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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bcb938d | Happy people have the ability to distract themselves and move on, whereas unhappy people get stuck ruminating and make themselves more and more miserable. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 1c068e7 | Certainly, it is safe to say that, based on available research, social comparison does nothing to improve one's satisfaction with the choices one makes. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| c299653 | So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one's autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 113be01 | The more difficult information gathering is, the more likely it is that you will rely on the decisions of others. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 01d43ef | The illusion that each person can have the body that he or she wants is especially painful for women, and especially in societies, like ours, in which the "ideal" body is extremely thin." -- | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 11b5447 | The research that my colleagues and I have done suggests that, not surprisingly, maximizers are prime candidates for depression. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 9e77bbe | To understand this, we need to make a distinction between what is good for the individual and what is good for the society as a whole, between the psychology of personal autonomy and the ecology of personal autonomy. In a study focused on twenty developed Western nations and Japan, Richard Eckersley notes that the factors that seem best correlated with national differences in youth suicide rates involve cultural attitudes toward personal fr.. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| a95783f | hedonic lag. Lane says that there is "a tendency of every culture to persist in valuing the qualities that made it distinctively great long after they have lost their hedonic yield." This, he says, "explains a lot of the malaise currently afflicting market democracies." The combination of hedonic lag with the mixture of psychological benefits and ecological costs of the culture's emphasis on autonomy and control makes it extremely difficult.. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| c0c2977 | Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 440615f | human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we have achieved what our ancestors could, at most, only dream about, but it has come at a great price. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 90b43fc | I believe there are steps we can take to mitigate--even eliminate--many of these sources of distress, but they aren't easy. They require practice, discipline, and perhaps a new way of thinking. On the other hand, each of these steps will bring its own rewards. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 0a47785 | The benefits of having options are apparent with each particular decision we face, but the costs are subtle and cumulative. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| ef6d2cd | Restricting yourself in this way may seem both difficult and arbitrary, but actually, this is the kind of discipline we exercise in other aspects of life. You may have a rule of thumb never to have more than two glasses of wine at a sitting. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 70c0a7c | It is the very impersonal quality of urban life, which is lived among strangers, that accounts for intensified religious feeling. For in the village of old, religion was a natural extension of the daily traditions and routine of life among the extended family; but migrations to the city brought Muslims into the anonymity of slum existence, and to keep the family together and the young from drifting into crime, religion has had to be reinven.. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 7db35c6 | But if you've been convinced by the arguments and the evidence in this book, you now know that choice has a downside, an awareness that should make it easier for you to adopt, and live with, a "two options is my limit" rule. It's worth a try." | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 9283c29 | It is choosers who create new opportunities for themselves and everyone else. But when faced with overwhelming choice, we are forced to become "pickers," which is to say, relatively passive selectors from whatever is available." | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 28216d8 | it's impossible to be a maximizer about everything. The trick is to learn to embrace and appreciate satisficing, to cultivate it in more and more aspects of life, rather than merely being resigned to it. Becoming a conscious, intentional satisficer makes comparison with how other people are doing less important. It makes regret less likely. In the complex, choice-saturated world we live in, it makes peace of mind possible. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 1ed167b | On the other hand, the more we think about opportunity costs, 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. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 0f663e6 | There are some strategies you can use to help you avoid the disappointment that comes from thinking about opportunity costs: 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." And don't worry that if you do this, you'll miss out on all the new things the world has to offer." | Barry Schwartz | ||
| be8e259 | Instead you might consider adopting a simple routine: 1. Keep a notepad at your bedside. 2. Every morning, when you wake up, or every night, when you go to bed, use the notepad to list five things that happened the day before that you're grateful for. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 3c6cb17 | We can mitigate regret by Adopting the standards of a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Reducing the number of options we consider before making a decision. Practicing gratitude for what is good in a decision rather than focusing on our disappointments with what is bad. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 00c01f7 | So, to be better prepared for, and less disappointed by adaptation: As you buy your new car, acknowledge that the thrill won't be quite the same two months after you own it. Spend less time looking for the perfect thing (maximizing), so that you won't have huge search costs to be "amortized" against the satisfaction you derive from what you actually choose. Remind yourself of how good things actually are instead of focusing on how they're l.. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| a91c79e | So to make the task of lowering expectations easier: Reduce the number of options you consider. Be a satisficer rather than a maximizer. Allow for serendipity. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| e98cc05 | Following the other suggestions I've made may sometimes mean that when judged by an absolute standard, the results of decisions will be less good than they might otherwise have been--all the more reason to fight the tendency to make social comparisons. So: Remember that "He who dies with the most toys wins" is a bumper sticker, not wisdom. Focus on what makes you happy, and what gives meaning to your life." | Barry Schwartz | ||
| ecf2213 | I want a pair of jeans--32-28," I said. "Do you want them slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, baggy, or extra baggy?" she replied. "Do you want them stonewashed, acid-washed, or distressed? Do you want them button-fly or zipper-fly? Do you want them faded or regular?" I was stunned. A moment or two later I sputtered out something like, "I just want regular jeans. You know, the kind that used to be the only kind." -- | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 196ba51 | This phenomenon is partly due to the nature of how we learn about ourselves and need to shuffle between jobs to gain experience. It is also largely a reality of the new nature of work, which has everyone looking more like a freelancer than a lifer. As Reid Hoffman writes in The Start-Up of You, we are increasingly thinking of our careers more entrepreneurially and see ourselves as start-ups, selling our time, talent, and networks.2 This app.. | Aaron Hurst | ||
| 5422ef9 | Instead you might consider adopting a simple routine: 1. Keep a notepad at your bedside. 2. Every morning, when you wake up, or every night, when you go to bed, use the notepad to list five things that happened the day before that you're grateful for. These objects of gratitude occasionally will be big (a job promotion, a great first date), but most of the time, they will be small (sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window, a kind wo.. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 72efd6a | Ninety percent of adults spend half their waking lives doing things they would rather not be doing at places they would rather not be. | Barry Schwartz | ||
| 0988b31 | panacea. This created a plethora of anomalies. The Syr | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 99ac09a | The aftermath of creedal passion is cynical indifference followed by the return of conservatism; creedal passion holds government and society to standards that they simply cannot meet. Nevertheless, Huntington believes, creedal passion is at the core of America's greatness. By holding officials and institutions to impossible standards in a way no other country does, the United States has periodically | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 62553c5 | Indeed, in Central Europe, communism claimed to be the cure for the economic inequalities and other cruelties wrought by bourgeois industrial development, a radical liberal populism of a sort, while in the former Byzantine-Ottoman empire, where there had never been such modern development, communism was simply a destructive force, a second Mongol invasion. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 9ff101a | Like serious reading itself, travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our .. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| f2fcc73 | Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 8470a94 | But in Jordan, it is hard to imagine a more moderate and pro-Western regime than the current undemocratic monarchy. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 8e942b2 | Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline--for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| ec6d9d8 | Once a typhoon breaks loose in markets, there is no telling where it will go. | Roger Lowenstein | ||
| 3f0e308 | it is not only our values that matter, but the military might that backs them up. Truly, in international affairs, behind all questions of morality lie questions of power. Humanitarian intervention in the Balkans in the 1990s was possible only because the Serbian regime was not a great power armed with nuclear weapons, unlike the Russian regime, which at the same time was committing atrocities of a similar scale in Chechnya where the West d.. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 90429b0 | China is able to feed 23 percent of the world's population from 7 percent of the arable land--"by crowding some 2,000 human beings onto each square mile of cultivated earth in the valleys and flood plains," as Fairbank points out." | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| bc9afbc | So far we have seen the weakening and collapse of small and medium-sized states in Africa and the Middle East. But quasi-anarchy in larger states like Russia and China, on which the territorial organization of Eurasia hinges, could be next - tied to structural economic causes linked, in turn, to slow growth world-wide. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 4054577 | Yet now that we inhabit Mackinder's "closed political system," which, as Bracken notes, has closed much further in the course of the twentieth century, the map is also subject to the law of entropy, meaning a state of equilibrium will eventually set in, with each human habitation on the relief map--not just the megacities--looking increasingly like one another, and be subject to similar passions. The result, according to Ohio State Universi.. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 6573b46 | The news coverage of the Indian Ocean tsunami indicates how the South China Sea may appear to the world through the media's distorting mirror. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| b035d4c | James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, Chinese Naval Strategy in the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan (New York: Routledge, 2008); Toshi Yoshihara and James Holmes, "Command of the Sea with Chinese Characteristics," Orbis, Fall 2005; Gabriel B. Collins et al., eds., China's Energy Strategy: The Impact on Beijing's Maritime Policies (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008); and Andrew Erickson and Gabe Collins, "Beijing's Energy Security St.. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 33d4fb5 | A better age would have to follow. | Robert D. Kaplan | ||
| 666e566 | China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) sees U.S. battle networks--"which rely heavily on satellites and the Internet to identify targets, coordinate attacks, guide 'smart bombs' and more"--as its "Achilles' heel." | Robert D. Kaplan |