The other day I was watching a clip of Elon Musk, and it stopped me in my tracks. What I’m about to say about Trump, the state of this administration and the rise of Zohran Mamdani is something you need to hear.

Just kidding. :)

I like to focus on things I can control.

But Elon said something that stuck with me.

“The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize a thing that should not exist.”

That quote hit me harder than I expected.

Because you don’t have to be building rockets or electric cars to fall into that trap.

You can be running a business, leading a team, or just trying to get through day-to-day life.

Time and again, we focus on refining a process or optimizing a workflow while completely missing the foundational problem.

It reminds me of Jackson's story.

Jackson was an optimization machine.

His desk said it all: notebooks spread out, a bunch of pens he actually organized by color for some reason, and a screen full of articles about how to wake up earlier (when you are a night owl).

No judgment, but you know the type.

And when he wasn’t getting the results he wanted, he didn’t question the approach. He just tightened the screws and became more and more exhausted.

Nothing was working because he kept trying to fix the wrong thing.

One night he mentioned it to a friend, someone who didn’t live inside the self-improvement bubble, and she asked the simplest, most inconvenient question:

“Have you checked your sleep?”

He took a sleep study and guess what? He had severe sleep apnea.

It wasn’t a motivation problem.

It wasn’t a willpower problem.

It was oxygen. His brain wasn’t getting enough of it.

Once he treated the real issue, everything changed.

All the performance he’d been chasing wasn’t trapped in a better routine. It was trapped in a medical problem he didn’t know he had.

The moment he stopped optimizing the wrong thing, he got his life back.

THIS WEEK'S MFD CHALLENGE

Where are you trying to “perform” your way out of a problem that might actually be physical, hormonal, or medical but not motivational?

Know someone solving the wrong problem perfectly?
Forward this issue to as many people as you want!

Until next Tuesday,

Kevin D. St.Clergy
Author & Podcast Host of Beyond Blind Blaming
Creator of the Blind Blaming Specialist™ Certification