What will sharpen your thinking today:

• Makes-You-Think Tweet: On the duration of degrees

• Mind-Expanding Concept: Paradox of Choice

• Cool Quote or Question: On repetition and being original

• High-Signal Content: Don’t do your best in everything

Makes-You-Think Tweet

Mind-Expanding Concept

Paradox of Choice

You open Netflix and start looking for something to watch. You're not sure what you're looking for. Nothing pops up. You flip to Amazon Prime. And...back to Netflix. After 15 (or 37) min, still nothing.

The paradox of choice is the idea that while having some choice is beneficial, too much choice can lead to feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, and dissatisfaction.

Two hypotheses why. First, opportunity cost. When presented with many options, we feel like we're missing out on the ones we don't choose, leading to regret and dissatisfaction with whatever we choose. And second, expected utility. When presented with many options, we naturally expect more from the choice we make. When our high expectations aren't met, comes disappointment.

This rings true for many things, from choosing what clothes to wear every day, to which restaurant to order dinner from, and even where to invest our hard-won money. But it can be particularly problematic for broader life choices such as which career to pursue. That's because we often don't know what we want to do. We have a hard time articulating it exactly. So many things can happen, not to mention that our tastes and preferences change. But this is the perfect substrate for the shadows of opportunity cost and expected utility to chime in. It's not surprising that many people choose jobs with the "best exit options", conserving their "optionality", which is fancy lingo for postponing the decision to commit.

Three implications of having too many options with costs that we often fail to properly consider:

• Spending too much time choosing. Many decisions are recurrent and trivial. Spending time on them is not spending time somewhere else more important or fun.

• Deferring too much to make a choice. By doing so, we maintain in our minds the possibility of success, the possibility of maximizing our future choice. Our expected value is high. But there's rarely a perfect choice. Also, we forego the possibility of gathering additional information by acting on a choice taken earlier.

• Decision fatigue. Our brains don't automatically rank decisions by relevance. Spending energy on many unimportant decisions will leave you mentally tired for the more important ones.

Choices can be important/unimportant, recurrent/one-offs, reversible/irreversible, and be impacted by different distributions of known/unknown factors. Calibrating the approach to each type of choice is optimal, even though it feels like you're not maximizing every single one of them.

Learned from: Barry Schwartz

Cool Quote or Question

There are two ways to look at this one:

One is that repetition is power. We don't like to repeat ourselves but we are much persuaded by things that are constantly repeated to us. Even if we don't like that either. That's why political campaigns have slogans, ads for consumer goods are everywhere, and companies hammer their principles home to their employees. Repetition brings familiarity and we tend to give more importance to things that are familiar.

The other is that there's nothing original anymore. If you think you have an original idea, you probably just haven't found the original source. Everything is a remix. And that's fine. The very act of putting our ideas out there, by ourselves, gives them our flavor, our spin. And that should be enough. The fear of not being original should not prevent us from sharing what we think. In fact, this newsletter is an exercise in that. By writing about concepts (that you probably have seen before) and riffing on questions and quotes (idem) that made me think, I not only find out what I really think, but I open the door for conversations that can push my thinking even further.

High-Signal Content

Doing the best you can in everything is not ideal.

“Real-world problems are not about producing the highest-quality products. In all walks of life, the goal is to hit a quality target with minimum effort.”

See you next week,

Filipe