We love options. Whoever said, they want fewer options? In fact, if you ask most people they will tell you they want as many options as possible. The more the better.
What many people don’t realize is that having all these choices comes at a cost. I’ve recently realized that being presented with unlimited options can actually hurt you.
Options and choices are a double edged sword. On one hand they allow us flexibility, and the other, it can paralyze us.
How can you do that if you choose this? What ends up happening is that we either start 100 things and never finish any of them or never start at all. We just want to keep our options open we tell ourselves. We can’t put all our eggs in one basket.
Cable providers offer hundreds of channels and most consumers willingly pay for premium packages to have access to all those channels, and if you’re like me you really only watch a select few.
We flip through the channels to find nothing on, then wonder what it is that we are even paying for. We say we’ll cancel, but we never do. We love having the option to watch tv!
Trying to decide where to go or what to eat for lunch can cause enough anxiety that you just want to take a nap or not eat at all.
We have a closet full of clothes we never wear. We couldn’t possibly throw them away, there will be that one day that we wish we still had it.
It’s easy to see why Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and other highly successful entrepreneurs prefer to wear the same outfit; it’s a simple choice.
All these choices take away from our ability to focus, and by eliminating options we can actually free up brain power to focus on more important things.
Ever eat too much candy? Sometimes too much of a good thing can actually be a bad thing, as is the case with always leaving options open.