Intelligence is recognizing your intelligence.

Optimizing your experience is about optimizing your space of experiences, not optimizing for specific experiences.  

I think these two statements may point to a general principle.  To elaborate further, I’ll go with the example of optimizing your experience.  Meaning, optimizing an experience for happiness, fulfillment, learning,…whatever.  

When time is factored in, or rather, the number of possible experiences or trajectories of experience against the number of experiences you can have, you find that your experiences cannot keep up with the possibilities.  Furthermore, by latching on to specific experiences, or the idea that specific experiences will be optimally satisfying, you sabotage your chances of having satisfying experiences because the ones you have fixated on will either be called into question when new possibilities present themselves, won’t live up to your expectations, or won’t happen for some reason.  

When instead you focus on optimizing for the conditions for good experiences, that kind of sabotage and worry is replaced with a higher order one.  At least, an improvement.