About Brett Ingram & optYOUmize

A different premise about what a good life actually requires

I built the life I thought I was supposed to want

I started a business in 2007 with no money, no mentors, and no idea what I was doing — while working full-time and finishing graduate school at night and on weekends. I made it work. I became a top 1% vendor and top 1% affiliate on multiple platforms. My products hit bestseller lists more than fifty times. I had $100,000 sales days. My name ended up in a New York Times bestselling author’s book. By every metric I’d been taught to track, I’d won.

And somewhere in the middle of it, I started noticing something I didn’t want to admit: I had been optimizing the wrong things.

Not all of it. The work was real. The freedom mattered. I’d build the business again. But I’d spent years pouring intelligence and effort into a definition of success that didn’t fully account for the rest of being a person — the body that carried me through it, the relationships I half-showed-up to, the rest I treated as a reward instead of a rhythm, the inner life I rarely turned to face. The productivity culture that taught me how to win the game also quietly taught me to ignore most of what made it worth playing.

A different premise

The dominant story about self-improvement says a better life is a more productive life. More output. More achievement. More optimized routines in service of bigger goals. It treats human beings as systems to be debugged.

I don’t think that’s true, and I suspect you don’t either — or you wouldn’t be on this page.

optYOUmize begins from a different premise: you are not a machine to be tuned. You are a whole person, with competing needs, deep relationships, finite time, and an interior life that deserves as much care as your calendar. True optimization — the kind that actually changes how your life feels — is not about maximum output. It’s about maximum alignment. It’s about understanding what a good life actually looks like for you, and then building toward that with intention, honesty, and balance.

I’m not asking you to abandon ambition. I’m asking what we’re actually optimizing for.

What this is

The optYOUmize blog and podcast are organized around seven domains of a well-lived life: mind and inner life, body and vitality, purpose and meaningful work, relationships and connection, money and financial wellbeing, time and rest, and growth and self-becoming. They’re meant to be in conversation with each other — because the real questions in life rarely live inside a single category.

What you’ll find here is a working philosophy more than a system. Frameworks instead of formulas. Better questions before easier answers. The tone is meant to feel like a thoughtful friend who has actually wrestled with this stuff — warm, but unwilling to hand you another five-step morning routine and call it a life.

The promise

I’ll help you live better — which is harder, slower, and a lot more interesting than continually "doing more." If that sounds like what you’ve been looking for, you’re in the right place. Pull up a chair.