You won’t catch every opportunity — and you shouldn’t try.
You won’t plug every leak — and you shouldn’t try.

One of the best things I’ve done for my mental health is making peace with waste. With inefficiency. With imperfection.

Not every opportunity is actionable. Not every paper cut needs a bandage.

example: my car insurance is too high

I know I’m overpaying for car insurance. I’ve known it for months. Probably years.

Could I save $20–$50 a month if I switched? Easily. But I haven’t. Not because I’m lazy (maybe though). Because that particular optimization doesn’t rank in my top 20 priorities right now.

Comparing quotes, navigating cancellation policies, reviewing coverage details—it’s just not worth the mental overhead for what I’d get back. And that tradeoff used to haunt me. Now? I let the car insurance ride.

Because I’ve realized: trying to fix every leak means you’re not sailing the ship.

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the shift: from survival mode to leverage mode

I grew up around what I’ll call survival economics—where saving was king. If you could clip a coupon, compare prices, or squeeze more out of less, you did. And for good reason: that’s how families like mine survived.

But here’s the trap: saving is capped. You can only cut so much.

What happens when you cross the threshold into a higher-earning career? When your upside becomes uncapped? When time becomes more scarce than money?

Suddenly, spending an hour to save $20 becomes a bad investment.

It’s weirdly painful at first. You feel guilty for not optimizing. You see waste and think: I should fix that. That’s programming left over from a life where money was tight and time was cheap.

Now it’s the opposite.

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penny-wise, pound-wasted

There’s a phrase: penny-wise, pound-foolish. But I’d push it further:

Being obsessed with optimization is a great way to stay small.

If you're constantly managing the edges — trimming, tweaking, saving — you're not building, creating, scaling, or living. You're just patching.

At some point, the game shifts from conservation to creation. And creation doesn’t care if you forgot to cancel that one subscription or missed a discount code.

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pick your battles, not every coupon

Do I still flinch when I notice I'm wasting money?
Yeah.
Do I wish I had time to optimize every little thing?
Kind of.
But do I believe that would actually make my life better?
Not at all.

We don't need to be excellent at everything. We need to deliver where it matters. We need to know what actually moves the needle — and let the rest slide.

Let the car insurance ride.
You’ve got bigger things to build.