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Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Focus on what makes you happy, and do what gives meaning to your life
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Barry Schwartz |
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When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn't meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their lives as a whole, people tend to identify failures to act.
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Barry Schwartz |
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We are surrounded by modern, time-saving devices, but we never seem to have enough time.
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Barry Schwartz |
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The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This "peak-end" rule of Kahneman's is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves ..
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Barry Schwartz |
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On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.
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Barry Schwartz |
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we have a tendency to look around at what others are doing and use them as a standard of comparison.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.
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Barry Schwartz |
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choose less and feel better.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Something as trivial as a little gift of candy to medical residents improves the speed and accuracy of their diagnoses. In general, positive emotion enables us to broaden our understanding of what confronts us. This
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Barry Schwartz |
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Most good decisions will involve these steps: Figure out your goal or goals. Evaluate the importance of each goal. Array the options. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. Pick the winning option. Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.
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Barry Schwartz |
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The way that the meal or the music or the movie makes you feel in the moment--either good or bad--could be called experienced utility.
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Barry Schwartz |
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The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don't exist--alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist. And to the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing. So, once again, a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.
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Barry Schwartz |
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If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.
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Barry Schwartz |
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We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn't satisfy us to the degree that we expect.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Buying jeans is a trivial matter, but it suggests a much larger theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable.
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Barry Schwartz |
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But clearly, the lesson is that incentives can be a dangerous weapon. A critic of this research might say that the problem is not incentives, but dumb incentives. No doubt, some incentives are dumber than others. But no incentives can ever be smart enough to substitute for people who do the right thing because it's the right thing.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Knowing what's good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So: Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for "good enough"; Scrutinize how you choose in those areas; Then apply that strategy more broadly."
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Barry Schwartz |
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PART OF THE DOWNSIDE of abundant choice is that each new option adds to the list of trade-offs, and trade-offs have psychological consequences. The necessity of making trade-offs alters how we feel about the decisions we face; more important, it affects the level of satisfaction we experience from the decisions we ultimately make.
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Barry Schwartz |
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ECONOMISTS POINT OUT THAT 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. This is referred to as an opportunity cost."
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Barry Schwartz |
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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.
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Barry Schwartz |
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There is no more effective way to destroy the leadership potential of young officers and noncommissioned officers than to deny them opportunities to make decisions appropriate for their assignments.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one's life matters.
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Barry Schwartz |
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What we don't realize is that the very option of being allowed to change our minds seems to increase the chances that we will change our minds.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Knowing that 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.
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Barry Schwartz |
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According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives. There you have it--the paradox of our times.
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Barry Schwartz |
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But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Most of us think about empathy as a "feeling" or an "emotion." It is. To be empathetic is to be able to feel what the other person is feeling. But empathy is more than just a feeling. In order to be able to feel what another person is feeling, you need to be able to see the world as that other person sees it. This ability to take the perspective of another demands perception and imagination. Empathy thus reflects the integration of thinking..
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Barry Schwartz |
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Most people give substantial weight to anecdotal evidence, perhaps so much that it will cancel out positive recommendations found in consumer reports. People's tendency to give undue weight to some types of information is called the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb, a mental shortcut. Suppose someone asked you a question like what's more common in English, words that start with the letter to r words that have t as the ..
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Barry Schwartz |
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We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.
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Barry Schwartz |
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When people are looking for causes of failure, they are predisposed to one of these positions. Suppose you apply for a job, but fail to get hired. Here are some possible answers you give. Global: I don't look good on paper and I get nervous at interviews. Specific: I don't really know enough about the kinds of products they sell. To look good at an interview, I need more of a feel for the business. Chronic: I don't have a dynamic, take-char..
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Barry Schwartz |
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Freedom to choose has what might be called expressive value. Choice is what enables us to tell the world who we are and what we care about.
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Barry Schwartz |
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So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Adding the second option creates a conflict, forcing a trade-off between price and quality.
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Barry Schwartz |
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So it seems that neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occurring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices.
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Barry Schwartz |
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emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.
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Barry Schwartz |
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Ask yourself what is the point of advertising prescription drugs (antidepressant, anti-inflammatory, antiallergy, diet, ulcer--you name it) on prime-time television. We can't just go to the drugstore and buy them. The doctor must prescribe them. So why are drug companies investing big money to reach us, the consumers, directly?
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Barry Schwartz |
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As advertising professor James Twitchell puts it, "Ads are what we know about the world around us."
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Barry Schwartz |
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But by restricting our options, we will be able to choose less and feel better.
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Barry Schwartz |
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But if unrestricted freedom can impede the individual's pursuit of what he or she values most, then it may be that some restrictions make everyone better off. And if "constraint" sometimes affords a kind of liberation while "freedom" affords a kind of enslavement, then people would be wise to seek out some measure of appropriate constraint."
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Barry Schwartz |
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The transformation of choice in modern life is that choice in many facets of life has gone from implicit and often psychologically unreal to explicit and psychologically very real.
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Barry Schwartz |
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keeping options open seems to extract a psychological price. When we can change our minds, apparently we do less psychological work to justify the decision we've made, reinforcing the chosen alternative and disparaging the rejected ones.
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Barry Schwartz |