# Optimise the thing, not yourself By Rea Stark, 12 November 2026 Source: https://reastark.com/writing/optimise-the-thing-not-yourself > Self-optimisation treats people as products and gets engineering wrong. Good engineers optimise very little. The effort belongs in better things. The moulders of the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts went on strike over a stopwatch. One of them refused to be timed at his work and was dismissed, and on 11 August 1911 his fellow moulders walked out. It was the year Frederick Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management. The men in the foundry had a clear idea of whom the watch was working for. A century later people buy the stopwatch themselves and wear it to bed. Self-optimisation has turned the person into a device with a dashboard, scored each night and reviewed each quarter. It is a category error. I have designed products for Sony, Nespresso and others, and a product has three things a person lacks: a specification, a user and an end of life. ## Three things missing A specification is a target set by somebody else. The machines I helped to design did not choose their own heat-up time. People with a market and a price in mind chose it, and the machine was judged against the result. Optimisation only means something against such a target. A life does not come with one, so the self-optimiser borrows a target from whoever is offering: the default setting of an app, or the morning routine of a stranger with a podcast. A user is the person the product is for. Ask who the user of an optimised person is, and the candidates are an employer who gets more hours and an audience that gets the progress report. The person doing the optimising is the one party who never takes delivery. The habit got a flattering name in 2007, when two Wired editors, Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, proposed calling it the quantified self. The moulders would have recognised the instrument. At Watertown the employer bought the watch and the worker objected. Now the worker buys it and thanks the app. End of life is the third. A product is finished on one date and withdrawn on another, and between the two nobody asks it to get better. A person is never released, which suits the upgrade trade very well: a customer who can never be finished is a customer for good. ## What self-optimisation borrows Self-improvement culture talks like an engineering department. It speaks of metrics and iterations, of stacks and protocols. It took the vocabulary and skipped the practice. In 1974 the computer scientist Donald Knuth told programmers to forget about small efficiencies "say about 97% of the time", because "premature optimization is the root of all evil". He was writing for people whose job is speed. Good engineers optimise very little. They find the one part that limits the whole and improve it. Then they stop, because the point of the exercise is that everything else can be left alone. They stop for a second reason. Every gain in one figure is paid for in another: make a machine smaller and something inside it has to give. The specification says which trade to make. A person optimising a whole life at once has no such document, so every figure is supposed to rise together. No machine has ever been built that way. The best case against me is that discipline and measurement plainly do improve lives. They do. A pianist who practises with a metronome plays better, and a founder who reads the accounts every month runs a better firm. In both cases the measurement is aimed at something outside the person, a sonata or a company, which the person chose. It also stops when the work is done. The metronome stays at home on the night of the concert. What I object to is measurement that has no concert. ## Ask less of people There is a better use for the same energy, and I have done it for a living. For Electrosuisse and the VDE I worked in Japan on a rule that sounds dull: the manual is safety equipment, and has to pass certification with the rest of the product. The idea underneath is blunt. When a person gets a device wrong, the device has failed, and that includes the paper that came with it. The burden of improvement sits with the thing. Self-improvement culture runs this backwards. If the software is confusing and the office is loud, the person is sold a course in focus. I would rather fix the software and the office. An hour spent tuning oneself helps one person, briefly, while the same hour spent on a tool or a room helps everyone who meets it afterwards. A good object has absorbed the effort so that its owner is spared it. The work went in once, at the factory, and it does not have to be repeated every morning by everyone who owns one. Aviation learned this in public. On 30 October 1935 Boeing's Model 299, the prototype of the B-17 bomber, crashed on take-off from Wright Field in Ohio because a control lock had been left engaged. Some argued that the aircraft was too big to handle. The Air Corps did not go looking for better pilots. It wrote a checklist. --- Rea Stark is an industrial designer and founder in Zürich. He has designed for Sony and Nespresso, co-founded Piëch Automotive and Archaí Physics, and works on how machines see, understand and use the physical world. About the author: https://reastark.com/about More essays: https://reastark.com/writing