Never really heard of this Seinfeld guy before, and indeed this is a common idea (the earliest attributable mention of this I remember was in Franklin's auto-bi

Never really heard of this Seinfeld guy before, and indeed this is a common idea (the earliest attributable mention of this I remember was in Franklin's auto-biography, but surely it is way older than that). This advice (as many other advises do) always raises some concerns about survivorship bias, but I'm willing to ignore that, since the idea is fairly intuitive. However, this tactic (really, it's a tactic, not a strategy) relies on the assumption, that you can identify the metric you want to "optimize", which I would claim is way more important on its own than any tactics for optimizing it. I mean, do you really know what do you want to get better at? After all, Heinlein's "Specialization Is for Insects" quote sounds like the words to live by for many people (myself included). It is rare enough for a person to be completely sure about what he wants to do. In its strongest form (as in this blog post) it basically assumes you are already doing your dream job, which on its own is more like the end-goal for most of the "self-improvement advice" consumers. And even in its weaker form (like employed by Franklin) it is still only as useful as the metrics you were clever enough to chose, and perhaps the most prominent thing about Franklin's story was how pointless pursuing some of his chosen virtues (like orderliness) turned out to be.