Last year, in May of 2022, I talked about the idea of "tactical minimalism." The main idea is that on the path to becoming a capable marksman, there are many important skills and capabilities to learn a long the way. To be capable across a spectrum of skills, you need to spend the bulk of your time practicing a few high-impact basic items to the point of complete mastery. Mastering those few basics serves you better in the long term than knowing twenty variations of every shooting position. This principle expands to other areas as well, such as starting fires, building shelters, radio communications, physical fitness, and more. Last year, I started talking about prism optics and how I thought they were due for a comeback. Sure enough, the big social media channels and YouTubers were ditching their LPVOs in favor of prism optics with piggybacked red dots. I'm already seeing chatter about a push towards medium power variables (MPVO). The cycle continues, telling everyone to switch to the new "thing." It all gets so tiresome. Today, I'm approaching this idea from a different angle. It's an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a few months: there is no optimum. What is Optimum? By nature, I love diving down rabbit holes. I enjoy the challenge of learning about a topic, then imagining how I would apply different variables to meet different situations. It's fun, if not also exhausting and expensive. It's this personality trait that leads me to buying and configuring six different sets of load bearing equipment, battle belts, and chest rigs. Each one with subtle differences tailored to variations on the intended purpose. It's this same mindset that leads me to spend weeks and months agonizing on whether I would be better served by a 6mm ARC or 6.5 Grendel for a particular project and how I might use it. All this despite knowing that in reality, they would perform about equally as well for me with what I would actually do with it. So I bought a shotgun instead. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. In fact, I think the majority of traffic to the site and questions I get comes from people trying to find the "optimum" answer to their shooting needs. Whether it's the perfect barrel length for a particular task or load, or just the right amount of magazines to carry, the best optic for a particular situation. Fitness discussions are loaded with people looking for the optimum workout program, even if they're novice enough that literally anything would work for them. I've come to the mindset that optimum doesn't really exist. I know that it does, sort of. For any challenge, there's likely an optimum way to approach it.  The optimum barrel length for shooting .223 at long range is probably somewhere between 20" and 26", and definitely not down around 12" to 16". Flip that for shooting close quarters. The optimum way to to grow your chest musculature is 20 sets per week of chest exercises from three different angles (and a healthy dose of steroids). You get the idea. The Problem with Optimum These situations have clear definitions and solutions, but they aren't the real world. The core issue I've developed with "optimum" solutions is that each one relies on a fixed set of circumstances and boundaries. As long as the scenario you're facing doesn't cross these boundaries, then everything works great. This is fine for controlled events like a shooting match or a power lifting meet, but completely falls apart if you're trying to live in the real world where you have limited time and resources to accomplish many goals at once. As a general rule, I offer that the more you optimize for a specific outcome, then the worse that solution performs at just about everything else. Jeff Gurwitch provided a great examp...