How to Choose Right

Change your attitude towards options

Less is More

— Mies Van Der Rohe.

Every minute of every day, we are constantly choosing among many options in our lives, and it is not a secret how our choices are a major determinant of our lives. Our choices are a rudder that directs this ship we call our lives, and these choices are as healthy as the options that we release ourselves to.

Don't get me wrong, there are many other forces at play to make things work. In the last book review in Emprinté book club, we discussed how luck and risk play a huge impact on the outcome of our lives, so it is without a saying that other forces are at play, but ultimately, the actions we choose in the face of these forces have a tighter impact on our lives.

Where we cannot act, or where our actions won't make any difference, then the attitude we choose will determine how our lives turn out.

So in the final analysis, whether there are forces other than ourselves at play in our lives, our choices, in the face of all of these forces is what is most important to our own specific, small life. It is the only thing that matters the most to us, and the only thing that can never be stripped away from us.

But don't take my word for it. Take Victor Frankl's words, expressed in Man's Search for Meaning where he wrote, "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."

This goes to show how important our choices are for our lives, and why we must strive to choose right as much as we can, everytime we want to make a decision.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. - Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Unfortunately, studies have shown that decisions are getting worse. In fact, decisions are the worst in our age than has ever been in the past centuries. You know why? Come on, guess. No awards for whoever guesses correctly.

Our decisions have gotten extremely worse, and increasingly suboptimal because the amount of options we have to choose from today.

A study published on the Psychological Science journal as far back as 2011 affirmed this. It argued that the sheer amount of information available today makes it a lot more difficult to make good decisions.

In short, too many options leads to bad decisions, decision paralysis, and suboptimal choices.

How does this affect us in our daily lives? We have given ourselves to so many options, from social media, to books, to relationships, to our wardrobe, our diet, and these things do us more harm than good.

Options are good, but when the options become too many that we have to think twice as hard, take two to three times the amount of time we actually should, then it becomes harmful for us, and our choices become suboptimal, such that, even when we truly chose right, there will be this nagging feeling that we didn't because of all the other options we gave up, and as a result, we won't even be able to function optimally in the option we chose.

Options are good, but when they become too many, they leave us destruct, paralysed, confused, and stunted.

There's a well known study Sheer Iyengar and Mark Lepper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in year 2000, where shoppers at a grocery store were presented with a either a limited option of jam flavors, or an array of options to choose from when buying, and at the end of the day, people were more likely to buy from the limited option than from the array of options, and the margin was wide! 30% to 3%. Decision paralysis came into play.

Many other studies have also shown that you are less satisfied with your choice when you have a lot more options to choose from. Always that nagging feeling that one other option would have been better.

Sadly, this is how many of us live our lives. This is why we are never satisfied. We amass so many options, we give ourselves to too many ideas, too many goals, too many options for a romantic relationship, too many beliefs, too many cloths, bags, shoes, friends, and we are surprised that we are not satisfied.

How can we be satisfied when we will always feel like we could have opted for something else out of the 10,000 options available?

We will not be satisfied in our relationship if we have opened ourselves to too many options. We'd either always feel like Jide would have been better, or even not make a decision altogether, frolicking with all our interests. Not a good look for our lives.

We have too many clothes in our wardrobes than we will ever have need of, as a result, we will never be fully satisfied with what we opt to wear, because in our head, the joggers, or gown, or hoodie, or blazer would have been better for the occasion.

What is the solution then? Limit your options.

Let's do a quick math.

If you have 2 options, the probability that you'll make the right one will be 50%. High odds.

If you add two more options, your chances of being right drops to 25%.

Then add another option, then another and another, until when we have 100 options and the probability that we will choose wrong is a whooping 99%!

With limited options, you have a higher chance at making the right choices than when you have too many options. Live the life of a minimalist.

There are too many other problems and purposes in life than to be spending the first three hours of your morning thinking about what to wear.

You are too peculiar and extraordinary of a person than to be having 20 options for who to spend the rest of your life with.

Start practicing limited options in the littlest things, every minute of the day. Know from this moment on, that anything more than two or three options is too much (note that this is relative though).

Stop spreading your attention. Help your focus by limiting your options. You and your business don't have to be on all the social media platforms. Concentrate your genius.

From today, dear reader, make it your mission to choose right by limiting your options.

To your growth,

Abiola Okunsanya,

Handzinspired. ✨