on you until you earned it’s ease. That and you had to restart the workout that just made you throw up, cramp up, pass out, lose pace, or otherwise unable to complete it before you even finished.
We often did a militarized form of synchronized sit-ups where we threw an 18 pound medicine ball to a partner as we screamed the corresponding number of reps. Don’t count loud enough, you all start over. Lose pace, you all start over, and if you lost pace because you can’t keep up with the group, they all start over, and oh yeah better luck later in the day when you try this whole thing again from the beginning. Drop the ball, you risk crushing your nose and of course you all start over.
There was a story of one player, who dropped the ball before it subsequently rolled into a nearby pond, being forced to wade into the water, replete with snapping turtles large enough to take a big toe, to recover the ball before having to start over. I suppose it might have been nice to get a break that long.
The workouts were the opposite of the carefully considered and scientifically backed workouts done at the smaller program. They did not consider our ability to recover, there were no rest breaks timed perfectly to maximize our effort. There were no recovery days. There was nothing but constant, soul bludgeoning work.
But this led to something that all the technical optimization in the world could not find you. At the end of each workout, when you stretched a little bit, took a shower and shot the bull with your teammates and coaches, you felt like a Greek God. You had arrived with what felt like an unconquerable task. For many it would be, and yet you looked it in the face and took every single blow on the chin.
“Destroying the gains” “foolish” “unproductive” the coaches from the second school would likely decry if they were to watch one full workout at the first. But the coaches at the first were working under a different set of assumptions and had made informed decisions in favor of a different set of trade off that these technocrats hadn’t considered.
The militaristic hellish beat down that characterized their workouts gave us a sense of accomplishment that was not the case elsewhere. We felt a sense of connectedness and respect for one another. Those of us who did not quit, had and would continue to go through something transformative that those from the outside could not understand. We had seen one another and most importantly ourselves at our breaking points everyday and because of this a confidence in ourselves and one another grew. How can you become accustomed to pushing yourself through your weakest moments and then even consider the possibility that someone could break you? Kids from entirely different backgrounds grew together and grew to care for one another through a shared suffering and because of that we all gained a blissful sense of mockery toward any challenges presented to us. Yes we grew in strength and speed but more importantly we grew in our mental development and our views of ourselves. We wrestled with complex feelings and emotions daily and surprised ourselves when we saw who we were.
At the end of the day the sterile, technocratic, overly scientific approach the other school offered couldn’t do that, and although it bore substantial gains in the measurable, it left something flat and uninteresting in the things that one can never measure.
I tell this story to draw an analogy. Often we see the implementation of AI and various forms of technological advancement in our lives as obvious and inarguable goods. The measurable added efficiency often closes the case. “Why would I waste precious moments of my life learning a map when I can always type a location into my phone and it will give me the relevant directions?” “Why would I read this book when I could read a summary from blinkist in 15 minutes?” “Why wrestle the words on my heart out onto a page when ChatGPT will give me a rough draft to start from?”
But I contend that we lose things unmeasured, but equally, if not more important when we optimize exclusively for efficiency. These are trade-offs that we all make everyday yet we are not wrestling with the reality of what we’re giving up, because it is not so easy to recognize. It’s a trade-off we’re making in the guise of no loss decision.
I’m not arguing to go churn butter or kill your next meal, but I am saying that we all should consider the trade-offs of what’s being lost when we optimize for the measurable at the sake of the those aspects of humanity much more challenging to put hard numbers on.
In the words of the great economist Thomas Sowell, “There are no solutions, only trade offs”
I liked this essay! I work in operations and often take a similar argument from another perspective - operations work is designed around systems. In big organizations, you end up as an employee number, you log into your platforms and you fill out forms to execute your work or file for reimbursements or requisition supplies or whatever. Those are all very efficient, and there's a lot to be said for efficiency. But from my perspective, staff's job isn't to fill out forms. They have a whole job - any forms I make them fill out should have the purpose of making *their* life easier. In practice, a lot of that is to make the lives of the administrators easier. At some level, it's obviously worth it - why pay someone to spend 40 hours a month on a process, if you can have your staff each spend 2 minutes filling out a form that allows that administrator to do that same process in 30 minutes each month? But if I need a particular piece of information, it doesn't really matter to me *how* I get it, it matters to me *that* I get it. I would rather just ask for it over Slack then go through a routine every month where the same 3 people have not done their form, and now I have to hassle them to do it (and in every operations job, there are people who simply won't do the process you create unless you're willing to fire them over it, and I have seen very few forms worth firing anyone over).
(I found this on Freddie's blog btw. Thanks for writing!)