The Verdict
What did you used to optimise for early in your career that you’d now tell someone to ignore?
Avoiding conflict is a trap early in your career — learning to mine disagreement productively leads to better decisions than false harmony ever did.
The only substantive answer in the pool points to conflict-avoidance as a misguided early optimisation, arguing that healthy, structured disagreement produces more thoughtful outcomes. With only one real data point, consensus is thin but uncontested.
Sharpest dissent
“Nothing”
A one-word answer of "Nothing" is a genuine philosophical dissent — it implies that early optimisations are either context-dependent or worth defending, and is worth sitting with rather than dismissing.
Distilled from 2 answers.
What the crowd said
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Nothing
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I used to try and avoid conflict at all costs, now I realise healthy conflict mining can lead a more thoughtful and well rounded solution.