Being the best in the world is easy

When I came to BYU, I wanted to be the best at something. It didn’t matter what, so long as I was better at it than anyone else at the university. And so I joined the juggling club. But it quickly became apparent that I was not the best juggler at BYU. I could juggle three balls well, and four poorly, but one guy there could do seven! So what did I do? I specialized. I wasn’t going to be the best juggler at BYU, I was going to be the best joggler at BYU, juggling and jogging at the same time. And I think I did it. Out of everyone I have ever talked to, I am the only one who can run an 8-minute mile while juggling three balls. 

A photo of the author juggling while jogging backwards/

 But no one cares about being the best at your university. The real prize is being the best in the world. The world record for joggling a mile is 4:42 [1]. The chance of me running that fast is close to absolute zero. So what do I do? I specialize. I am now going for the world record in running a mile while juggling blindfolded. Don’t hold your breath; it’s just as hard as it sounds. But, as far as I know, only one other person in the world has even tried it, and that’s the current record holder. And with so little competition, it might be doable.

Pareto Frontier

So, let’s talk engineering. An important step in the engineering design process is optimization, taking your design and making it better. But often there are tradeoffs between multiple objectives (such as juggling and running) that you need to keep in mind. I want to bring up a topic from multi-objective optimization called the Pareto frontier [2]. (It is also called the Pareto Front, but I prefer to imagine myself in the wild west of optimization.) Consider the plot below, in which there are two objectives we are trying to meet. A point on the lower right satisfies Objective 1 well but does poorly in Objective 2. Conversely, a point on the upper left does well on Objective 2 but poorly on Objective 1. Points in the middle make different tradeoffs between the two objectives. But even considering tradeoffs, some options (red) are strictly better than others (blue). The Pareto frontier is the set of options where no objective can be improved without sacrificing at least one other objective. So, say you’re looking at the set of all BYU students, and your two objectives are that they’re good at juggling and that they’re good at running. Maybe the best runner has never even tried juggling, and maybe the best juggler is out of shape and can’t even run a mile. But those aren’t the only two options; to be on the Pareto frontier, you just have to be a better juggler than everyone who beats you at running, and a faster runner than everyone who beats you at juggling.

A plot of different points in the design space plotted against two objectives, where a larger value for each objective is preferred. Red triangles are on the Pareto frontier of this set, while blue circles are considered suboptimal.  

 What does this have to do with design? 

Now, apply this concept of a Pareto frontier to your engineering design ideas. Your design doesn’t have to be the strongest, fastest, cheapest, or best-looking one out there. It just needs some combination of these factors that will set it on the Pareto frontier. Being on the Pareto frontier means that when you compare your design to any other design in the world, there will always be at least one objective that you satisfy better than them. You know what that means? It means that, in this narrow sense of the word “best”, you are the best in the world. Congratulations! 

Recognizing that you are the best in the world can boost your self-confidence. But it is also absolutely necessary if you want to market your design to others. If there already exists a design out there that is better than yours at every objective you care about, then you’re going to have a terrible time trying to convince people to choose yours. You need to be on the Pareto frontier to be successful. Considering what types of objectives you care about and where on the Pareto frontier you want to end up from the very beginning will aid you in many of your design choices. Objectives you might consider include: Faster, Cheaper, Safer, Stronger, Smaller, Lighter, Simpler, More Reliable, More Efficient, More Convenient, More User-friendly, More Sustainable, More Eco-friendly, More Accessible, More Secure, More Versatile. 

How can I apply this to my life?

A previous BYU Design Review article [3] brought up the concept of talent stacking, where you build a number of skills that can be combined in unique ways.  According to that article, by building an array of skills, “you will carve out a niche for yourself, where you are the best in the world, and when people need something in that niche, they will come to you.” In other words, choose a set of skills as your objectives, and then place yourself on the Pareto front for those objectives to make yourself the go-to guy for that set of skills.

Of course, the law of equal and opposite advice applies here as always: great advice for one person may be the worst advice for you. Which is to say, don’t spread yourself too thin. If you try to optimize for too many variables at once, you get diminishing returns on your effort, and you might end up neglecting your main objectives. If you are the kind of person who already has too many responsibilities, my advice is to pick a smaller set of objectives and rerun the optimization problem. But, if you feel up to it, then I challenge you to learn how to juggle several skills at once.

Conclusion

When you have multiple objectives that matter, it is easy to carve out a niche in which you compare favorably to everyone else in at least one objective. That is called locating yourself on the Pareto frontier. When writing this article, I was targeting a point somewhere in the middle of the Pareto frontier of “entertaining” and “informative”. I would bet you that this article is not the best technical explanation of a Pareto frontier out there. It is also probably not the most entertaining piece of literature you have read this week. (Or maybe it is? If so, I can recommend some sci-fi novels.) But, to be the best explanation of the Pareto frontier that is accessible to the population of readers of the BYU Design Review, I just needed to be more entertaining than the guy who wrote a slightly more technical article than me and more informative than the guy who wrote a more entertaining article than me. That’s not too high of a bar to pass, so I am going to tentatively say that this is the best article in the world on Pareto frontier. Hooray! 

References

[1] Joggling World Records, http://www.recordholders.org/en/list/joggling.html

[2] Engineering Design Optimization, Joaquim R. R. A. Martins, Andrew Ning, 2021

[3] “Optimizing vs Satisficing: Tips for Product Design and Designing Your Life”, BYU Design Review