The Century of the Maxxer argues that mass production creates an abundance of identical goods, thereby creating a need for hyper-specialized labor.
Mass production stabilizes supply. When basic needs become reliably met (food, clothing, shelter), survival is no longer the primary axis of competition. Instead, competition shifts upward into domains that are inherently comparative: status, taste, identity, and differentiation.
Unlike bread, these goods are not consumed in isolation. They derive value from their ranking relative to others. This creates markets where the payoff structure is steeply unequal: being the best (or visibly among the best) captures disproportionate attention, opportunities, and rewards. As a result, individuals rationally overconcentrate their efforts on narrow, legible dimensions of success—what looks like “looksmaxxing,” “moneymaxxing,” or “resume-maxxing.” Maxxing, then, is an equilibrium behavior in winner-take-all status markets that emerge once material scarcity ceases to be the binding constraint.
A few weeks ago, Alyssa Liu, a Bay native, made national news for winning gold in the Olympics after quitting (at 16). In a sport defined by precision, pressure, and near-mechanical perfection, Liu skated with visible joy.
After walking away from elite skating at 16 due to burnout, Liu returned on the thesis of prioritizing happiness, connection, and self-expression over medals. She has repeatedly framed her goal not as winning, but as “connecting with people” and “sharing her art”.
It’s a change from what I previously expected from high-achievement subcultures. The competitive nature of these communities, and the selection mechanisms of competitions, social media, and social hierarchies, seems to aim to mint flawless talent profiles: high school students with straight As, who excelled in sports, mastered a musical instrument, joined a debate club, started a nonprofit, and are accepted to an Ivy League university. The bay trains kids to be heat-seeking missiles for signal and prestige. This level of rigidity suppresses kids’ abilities to develop good taste and self-esteem. It results in higher achievement, but it does not foster creativity or earnestness.
Liu gives me hope that we can reshape what good work looks like.
Markets do reward the strongest players, and achievement remains important. This strategy works in stable, well-defined systems. But in open-ended domains like startups or research, the desire to be the best suppresses the development of taste, self-trust, and the ability to ask novel questions.
The highest-leverage individuals are not those who optimize hardest, but those who retain enough independence from the market to define what is worth optimizing in the first place.
Being the best might not always be the right question to ask. We would be ideal talent profiles with no pliancy to negotiate future opportunities, or uniquely draw people into their cause. The race to be the best is a Girardian race – when people copy each other’s desires so much that they end up competing for the same thing, to the bottom. If too many people compete in the achievement race, there are very few winners, which describes destructive cultures and wastes talent.
Earnestness grants us a source of differentiated insight, where optimization is only a tool for execution. Our startup faced a problem of premature optimization without taste. We were going too fast, too early. With earnestness, we would have had a bit more flexibility.
People without internal grounding cannot ask good questions because they outsource value to the market. Builders who are earnest and have the space and flexibility to develop a strong sense of taste are more likely to adapt to the market and build something more meaningful and impactful along the way.
Thank you to Lela Sengupta, N. D. for edits.