The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist. — Elon Musk

The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.

Author: Elon Musk

Insight: We're often taught that smarter means better, faster, more efficient. So when we encounter something broken or slow, our instinct is to fix it—to engineer a solution, streamline the process, automate the tedious parts. But there's a blindspot in this approach: sometimes the real problem isn't that something works badly. It's that it shouldn't be there at all. This shows up everywhere in modern life. Companies build elaborate systems to manage approval workflows, then hire consultants to optimize them—when the real win would be asking why the approvals exist. You spend energy organizing your email inbox when the better move might be unsubscribing. We tweak our morning routines obsessively when the question should be whether we're doing the right things to begin with. The unintuitive part is that this mistake gets worse the smarter you are. A sharp engineer or manager can always find elegant ways to improve something. That capability becomes a trap—you optimize by default, rarely stepping back to ask whether the thing deserves to exist. The harder question, the one that requires different thinking, is knowing what to delete entirely. That's where real efficiency lives.