Why You Should Min-Max Your Life ► Explained With Dark Souls

I used to think working harder should get me better results, but the game Dark Souls made me realize trying too hard after a certain point can actually hold you back. In Dark Souls, there’s a concept called the soft cap. It’s the point where adding more effort gives you smaller and smaller returns. You’re still putting in the same amount of effort, but your progress slows down, and eventually it’s not even worth it. You can spend all your souls or points

To level up things like your strength or dexterity or whatever. You can level up your strength all the way to level 99, but it’s only really worth it to upgrade it to level 40. After 40, it’s not really worth spending your souls on it anymore. But why is that? It’s because level 40 is the soft cap for strength. After level 40, every point you upgrade gives you less and less return. The benefits diminish, but the price to buy

It still goes up a lot. So, you’re spending all your points just to upgrade one thing that doesn’t really make a difference anymore. That’s the point of diminishing returns. You can keep leveling to level 99 if you want, but it’s just not going to be worth it anymore. And every attribute or skill in Dark Souls has its own soft cap, too. But that’s what life is like. There’s a soft cap for effort, a point where more

Work equals less output. If you don’t know where that soft cap is, you’re going to keep wasting effort, wasting time, and feeling stuck when that same energy could have gone more productively to something else. I actually talk about this in my new community too. You can join it with the link in the description if you want. Dark Souls made me realize that you need to minmax your life. Get the maximum possible output or result from the minimum possible input or

Effort. Less work but more gains. I worked the closing shift at my job. The other night I was working with the new guy. He’s a good guy and he probably just wants to make a good impression. At one point he said he was going to go in the back to wash the chicken spits. These are like the metal rods we use to roast whole chickens in the oven. I gave him time. I figured like, okay, he wants

To clean them properly, not just halfass them. I respect that. I’ve been him before, but he takes more time. Probably a quarter of the time I was with him, he was in the back washing these things. And like, I don’t mind, but I just noticed. I used to be like him. But I realized working at this place, you actually get punished for being perfect. you take too long on one thing and now the rest of your tasks have to be

Rushed. Or if you leave tasks unfinished, then the people in the morning have to deal with it and it slows them down right from the beginning because they’re trying to catch up and then it all ends up back to you anyway because the entire day got pushed back. Perfection gets punished in a place like this. There’s no bonus reward for making those chicken spits shine a little brighter, but if you stay late or leave a mess behind, that gets noticed. What

I’m suggesting is to do 70%. Do good enough. And I know that doesn’t sound good to some people because you don’t want to be mediocre or average. You want to be the best, right? I would rather give my brain capacity and my energy to more useful things. And I would rather finish all of my tasks that night and not leave it for tomorrow. And that’s kind of the more perfect thing to do here, isn’t it? Not sloppy, not lazy,

Just good enough. Good enough to keep things running smoothly. good enough to not ruin people’s day or piss anyone off. I’d rather finish all my tasks to a decent standard than make one thing perfect and leave a mess behind. I understand there’s a time and place to be a perfectionist. If your goal is to be perfect, if you’re a doctor doing a surgery, if you’re cooking a chicken, the chicken needs to be a certain temperature or else you’ll get sick if

You eat it. Some things need to be held to a standard and done every single time. But I think a lot of things in life don’t need to be perfect. Perfection sounds noble, but sometimes it just makes you slower, more anxious, and less effective. That new guy probably got the spits mostly clean in 20 or 30 minutes, but then he kept scrubbing another half hour just to get off that last tiny bit, like he was leveling strength from 41 to 99. He

Already did the best part. He already got the most yield results in that first 30 minutes. He hit the soft cap already, but he didn’t stop. What you want to do is minmax. You prioritize what gives you the most value and stop doing things that don’t scale well, that don’t give you good results in return. Minmaxing is directly related to soft caps because it involves strategically investing points into stats to get the most efficiency and soft caps are the points where stat

Investment yields diminishing returns. By understanding these caps, you can maximize the benefit of your stats and avoid wasting points on stats that are no longer efficient, which is a core part of the minmaxing process. He could have finished washing those dishes in 20 to 30 minutes and then used that extra time that he would have used finishing it up perfectly. He could have used that extra time to come back and help me cuz we were behind that day. We had stuff to

Do and it was going to be on him, you know? I wasn’t even staying for the closing shift. He was he was staying. So, we could have made him be ahead more, but instead we were behind still. He could have realized that he already reached level 40 strength. Anything past this point is kind of not worth it, and maybe we should just go do something else. I’ve talked about this in my focus video, too. So, watch that one after you

Watch this one. But 1 hour of concentrated full deep work focus is like way better than 4 hours of unconentrated halfass work. This idea of quality versus quantity reflects the same idea of leveling past the point of where it’s worth it. You know, beyond the soft cap. Yeah, you could spend more time and make yourself more tired by studying for 4 hours instead of one. But how much of the stuff you studied did you actually retain? Did you actually

Learn? 1 hour is better because you can just focus for 1 hour. No distractions, complete focus, complete intention. Then you can learn more. You retain more and actually you make more progress. If you force yourself to study for 4 hours already, you’re dreading it because nobody wants to sit there for that long. Right from the beginning, you’ll be distracted, thinking about random thoughts, and you won’t be retaining information the same because you’re distracted. The point of studying is to

Learn. And at that point, you’re not even learning. You’re just sitting there wasting time. You might as well just do 1 hour of study undisturbed and then go do whatever else you want to do or at least just take a break. You need to minmax your effort and time. realize that maybe 4 hours spent of studying like unfocused and just dreading it the whole time. Maybe that’s not as productive as just doing one hour of completely like focused, like dialed in,

Locked in syndrome, totally focused, like 1 hour is better. And then it’s not dreading to you. It’s just like, okay, I can do 1 hour. I can do just 1 hour of just focus. You know, that is more productive than 4 hours. And I know maybe you think like four hours is more productive just because it’s more time. Actually, 1 hour is more productive. 1 hour is more productive if you’re actually in it. 4 hours is less

Productive if you’re not actually focused. I think that’s a hurdle a lot of people deal with in their own mind, even subconsciously, because you overthink it so much. You wake up in the morning and you start thinking about all the stuff you have to do today. And instead of getting out of bed and actually starting on any one of them, you just stay in bed because it’s easier to do that. And you have so many things

To do. it seems impossible you can do all of them anyway. Stop trying to do everything perfectly. Stop feeling like you need to do everything all at once. Just do one thing at a time. Start doing things good enough to move forward. Not halfassed, not lazy either, just smart. Figure out when you’ve hit the soft cap and then move on to the next thing that actually matters because that’s how you beat perfectionism. That’s how you stop

Feeling stuck. That’s how you stop wasting your time. It’s not about giving less effort. It’s about giving the right effort in the right place at the right time. That’s how you make a good build in Dark Souls. And that’s how you’re going to make a good build in real life, too. The idea of a soft cap, where returns start to drop, applies to way more than just Dark Souls. It applies to your job, studying, working out, even

Relationships. Trying to go from 90% to 100% often costs as much or more as it took to go from zero to 90%. The trick is knowing when good enough is good enough. If you can know yourself and know when it’s good enough to just leave it, then I think you’ll make more progress faster and you will achieve more in less time. Focus on the things that give you the most value. Don’t dump energy into things that don’t scale

Well. Just ask yourself, have I hit the soft cap yet? Am I really being productive by continuing to do this, or do I need to go do something else now? See the soft cap. Minmax it. If you like Dark Souls and self-improvement, I’ve started a new community and you can join it with the link in the description. Uh I’m trying to make a new course right now and it’s like I just want more input from you guys. You know, I want to know

The things that are bothering you the most and if you join my community, we can talk about that. You can tell me directly what’s bothering you and we can make this course together. The course is not so that I can make money. The course is because I want to leave something behind that like helps people actually. And I think that the way that I can help people is by actually asking you guys what’s bothering you and get your help

To make this. So if you’re interested in that, come join. Come join. Come talk to me and let’s make something cool together. Let’s make souls improvement together. I hope this video helps, guys. Take care, okay? And don’t you dare go hollow.