I’ve been a marketer since fifth grade.

I sold stuff to my classmates between classes. Little arbitrage plays. Buy low at the store, sell high in the hallway. Everybody won.

Until the school created a new “non-solicitation” policy. My first cease and desist. They didn’t name me. They didn’t have to.

I didn’t necessarily “stop”. I just pivoted into different verticals.

That instinct — take what exists and make it better — has a name. It’s over 2,000 years old:

Optimus.

Most people think “opti-” is one root. It isn’t.

It comes from two ancient ideas that merged.

First: Latin ops — power, wealth, abundance.
Originally, it meant to produce, to create plenty. Over time, it evolved into optimus — “the best.” Not through talent, but through output and resources.

“Best” once meant something closer to most resourceful.

Second: Greek opsis — sight, appearance, the act of seeing.
From it came optikos — anything related to vision.

Two different meanings:

• Abundance and performance

• Perception and appearance

Both ended up in “opti.”

That’s why we get words like:

• From Latin: optimal, optimize, optimism

• From Greek: optic, optics

Even today, when people say “the optics look bad,” they mean appearance — not performance.

That distinction matters.

We treat “optimize” like one thing.

It isn’t. It depends on what you’re trying to improve — output, or perception.

Some things optimize through time. Great wine doesn’t come from working harder at the crush. It comes from waiting. Barrel aging. Patience. The winemaker’s hardest job is resisting the urge to do.

Some things optimize through intensity. Surgery. A product launch. A compliance audit. These demand everything you’ve got inside a narrow window. You can’t casually optimize a scalpel.

Some things optimize through repetition. Your golf swing. Your sales pitch. Your morning routine. Not one heroic effort. Ten thousand small ones, each a little better than the last.

Some things optimize through subtraction. The best writing is rewriting — cutting what doesn’t belong. The best portfolios aren’t built by adding positions. The best tech stacks aren’t the ones with the most tools.

And some things optimize through sight. You can’t fix what you can’t see. Dashboards. Data. Transparency. Before you produce abundance, you need clear eyes.

That’s the Greek root earning its keep.

Here’s where it gets dangerous.

My favorite plant in Charleston is the bottlebrush. Bright red blossoms. Hummingbirds love them. They bloom throughout the year.

The other day, my father-in-law was about to trim his way back. Thankfully, someone stopped him.

A bottlebrush can handle a prune of up to a third — and it’ll come back stronger. More blossoms, more life. But push much past that line and it may never recover.

Optimization has a threshold. Most people don’t know where it is until they’ve crossed it.

Because optimization takes so many forms, it’s easy to apply the wrong kind. Or the right kind in the wrong dose.

Bringing intensity to something that needs patience. Adding repetition where subtraction would serve. Obsessing over optics — how it looks — when the real problem is ops — how it performs.

In wealth management, the most common version? Optimizing for activity instead of outcome. More reports. More meetings. More tools. More data. Pruning past the line.

The Romans would call that a corruption of ops. The appearance of work without the abundance it’s supposed to produce.

Real optimization starts with one question the Romans would’ve understood:

What are you actually trying to produce in abundance?

Time? Optimize by subtracting.

Scale? Optimize by systematizing.

Clarity? Optimize by seeing.

Value? Optimize by compounding.

One more thing.

Voltaire said “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

But optimus never meant perfect. It meant the best you can do with what you’ve got.

The Latin superlative wasn’t aspirational. It was practical. The optimates — Rome’s ruling class — took their name from it. Not the dreamers. The doers with resources.

That fifth-grader didn’t have a business license. No capital. No permission from the administration.

But he had a product, a market, and a hallway.

That was optimus for a ten-year-old.

What’s yours?