If you try to maximize anything fully, you lose the ability to maximize anything else.

I was out of new songs to play, and my technical accuracy in the rhythm game Project SEKAI: Colorful Stage had been stagnant for at least a month. I’d just managed to get top 1000 in a Project SEKAI event for the first time, but felt empty inside.

6 months before, I was looking for a rhythm game I could play without needing to go to an arcade. Free daily gems made it easy to get cards of my favorite characters in the gacha. Cards granted event points, which made maxing out each event’s rewards an achievable goal. The event rewards were more gems and stuff that let me upgrade my cards for even more event points. My technical accuracy was improving quickly, and with each event my collection of cards grew. My collection of upgraded cards started to make aiming for a high event ranking feel possible.

I only ended up achieving top 1000 after paying for a $14.99 subscription bundle granting “autoplay”. I’d been devoting my time and attention to acquire gems, cards, event rewards, upgrades, and ranking, but originally my goal was just to play a rhythm game at home.

One of my friends left his job a couple of years ago, founding a startup and working to publish a board game. We met up at PAX Unplugged. At the start of the weekend, he would talk about nothing but his startup: he was just starting to get his first paid customers through experimenting with TikTok for marketing. After 20 hours of playtesting, the game felt closer to finished than ever. But he was torn: was it irresponsible to finish publishing the game if that would get in the way of maximizing his startup’s chances of success?

If you try to maximize anything fully, you lose the ability to maximize anything else.

Fine, I’ll concede that it’s possible to maximize your Tic Tac Toe playing ability. But even seemingly small goals can grow larger. When you lose sight of why you started, your goal can slip, becoming more ambitious. Becoming the best Tic Tac Toe player is already a different goal entirely.

It’s even harder if your goal starts out ambitious or even unbounded. When you can’t make the goal concrete, you don’t even know how to figure out what you might need to give up to achieve it.

That’s not to say that ambitious goals are bad. But maximizing more than one at a time is dangerous. Unless your goals are compatible, eventually one will ask you to sacrifice the other. Instead, satisfice, setting achievable thresholds for your goals, except perhaps for your most important one.

But be careful that your thresholds are actually achievable. You won’t satisfy a threshold that always ratchets in a single direction before you achieve it. Approaching an asymptote takes just as long as reaching infinity.

When did you decide what you’re maximizing? How would you know that it is time to reconsider?