Find Your Paperclip Problem
Why you should stop setting goals and start maximizing functions.
You know Nick Bostrom’s Paperclip Maximizer. It’s the nightmare scenario where an AI, given the single goal of “make paperclips,” destroys the world to mine raw materials. The AI is terrifying because of its ruthlessness.
But it’s efficient because of its clarity.
Instead of working toward a grand achievement, the AI has a crystal-clear reward function that it pursues daily. It just makes paperclips. That is both its day-to-day purpose and its ultimate goal, and as a result, it succeeds with extraordinary efficiency.
After reading Charlie Vavrik’s The Real Mom Test on the struggle to find your “why,” I realized we must set a clear rationale for our actions; otherwise, we risk drifting or becoming discouraged. We need our own Paperclip Problem.
Adopting a relentless, non-binary reward function solves three specific problems:
1. The Rationalization Trap (Distraction) When you doom-scroll X or binge YouTube, you lie to yourself. You say, “I need to decompress” or “This is research.” A reward function kills this ambiguity. If the action doesn’t maximize the function, it’s waste. Pure and simple.
2. The Paralysis of “Big Goals” (Motivation) “Get a promotion” is a terrible daily motivator. It is binary (you have it or you don’t) and distant. This gap creates paralysis. A Paperclip strategy shifts the focus to the input. Instead of “Get promoted,” your function becomes “Maximize the number of high-quality slides produced today.” It turns a distant hope into a daily, high-score game you can actually win.
3. The Happiness Gap Happiness usually lives in the future: “I’ll be happy when I sell the company.” That’s a recipe for misery. By setting a daily reward function, you pull the dopamine hit into the present.
This approach has a similar logic to Naval Ravankant’s Wealth vs. Status philosophy, but fulfillment is on a day-to-day timeline rather than a life timeline.
The 2026 Experiment Obviously, humans aren’t AI. We need different functions for health, friends, and work. But for my career in 2026, I am switching from binary goals (e.g., “Make $100k,” “Sell 1,000 books”) to a continuous reward function:
Exert a positive influence on childhood happiness.
Under this framework, every StorybookYou custom children’s book I create and sell isn’t just a step toward a revenue goal; it is the reward itself. It is a paperclip.
Paradoxically, by ignoring the revenue goal to obsess over the function, I’ll likely sell more books than if I worried about the money.
So, what’s your paperclip?
I like your essay and I'm wondering if the non-binary continuous reward goal(s) that you describe is something for which some people come by "naturally." And for those people what is the source? Nature vs. nurture? Parental modeling, mentors, religion, developmental environment...can it be learned actively or rather imbued through mentorship. My own experience is mentors thought me how to break down bigger goals into individual pieces which could be accomplished and to decide (difficult for me) when enough was enough with the details, instead go with what seems to becoming apparent. Another practice which has helped was mindfulness and recognizing the taking advantage of that space between stimulus and response to be present to determine your future as opposed to reflexively reacting.
What is my paperclip? As context, I'm retired (from Accenture where the paperclip was "close the deal" or "deliver the margin"). Those binary goals were clear, though not rewarding day by day. Instead knowing, setting, and achieving daily challenges was a reasonable paperclip. So in retirement my paperclip can be
Challenge myself each day to learn and apply earlier learnings so that I am a better husband, parent, provider, friend, and member of my community.
And, one of my learnings to apply today came from your essay on the "paperclip." It can be my challenge for many days.