Seeking the Optimum

It has been one year with its fair share of hills and valleys, but I am truly grateful for every experience. So recently I’ve been thinking about something (and this is going to be a bit engineer-ish so bear with me). As engineers we don’t always seek the “perfect” solution. Most often than not, we seek the optimum because we understand that it’s not always one input variable that results in one output variable. Variables interact with each other positively or negatively, and some tend to offset the effect of others so the result isn’t always what we expect. Also, we always work within certain limitations (of budget, or size, or complexity, or computational power).

So let’s say we’re trying to design a building. Engineers seek to optimize the amount of sunshine going into a certain room. Why don’t we just maximize it? Put french windows across every single face of the room? The more natural light, the better the lighting during the day, the less we spend on powering light fixtures, right? But sunlight doesn’t enter the room alone. It comes in with heat. So the more light that comes in, the more heat accompanies it, and the cooling requirements in terms of A.C.s go up, so maximizing natural light indefinitely isn’t a practical option. In other words, we would need to optimize.

What does that have to do with situations in our life? This idea of optimization has made me think of how we always seek the ‘ideal’ situation, and we might get disappointed when reality doesn’t reflect our opinion of what’s ideal. But the moment we really look into it, we might realize that maybe it’s true our situation is not ideal, but it is the optimum for us.
Think about it and leave your comments below.
Adios