The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less – by Barry Schwartz

The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less – by Barry Schwartz:  Buy on Amazon

We are faced with many options or decisions in our lives.  This book will change the way you look at them. We feel worse when we have too many options. With limitless choice, we produce better results with our decisions than we would in a more limited world, but we feel worse about them.

When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of choices increase, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear. As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates.

There is no denying that choice improves the quality of our lives. It enables us to control our destinies and to come close to getting exactly what we want out of any situation.

The fact that some choice is good doesn’t mean that more choice is better.

Schwartz argues that…

1. We would be better off if we embraced certain voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.
2. We would be better off seeking what is “good enough” instead of seeking the best.
3. We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.
4. We would be better off if the decisions we made were non-reversible.
5. We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.

 

Schwartz gives an example of an experiment done by psychologist Sheena Iyengar. When shoppers were given free samples of jams to taste in a store, 30% of people of those taste testing just 6 jams, bought a jar. Whereas only 3% of people exposed to a possible 24 jams bought a jar. This highlights the possibility that when were exposed to a large array of options it discourages us, because it forces an increase in the effort that goes into making a decision. So we decide not to decide.

Americans have more available options than they have ever had when it comes to consumerism in all dimensions. Shopping for food at your local supermarket is a perfect example of this. A quick glance up and down the isles, you’ll notice such things as 85 different brands of crackers, 285 varieties of cookies and 95 options just in the snack aisle alone! If a person doesn’t

want to leave their house to shop, this isn’t a problem as there are catalogues that they can look at, order their goods over the phone or the internet and they will be shipped directly to them. When it comes time to choose courses to study in college, students encounter the same vastness of available options and are encouraged to select classes that best suit them and the course route of study that they have also designed for themselves. Americans go to shopping centers about once a week, which happens to be more often than they go to houses of worship. Americans now have more shopping centers than high schools. Do we have too many choices, too many decisions, and too little time to do what is really important?

History of Choices

Human existence is defined by the choices people make. Every second of everyday we are choosing, and there are always alternatives. Our society has shifted from foraging and subsistence agriculture to the development of crafts and trade. We now have the ability to obtain what we

need for ourselves and for our families, until recently, at the same general store. In the past few decades that long process of simplifying and bundling economic offerings has been reversed. Increasingly, the trend moves back toward time-consuming foraging behaviour, as each of us is forced to sift for ourselves through more and more options in every aspect of life. Of course if it came down to whether or not to have choice, we would opt for choice. Schwartz argues that it is the cumulative effect of choice that is causing our society substantial distress.

Schwartz suggests that thinking about the attractions of some of the unchosen options detracts from the pleasure derived from the chosen one. When experiencing dissatisfaction on a shopping trip, consumers are likely to blame it on something else (salespeople, traffic, prices) – anything but the overwhelming array of options.

Could readers be attracted to a magazine that offered to simplify their lives by convincing them to stop wanting many of the things they wanted?

A majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. Most people feel they lack the expertise to make decisions about their money by themselves.

Patients prefer to have others make their decisions for them. 65% surveyed said if they were to get cancer, they’d want to choose their own treatment. But only 12% of people with cancer want to do so.

We always think we want choice, but when we actually get it, we may not like it.

The burden of having every activity be a matter of deliberate and conscious choice would be too much for any of us to bear.

Most good decisions involve these steps:

1. Figure out your goals
2. Evaluate the importance of each goal
3. Array the options
4. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals
5. Pick the winning option
6. Later, use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.

As the number of options increases, the effort required to make a good decision escalates as well.

The process of goal-setting and decision-making begins with the question “What do I want?” Looks easy to answer, and addressed largely through internal dialogue. But knowing what we want means being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.

Interesting story about how you can read Consumer Reports saying that Volvo is the most reliable car (based on dozens or hundreds of sources, combined). But all it takes is one person at a party saying, “Oh I had one and it was nothing but trouble” to sway us from our choice. Logically, this one report should have almost no influence on your decision. Unfortunately, most people give substantial weight to this kind of anecdotal “evidence”, perhaps so much so that it will cancel out the positive recommendation from Consumer Reports, because it is extremely vivid and based on a personal, detailed, face-to-face account.

We assume that the more available some piece of information is to memory, the more frequently we must have encountered it in the past. When you see film footage of a $50,000 car being driven into a wall, it’s hard to believe the car company doesn’t care about safety, no matter what the crash-test statistics say.

People mistook the pervasiveness of newspaper stories about murders, accidents, or fires as a sign of the frequency of the events these stories profiled. This distortion causes us to miscalculate the various risks we face in life, and thus contributes to some very bad choices.

Any random group of people predicting who will win the Academy Awards will do better than the predictions of any one individual. (!!) The group picked 11 out of 12 winners correctly, while the average individual only picked 5 out of 12 correctly, and even the best individual only picked 9.

This is amplified by mass-reach news, because friends and neighbours will have the same biased story from the same source, making us assume it to be true. The more people believe it’s true, the more likely you are to repeat it, and more likely you are to hear it. This is how inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect, leading quickly to a broad but mistaken consensus.

Any particular item will always be at the mercy of the context in which it is found. A store sold a bread-maker for $279. Later, they added a deluxe version for $429. They didn’t sell many of the expensive ones, but sales of the less expensive one doubled! The $279 now looked like a bargain. Even if companies sell almost none of the highest-priced models, they can reap enormous benefits from producing such models because they help induce people to buy their cheaper (but still expensive) ones.

Loss aversion.

Losses have more than twice the psychological impact as equivalent gains. Once something is given to you, it’s yours. Giving it up will entail a loss. Because losses seem more bad than gains are good, the thing you have gained is worth more to you than it is to a potential trading partner. Losing the thing will hurt worse than gaining the thing will give pleasure. This is why companies can afford to offer money-back guarantees. Once people own them, the products are worth more to their owners than the mere cash value, because giving up the products would entail a loss. This is known as the ‘Endowment Effect’: the feeling of ownership you have once you’ve been given something.

Even with relatively unimportant decisions, mistakes can take a toll. When you put a lot of time or effort into choosing a restaurant, vacation place, item of clothing, you want that effort to be rewarded with a satisfying result. As options increase, the effort involved in making decisions increases, so mistakes hurt even more. Thus:

– decisions require more effort

– mistakes are more likely

– the psychological consequences of mistakes are more severe

When Only The Best Will Do… ABSOLUTE BEST vs. GOOD ENOUGH

If you seek and accept only the best, Schwartz labels you a ‘maximizer’.

If you settle for something “good enough”, and don’t worry about the possibility that there might be something better, Schwartz labels you a ‘satisficer’.

Maximizer: You seek and only accept the best. You exhaust all other alternatives to make sure that you know that what you’re buying is the absolute best (quality, price, etc…). You aspire to achieve a given goal and are less likely to get satisfaction out of the choices you make compared to the satisfier. Satisfier: You settle with something that is good enough and you don’t worry about the possibility that there might be something better out there.

To a maximizer, satisficers appear to be willing to settle for mediocre, but a satisficer may be just as discriminating. The difference is that the satisficer is content with the merely excellent as opposed to the absolute best.

Satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy. The best thing people can do is to satisfice.

– Maximizers savor positive events less than satisficers and do not cope as well with negative events.

– After something bad happens to them, maximizers’ sense of well-being takes longer to recover.

– Maximizers tend to brood or ruminate more than sacrificers.

Whereas maximizers might do better objectively than satisficers, they send to do worse subjectively.

So – what counts when we assess the quality of a decision? Objective results or subjective experience?  What matters most of the time is how we feel about the decisions we make. For example students who think they’re in the right school get far more out of it than the students who don’t.  So the best strategy maybe to figure out when information-seeking has reached the point of diminishing returns, stop the search, and choose the best option.

Maximizer and Perfectionist are not synonymous.

• Perfectionists have high standards that they don’t expect to meet.
• Maximizers have high standards that they do expect to meet.
• Nobody is a maximizer in every decision, and probably everybody is in some.
• Overload of choice for a maximizer is a nightmare, but not for a satisficer.
• Maximizers may not even realise they’re doing it, but believe to be the best is to have the best.

Maximizing and Regret.

Almost everyone who scores high on the Maximization Scale (a scale developed to determine people’s propensity to maximize or satisfice based on thirteen items) also scores high on regret.

Schwartz discovered that people with high maximization scores experienced less satisfaction with life, were less happy, were less optimistic, and were more depressed than people with low maximization scores.

For someone who feels overwhelmed by choices, apply the satisficing strategy more often, letting go of the expectation that “the best” is attainable. Adding options doesn’t add much work for the satisficer, because the satisficer feels no compulsion to check out all the possibilities before deciding.

Learned Helplessness.

Learned helplessness can affect future motivation to try, and future ability to detect that you do have control in new situations. Our most fundamental sense of well-being crucially depends on our having the ability to exert control over our environment and recognising that we do. Feelings of helplessness should now be rare. Only in situations where there is no choice should vulnerability to helplessness appear. Choice enables people to be actively and effectively engaged in the world, with profound psychological benefits. The most important factor in providing happiness is close social relations.

Social Relationships.

Schwartz pulls conclusions from researchers who have found that it is our close social relationships that make us happy. People who are:-

• Married,
• Who have good friends,
• Who are close with their families

Are happier than those who are not. We are paying for increased affluence and increased freedom with a substantial decrease in the quality and quantity of social relations. Being socially connected takes time. People want the closeness, not just the acquaintanceship. These relationships take time to develop and once established, take a significant amount of time to maintain. A major contributor to this time burden is the vastly greater number of choices we find ourselves preparing for, making, reevaluating and perhaps regretting.

Happy people attract others to them, and being with others makes people happy.

In many ways, social ties actually decrease freedom, choice, and autonomy. Establishing and maintaining social relations requires a willingness to be bound or constrained by them, even when dissatisfied. Once people make commitments to others, options close.

Friendships often sustain themselves on a combination of standards and routines. We’re drawn to people who meet our standards and then we stick with them. We don’t make a choice, every day, about whether to maintain the friendship. We just do. Some cultures have constraints in oppressive abundance, while Western Cultures have pretty much eliminated as many constraints as possible. But oppression can exist at either extreme.

Why we suffer:-

Choice is a burden as a result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture. They include:-

1. Rising Expectations: Our society is built around being, having and experiencing the very best. We strive to be the best in our jobs, drive the best cars and own the best houses. Accepting anything less is considered to be unacceptable.

2. Opportunity Costs: The degree to which one passes up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. This happens because the quality of any given option can not be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. For example: An opportunity cost of taking a job near your romantic partner is that you won’t be near your family. Every choice one makes has opportunity costs associated with it.

3. Aversion to Trade-Offs: Being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive. The emotional costs of trade-offs diminishes our sense of satisfaction with a decision and interferes with the quality of decisions we make.

4. Adaptation: Simply put, humans get used to things and then they start to take them for granted. For example: When air-conditioning is first installed in a home, the homeowner loves the new comfort, but has to go into the outdoor heat to remember the air- conditioning they no longer have.

5. Regret: There are two types of regret: anticipated and post-decision. Both types will raise the emotional stakes of decisions. Anticipated regret will make decisions harder to make, and post-decision regret will make them harder to enjoy.

6. Self-Blame: If someone is responsible for an action that turns out badly, they will experience more regret than if things had turned out badly because of something or someone else. Example: If you choose the restaurant and have a bad meal, you will feel worse about your decision than if you had eaten at a restaurant recommended by a friend.

7. Social Comparisons: The degree in which we evaluate our own current state of affairs is influenced by how we see ourselves when compared to those around us.

8. Maximizing: Maximizers are less happy, less satisfied with their lives, and are more depressed than satisficers because the taint of trade-offs and opportunity costs washes out much that should be satisfying about the decisions they make.

The downside of abundant choice is that each new option adds to the list of trade-offs.

The quality of any given option can not be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. One of the costs of any option involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have afforded. Schwartz give some excellent advice for managing our own psychological response to choice : Pay attention to what you’re giving up in the next-best alternative, but don’t waste energy feeling bad about having passed up an option further down the list that you wouldn’t have gotten to anyway.

The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist. When we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing.

There is no objective “best” vacation, job, or activity. What matters is the subjective experience. Being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

Consider this story of a typical retail situation:

If customers are presented with one Sony CD player for $99, which is far below list price 66% of people said they’d buy it, whereas said they would 34% would wait. If we change the offer and offer two CD players:  a Sony for $99 and a $169 top-of-the-line Aiwa, both below list price, now 27% would buy the Sony, 27% would buy the Aiwa, 46% would wait. The third scenario was a Sony CD player at $99 and a clearly inferior Aiwa at $105, in this scenario, 73% go with the Sony, almost nobody goes for the Aiwa.

So… Faced with one attractive option, 66% of people will go for it. But add one conflicting option, and only 54% buy anything. Adding the 2nd option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality. The 2nd option made it harder, not easier, to choose.

But in the 3rd scenario, the crappy Aiwa gave people confidence that the Sony is a good deal – an anchor of comparison that bolsters a buyer’s reasons for buying the Sony. This a non-conflicting option. Difficult trade-offs make it difficult to justify decisions, so decisions are deferred. Easy trade-offs make it easy to justify decisions. Single options lie somewhere in the middle.

It’s not just in the retail sector where we see problems with choices, consider this medical scenario. Doctors : A man suffering from disease. Doctors asked whether they’d give him medication or send him to a specialist. 75% chose the medication. But when asked whether they’d give him a choice between two medications or send him to a specialist, only 50% chose any medication. Meaning: adding a 2nd medication doubled the likelihood they’d send him away to a specialist, in other words : defer the decision. When people are presented with options involving trade-offs that create conflict, all choices begin to look unappealing.

We want our doctors, investment advisors, Consumer Reports to be weighing the trade-offs for us. We don’t want to have to evaluate the trade-offs ourselves. It’s emotionally unpleasant.

When we are in a good mood, we think better. We consider more possibilities. We’re open to more considerations that would otherwise not occur to us. We see subtle connections we might otherwise miss. Something as trivial as a little gift of candy to medical residents improves the speed and accuracy of their diagnoses. Positive emotions enables us to broaden our understanding of what confronts us.

Students were given too many options of what to write an essay on : as they try to write about the topic they chose, they’re further distracted by other appealing but rejected topics, preventing them from thinking clearly.

When people are asked to give reasons for their preferences, they may struggle to find the words. So they grasp at what they can say, and identify it as the basis for their preference. As time passes, the reasons that people verbalized fade into the background and people are left with their unarticulated preferences. People’s satisfaction with the decision they made, fades.

There are pitfalls to deciding after analyzing : as the number of options goes up, the need to provide justifications for decisions also increases. While participants valued being able to reverse their choices, almost no one actually did so. Those who had the option to change their minds were less satisfied with their choices than participants who did not have that option.

The more options you have, the more likely you will experience regret.

When asked about what they regret most, people name failures to act. For example, When you miss by a little, ouch. Missing a plane by 1 minute causes much more regret than missing by an hour, since you obsess about all the things that could have saved you 1 minute.

For example, it is known that ‘Bronze’ medalists are often happier than silver medalists, because instead of thinking how close they were to Gold, they think about how close they were to having no medal at all.

These are both examples of what Schwarz calls “Counterfactual” thinking. This is contrasting actual experience with what it could have been. It is actually vital that we use counterfactual thinking as we couldn’t make it through the day without it. Without the ability to imagine a world that is different from our actual world and then to act to bring this imagined world into being, we never would have survived as a species.

1. “Upward counterfactual” = comparing to the next-best option (the Silver medalist)
2. “Downward counterfactual” = comparing to next-worst option (the Bronze medalist)

We’d be happier if we did Downward counterfactual more often. Be grateful things aren’t worse.

Upward comparisons produce jealousy, hostility, frustration, lowered self-esteem, and stress.

Downward comparisons boost self-esteem, and reduce anxiety.

Bad results make people equally unhappy whether they were responsible for it or not. But bad results make people regretful only if they were responsible. The more our experiences result from our own choices, the more regret we feel if things don’t turn out as we hoped.

People facing decisions involving trade-off, and thus opportunities for regret, will avoid making those decisions altogether. We show greater willingness to take risks when we know we will find out how the unchosen alternative turned out, and there is thus no way to protect ourselves from regret.

Sunk costs effects.

People hold on to stocks that have decreased in value because selling them would turn the investment into a loss.

If you buy two nonrefundable tickets to a ski trip, one costing $50, and one costing $25, then find out they’re on the same day, you’ll go on the $50 ski trip even if there’s a good reason to think you’d have more fun on the $25 ski trip.

• Basketball coaches give more time to players earning higher salaries.
• People who have started their own business are more likely to invest in expanding them than people who have purchased their business.
• Many people persist in troubled relationships because of the effort they’ve already put in.

In all of these cases, what should matter are the prospects for future performance, but what seems to matter is the previous investment, i.e the ‘Sunk Cost’.

When there are many options, the chances increase that there is a really good one out there, and you feel you ought to be able to find it. When the option you actually settle on proves disappointing, you regret not having chosen more wisely. As the number of options continues to proliferate, concern for a better option may induce you to anticipate the regret you will feel later on, when that option is discovered, and thus prevent you from making any decision at all.

Regret serves important functions :

We all know that regret can make people miserable, but regret also serves several important functions. First, anticipating that we may regret a decision may induce us to take the decision seriously, imagining the various scenarios that may follow it. This may help us to see consequences of a decision that would not have been evident otherwise. Second, regret may emphasise the mistakes we made in arriving at a decision so that should a similar situation arise we won’t make the same mistakes. Third regret may mobilise or motivate us to take the actions necessary to undo a decision or ameliorate some of its unfortunate consequences. Fourth, regret is a signal to others that we care about what happened.

Why decisions disappoint. The problem of adaptation.

Schwartz explains the process known as ‘adaptation’ using an example of buying a new car, after much anguish, you might decide to buy a Lexus and you try to put all the attractions of other makes out of your mind. But once you’re driving your new car, the experience falls just a little bit flat. You’re hit with a double whammy- regret about what you didn’t choose, and disappointment with what you did. This ubiquitous feature of human psychology is a process known as adaptation. Simply put, we get used to things, and then we start to take them for granted.

The more we invest in a decision, the more we expect to realise from our investment. Adaptation makes agonizing over decisions a bad investment. Adaptation will have more profound effects on maximizers than satisfiers. Maximizers make such investment in their decisions so they’re most disappointed when they discover the pleasure they derive from their decisions is short-lived.

We can do more to affect the quality of our lives by controlling our expectations than we can by doing virtually anything else! Leave room for experiences to be a pleasant surprise. The challenge is keeping wonderful experiences rare. (No matter what you can afford, save great wine for special occasions.) It’s a way to make sure you can continue to experience pleasure.

In societies in which you have little control, you also have little expectation of control. Lack of control does not lead to feelings of helplessness and depression. Schwartz uses the Amish communities of Pennsylvania as an example of a community where the individual has less control over their lives than the rest of us. This does not appear to have a significant impact on their happiness and membership of the community doesn’t appear to entail much in the way of personal sacrifice.  

Those nations whose citizens value personal freedom the most tend to have the highest suicide rates. These same values allow certain individuals within these cultures to thrive and prosper to an extraordinary degree. The problem is that on the national or “ecological” level, these same values have a pervasive, toxic effect.

What to do about choice.

1. Choose when to choose.

As we have seen, having the opportunity to choose is essential to well being, but choice has negative features. Decide which choices in our lives really matter and focus our time and energy there, letting other opportunities pass us by. By restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.

Try this:

(1) review recent decisions you’ve made,

(2) itemise the steps, time, research, and anxiety that went into it,

(3) remind yourself how it felt to do that work of making the decision,

(4) ask yourself how much your final decision benefitted from that work.

This exercise will help you appreciate the costs associated with making the decisions you make.

2. Be a chooser not a picker

Choosers are people who are able to reflect on what makes a decision important. Pickers are relatively passive selectors from whatever is available. Being a chooser is better, but to have the time to choose more and pick less, we must be willing to rely on habits, customs, norms, and rules to make some decisions automatic. Try to shorten or eliminate deliberations about decisions that are unimportant to you. If none of the options meet your needs, create better options that do.

3. Satisfice more and Maximize less

Its maximizers who suffer most in a culture that provides too many choices. It is maximizers who have expectations that can’t be met. It is maximizers who worry most about regret, about missed opportunities, and about social comparison, and it is maximizers who are most disappointed when the results of decisions are not as good as expected.

Learning to accept “good enough” will simplify decision making and increasing satisfaction. Knowing what’s good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So:

1. Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for “good enough”;
2. Scrutinize how you choose in those areas;
3. The apply that strategy more broadly.

4. Think about the costs of missed opportunities.

When making a decision. It’s usually a good idea to think about the alternatives we will pass up when choosing our most preferred option. Ignoring these “missed opportunities” can lead us to overestimate how good the best option is. On the other hand, the more we think about missed opportunities, the less satisfaction we’ll derive from whatever we choose. So we should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject.

Unless you’re truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always buy. Don’t be tempted by “new and improved”. Don’t scratch unless there’s an itch. Don’t ‘worry’ that if you do this, you’ll miss out on all the new things the world has to offer.

5. Make your decisions nonreversible.

Agonizing over whether your love is the real thing, or your sexual relationship up to par, wondering whether you could have done better – is a prescription for misery. Knowing you’ve made a choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have rather than constantly second-guessing it.

6. Practice an ‘attitude of gratitude’.

Our evaluation of our choices is profoundly affected by what we compare them with, including comparisons with alternatives that exist only in our imaginations. The same experience can have both delightful and disappointing aspects. Which of these we focus on may determine whether we judge the experience to be satisfactory or not.  We can vastly improve our subjective experience by consciously striving to be grateful more often for what is good about a choice or an experience, and to be disappointed less by what is bad about it.

7. Regret less

The sting of regret (either actual or potential) colours many decisions, and sometimes influences us to avoid making decisions at all. Although regret is often appropriate and instructive, when it becomes so pronounced that it poisons or even prevents decisions, we should make an effort to minimize it.

We can mitigate regret by:-

1. Adopting the standards of a satisficer rather than a maximizer.
2. Reducing the number of options we consider before making a decision.
3. Practicing gratitude for what is good in a decision rather than focusing on our disappointments with what is bad.

It also pays to remember just how complex life is and to realise how rare it is that any single decision, in and of itself, has the life transforming power we sometimes think it might.

8. Anticipate Adaptation

We adapt to almost everything we experience with any regularity. The fact that the “fun wears off” when you get used to the new choice or experience. Remember that the high-quality sound system, the luxury car, the big house, won’t keep providing the pleasure they give when we first experience them.

Spend less time looking for the “perfect” thing, so that you won’t have huge search costs to be amortized against the satisfaction you derive from what you actually choose.

9. Control Expectations

Our evaluation of experience is substantially influenced by how it compares with our expectations. So to make the task of lowering expectations easier:-

1. Reduce the number of options you consider.
2. Be a satisficer rather than a maximizer
3. Allow for serendipity.

Remember that the thrill of unexpected pleasure stumbled upon by accident often can make the perfect little diner or country inn far more enjoyable than a fancy french restaurant or four star hotel.

10. Curtail Social Comparison

We evaluate the quality of our experiences by comparing ourselves to others. Though social comparison can provide useful information, it often reduces our satisfaction. So by comparing ourselves to others less, we will be satisfied more. So:-

1. Remember that “he who dies with the most toys wins” is a bumper sticker not wisdom.
2. Focus on what makes you happy, and what gives meaning to your life.

11. Learn to Love Constraints

As the number of choices we face increases, freedom of choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice. Routine decisions take so much time and attention that it becomes difficult to get through the day. In circumstances like this, we should learn to view limits on the possibilities we face as liberating not constraining. By deciding to follow a rule, we avoid having to make deliberate decisions again and again.

Final Word

This is an important book which brings the concept of decision theory to popular awareness.  Schwartz highlights the many factors that are involved in choosing and decision making. Whether you like it or not you are making many decisions on an hourly basis, so it’s reasonable to think that if I could make better decisions then I could improve both myself and my business. I would highly recommend that you grab a copy and have a read for yourself. Buy on Amazon

Happy reading