Dancing Geek

I’ve been reading lots of books recently.  One that I’m currently going through is The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, after seeing his video on TED.

Short version: choice is good, but too much choice is bad for us.

He talks about ‘maximizers’ and ‘satisficers’, and that in general we’re usually one in some situations and the other in others. (You following so far?)

As an example: when I shop for underwear, I go to Next (because that’s just where I always go) and get a few packs of whatever looks fun and not too ‘trendy’.  But when I bought my laptop, I spent hours constructing spreadsheets and comparing details and studying minutae.

Can you guess which is supposed to be better?

Of course, there are times when very careful analysis is best, however we tend to overuse it in our culture (US or UK and others).  His analysis is obviously much more supported by argument, but you can get a copy from the library if you insist on all that (like I do).  But he makes a very good case for working out what is good enough for you in any decision and then stopping once you’ve found it.

Just think about that for a second.

Yeah, wow, and ouch, and yuck, and holy crap, and oh my gosh.  Think of the free time you’d get, and the reduced stress of not trying to get ‘the best’ and ‘be perfect’ all the time.  Or even most of the time.  Or even only in certain areas.

So yeah, I wrote out where I thought I was maximizing (like my whole I-must-know-where-my-life-is-going journey type thing, and lots of other stuff) and then wrote for each one what good enough would look like.  And what do you know, some of them I’m already there!  Others are just a small distance away and others I can see I’ve still got some work to do to even get to good enough, but stick the 80/20 rule on that and hey presto my to do list just shrank by like 93%!

So, you willing to try taking something that’s been bugging you and ask yourself what good enough would look like?