Are you just optimizing your marketing efforts or are you taking active steps to improve them? That’s an important question to ask yourself because you need to make sure there is a balance between the two. Sure, it’s great to always keep an eye out for ways to optimize operations, workflow, return on investment, etc. but at some point you get stuck in that cycle where you are no longer seeking improvements and real changes that can or should be made.

Seth Godin brought this issue up in his recent blog post, The Non-optimized Life.  Here is Godin’s way of looking at it, “But I also worry that a never-ending cycle of optimization can become a crutch, a place to hide when you really should be confronting the endless unknown, not the banal stair step of incremental optimization.” I could not have said it better myself.

Optimization is great as long as you do not use it as an excuse to avoid real change because you could also be avoiding real results.