If so, I welcome you to the extraordinary world of decision making. If so, I welcome you to the paradox of choice .
Maybe you'll think that choosing a pizza is not that important. But if instead of a pizza the decision making has to do with your health insurance, with the school of your children, with the choice of a job or with the purchase of a car or your house, then the decision is no longer a trivial decision.
That is why in today's article I want you to learn some simple and effective tips to take the best option in each of the decisions you make in your life, regardless of whether the choice is a pizza or the purchase of a house . These tips I have extracted from the extraordinary book called The Paradox of Choice. Why more is less, by Barry Schwartz, a true benchmark in the world regarding the concept of decision making .
Do you want to learn how to make the best decisions to be happier? The decision to continue reading this article is served.
The Paradox of Choice. Why more is less . How you learn to make decisions and that they make you a happy and fulfilled person.
As I said in the introduction to the article, this entry would not have been possible without reading the book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less . Today it iconsidered one of the reference books in terms of decision making. Unfortunately, this book can only be read in English.
In this article about the book The Paradox of Choice. Why more is less I am going to teach you the basic aspects that Barry Schwartz teaches in his book and how and why you make the decisions that you make and how these decisions influence your life and, above all, your mood and your relationship with others.
I will divide the article into two parts: the first part will be a selection of the fragments that I liked the most or the ones that have caught my attention in the book, while in the second part I will approach the tips that The Paradox of Choice. Why more is less to make decisions with the greatest of guarantees.
FIRST PART.
These are the sections that have most caught the attention of The Paradox of Choice. Why more is less .
ntroduction
Any excess of decisions has a cost.
Freedom is essential for self-esteem, participation, food, mobility, but not all decisions make you more free.
A variety of options discourages because it increases the effort involved in deciding. This means that when you have to make an effort to choose a product, for example, many times you decide not to decide and, therefore, not to acquire that product.
The more alternatives you have to choose, the more problems you will have to decide.
The choice of who you want to be.
In modern society another unprecedented type of election has been born. It is the choice to choose your own identity. But what does it mean to choose? There is a very famous question by Albert Camus that goes like this: Should I commit suicide or have a cup of coffee?
This seemingly absurd question hides something that seems essential to me: there is not a moment in your life that you are not making a decision. In fact, existence could be defined by the decisions that people make.
Think for a moment what you do right when you get out of bed. Well, everything that has come to mind are not really decisions or, rather, do not count as decisions (go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, turn on your mobile).
What you do right when you get up are not decisions, they are automations. This aspect is really important and crucial. As a person you have put into practice a series of automations that what you have been allowed to do is precisely to avoid making decisions from good morning. And not only in the morning.
Throughout the day there are many automations that you carry out and that suppose for you not to have to make decisions that the only thing they do is increase personal and emotional wear.
You make good decisions is a difficult task. In fact, the best decisions are based on the following aspects:
Find out what your goal is.
Evaluate the importance of your goal.
Organize your options.
Evaluate the probability of each of the options to achieve your goal.
Choose the winning option.
Later, use the consequences of your choice to modify your goal. This will mark the path of other future objectives.
What is involved is that you become aware that, even with a limited number of options, going through the decision-making process can be an arduous task. In fact, the more options you generate, the effort to make a decision will increase proportionally.
And this can cause the decision to go from being a blessing to becoming a nightmare.
Knowing your goal to make the best decisions.
The essential question you should ask yourself is this: What do I want? Because knowing what you want you will anticipate the decision you want or should take.
If the night you go to the pizzeria with your friends you know that "you want to eat vegetables", then the choice of pizza will be much easier because you have anticipated reading the menu of pizzas that has more than forty varieties. Of course, the example I just put you of the pizza can be extrapolated to any facet of your life.
Gathering information
Before making decisions, it is very normal for you to collect information. How? From your own experience, chatting with friends or surfing the net. You are continuously gathering information to make decisions. Therefore, it is quite clear that the normal thing is that you do not make a decision without prior help.
That is why it is so important to learn to distinguish between the quantity and quality of information. And this is where the concept of heuristic availability comes into play .
The heuristic availability.
The heuristic of availability is a mental shortcut that occurs when people make a judgment about something because it is easy to remember, that is, if you can think of something, that something is important. When you face decision making, it is common that you resort to heuristic availability, that is, you choose the option that is easier for you to remember.
This now makes you understand why the same ads for a brand on television are repeated over and over again, for example. Advertising plays precisely with heuristic availability because it knows that as a consumer you will give more importance to a product the more you are able to remember it.
The price of gathering information in a world with too many options.
When you have to make many decisions, the consequence of an error can be trivial, but with few decisions to make, the consequences of an error can be very serious. As options increase, so does the effort to make decisions and, therefore, mistakes matter much more.
So the increase in options and probabilities of a decision has implied three unfortunate effects:
Decisions end up requiring more effort on your part.
Increase the probability of making an error.
The error has a negative effect on your psychological aspect.
Differences between a maximizer (demanding person) and a satisfy (satisfied person) . [The translation is mine]
Brian Schwartz makes a distinction in The Paradox of Choice. Why more is less tremendously interesting. It is the difference between maximizer and satisficer . This distinction focuses on people who aim to choose only the best ( maximizer) and people who choose to choose something that is good enough ( satisfy ).
This differentiation seems fundamental for decision making. While the maximizer needs to have the complete assurance that each time it makes a decision it must be the best that exists, the satisfaction is someone who decides what is considered good enough without worrying about the possibility that there may be something better , although it is fully aware that it exists.
This makes satisfying have criteria and norms that allow them to make choices based on these criteria and norms and, once they have found what they want, they stop. This aspect has made me think and much about the difference between perfection and excellence .
Therefore, if you are a satifier, the number of options does not have such a significant impact on the decisions you make. A satifierchooses an object and, based on its rules, decides not to go further, that is, does not take into account the other options or discards them as irrelevant.
According to Brian Schwartz and based on his studies has confirmed that people who tend to be maximizers experience less satisfaction with their life, less happiness, less optimism and are more prone to depression.
The problem of time.
In the process of making decisions, time always intervenes. This is an aspect that you should be very aware of when you make a decision, because the time you spend making a decision is time that you can not dedicate to your people, for example. So that this does not happen it is fundamental that you already take conscience of what your rules are and define them as soon as possible.
You can start by doing the following division: the options that are part of your rules and those that are not. Then, when you have to make a decision, you will only have to think about whether or not it is part of your rules. As a council, you can begin to establish as norms all those actions that you do routinely throughout the day.
The costs of opportunities.
The costs of the opportunities are based not so much on what you decide, but on the repercussion of what you throw away after having decided. One of the costs of any decision involves letting go of the opportunities of another different option.
The emotional in the decision making.
Brian Schwartz defends the idea that a positive emotion produces a positive effect, that is, when you are in a good mood, you think better. And you think better because you consider more likely. Moreover, you are open to other possibilities.
The reversible decisions.
It has been shown in different studies that those people who are given the option to change their decision are less satisfied than those who do not have the option to change the option they have chosen.
Here are the tips that Brian Schwartz gives you to make it easier for you to make decisions. These councils require discipline, practice and, surely, a new way of thinking. But I assure you that the achievement of each of these steps will only benefit you personally and emotionally.
10 Tips for making decisions correctly.
1. Learn to choose what and when to choose.
To avoid the problem of making too many decisions, you must learn to select which decisions are really important and dedicate all the time and effort necessary, leaving behind other more irrelevant decisions. And do not forget that the more selective you are in your options, the less you will have to decide and the better you will feel. Value and much the cost associated with any decision you make. For this, it takes as a rule to have a maximum of two options.
2. Be a person capable of reflecting on what makes a decision important.
What is involved is to be willing to depend on habits, customs, rules and regulations in order to automate as many decisions as possible.
3. Prioritizes being a satisfied person (satisfy) over being an extremely demanding person when making decisions (maximizer) .
If you learn to accept "good enough" you will greatly simplify decisions and increase your degree of satisfaction. This way you will feel much better about the decisions you make. But if you become a satisfied person, you must bear in mind that you must first define your objectives and aspirations, as well as the standards of what you consider to be good enough.
4. The more you think about the costs of an opportunity, the less satisfied you will be with what you have decided.
What is involved is to make an effort to limit the number of characteristics that have what you should decide. For this, here are some strategies:
Unless you are very dissatisfied with your choice, keep buying what you always buy.
Do not fall into the temptation of the new and improved.
Do not buy something without asking yourself before if you need it and why you need it.
5. Make your irreversible decisions.
When you can change your thinking about what you have decided, it is when you are least satisfied with what you have acquired. On the other hand, when making a decision is final, your feelings improve about what you have acquired.
6. Fosters an attitude of gratitude.
The process of evaluating your decisions will always be profoundly affected if you establish comparisons. The moment you imagine better alternatives, what you have decided becomes a worse decision.
7. Lick less.
Define your rules based on what you consider good enough.
Minimize the number of options before making a decision.
Encourage gratitude for the decision you have made.
Learn to adapt to your decisions and learn quickly.
Invest the least possible time looking for perfection. A greater search for perfection plus investment of time.
9. Control the excess of expectations that a decision may entail.
Reduce the number of options to consider.
Base your choice on what you consider to be good enough.
It allows the seredipia. Serendipity is the lucky or unexpected discovery that occurs when you are looking for something different.
10. Avoid comparing yourself with others.
People tend to compare with each other. But although comparing may imply useful information, it also reduces satisfaction about the decisions you make. So the less you compare yourself to others, the more satisfied you are with the decisions you make. Focus then on what makes you happy and what gives meaning to your life.
The decision making In conclusion.
If you have come this far you will have seen how this article has no relation to education, or maybe it does. What I wanted to show you with this article is that decision making is something inherent in your life and the lives of the people around you.
I constantly see people around me who suffer from having to make decisions. I constantly see people who are distressed and dissatisfied with the decisions they have made or plan to make. This is why I wanted to make this effort to transfer the knowledge of the book The Paradox of Choice to all those people who do not speak English.
But above all I have written this article because I want you to realize that making decisions is also part of a process and learning. And everything that you are capable of learning also makes you capable of teaching it.
Therefore, if you think that this article can help other people, I would appreciate it if you would share them and make them reach all those you see suffering making decisions, all those to whom learning to make decisions can change their lives for the better.
If you do so, I can assure you that the effort will have deserved, no doubt, worth it.
It's up to you again to make a decision ...
If you are interested in the book The Paradox of Choice, you can get in touch with the following link (affiliate).
Note: I apologize if some of the concepts or expressions that appear in the book are not. In this look I would appreciate any comments that improve the translation of them. Thanks in advance.
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