Optimizing Life ... 2014

“Can what I have done all my life be applied to my life?” is a question that has nagged me for a long time (all my life, may I say?). So, here is my attempt to start dissecting, and I invite perspectives from all readers of this blog post.

For those not close to my professional life, let me explain what I have done all my life – optimize business problems! I need to define what “optimize” means. It means to take an objective function (like profit, or cost, or a service level, or some combination of such functions), and find those operating parameters that will provide an “optimal” (that is maximal or minimal, as the case may be) value of the objective function.

In layman terms, suppose I want to get from home to work in the shortest possible time. The objective function is the travel time. What I want to do with the objective function is to minimize. My decision variables that I want to find values of are the mode of transportation, the route of travel, and other near-real-time decisions such as going around traffic bottlenecks.

It is important to note that in a previous paragraph, I used “or”s and not “and”s when I defined objective functions. This distinction is critical. The answer to my “shortest time from home to work” need not optimize other objective functions like “shortest distance from home to work”, “least amount of fuel used traveling from home to work”, or “least amount of driving stress from home to work”. If some other objective function is also optimized by the answer to my sought after objective function, it would be more by chance than by choice.

The point I am trying to drive home (sic) is that there can be one and only one unambiguous objective function. For example, wanting to be rich and wanting to be happy poses the dilemma: if I am at a decision point to be richer at the expense of happiness, or to be happier at the expense of richness, which fork in the road do I take? Such dilemmas are resolved in the optimization realm by defining thresholds for one metric while optimizing another. That is, I can say that I want to be as rich as possible, so long as I don’t compromise my happiness more than 20% (howsoever measured), or by saying that I want to be as happy as possible so long as I don’t hurt my affluence by 10% (more easily measured).

Once we have cleared our thinking about objective functions, we can turn to constraints. Constraints are those factors that limit (or have the potential to limit) the optimal achievement of the objective. Some illustrations:

• The objective may be that I want to feed the hungry, and the constraint is my financial state.

• The objective may be that I want to be a music maestro, and the constraint is the amount of tolerance my neighbors have for what they may consider noise.

Constraints have some characteristics that I shall now elaborate. As I mentioned before, constraints, in general, are limiting factors. How much one can push the envelope to relieve a constraint and break free to achieve a higher value of the objective provides the first distinction of soft/ hard constraints.

The law of the land that you live in is most certainly a hard constraint. Breaking it can have dire consequences. Religious orthodoxy can be one such example, where someone may feel stifled. The only way to untether the constraint in the near term is to seek to live in another land where the law of the land may be conducive to your psyche. However, this choice may not exist for most, and may require endurance through the transition for those who may try it. A good metaphor for a hard constraint is the stone wall of a fortress you are in, and the moat around it. After you cross the moat, you are free from the fortress, but the moat can impose risks of failure.

Guidelines of tradition are examples of soft constraints. What if my family has the tradition of putting up lights for Christmas and I don’t put them up this year? The family tradition is a constraint, but with minor consequences, if any, for violating it.

Having established that hard constraints are the one to reckon with, here is a further classification: binding and non-binding constraints.

Let us say, we want to bake a cake that requires 6 eggs and 1 liter of milk. I open my refrigerator and find that I have a dozen eggs but only 0.5 liters of milk. The size of cake I bake is now limited by the amount of milk I have. Milk is my binding, hard constraint. If, instead, I had 4 liters of milk in the refrigerator, the eggs would have become the hard constraint.

So, as we optimize life, after having figured out ones objective function, it is necessary to find what your binding hard constraints are. It is sufficient to focus immediate energies on the ways to relieve the binding hard constraints. Without this clarity, we may be working on addressing soft constraints that don’t matter in most cases, or anticipating the hitting of non-binding hard constraints, while the binding hard constraints remain to be addressed.

A highly restrictive job, a bad marital or a relationship situation, religious orthodoxy of the neighborhood you live in, are examples of binding, hard constraints if and only if they come in the way of your achieving your potential. Addressing such requires clarity of thought first, and courage next. It frequently happens that one gets into the “frog in gradually warming water” mode and becomes increasingly tolerant of the constraint, and also complacent about it. People waste so much time and large parts of their lives just waiting for the situation to miraculously change. And, it doesn’t.

This blog is a wake up call to anyone who needs it; a plea to look at yourselves objectively and without emotion and drama; and take charge!

Having been there, done that (the complacency, the tolerance, the waking up, and acting decisively), I can say that I have done better than I would have without this approach. If I had someone to give me this wisdom in my time of need, I could have done even better, generally. No regrets, though, and thankful for all the turn of events.