Easy Choices, Tough Decisions

I love reading Malcolm Gladwell and other authors like him, but especially his collection of New Yorker articles in the book "What the Dog Saw." What's funny is those ideas all swim around in my head freely and  create new associations and sometimes when he references some one's research I look them up because I get curious. One example of this was the article about sales, and he starts out talking about the door to door people, and I think somewhere in there he talks about the taste-testers and the supermarket, and he referenced something called the Jam Study. I found a TED talk by the lady who ran the Jam Study, and then I found a youtube clip of a panel she was on, so you could say I was obsessed for a minute. I found this fascinating from both a professional (sales) point of view and of course also from a personal point of view. Let me quickly summarize the key points, some of which were counter intuitive.

Here in the US, we prize our freedoms, especially freedom of choice. We vote on elections, american idol, dancing with the stars, you name it. And we *think* more options make us happier because we *think* we want all that control. But there's a tipping point (ooh, maybe it was in that book instead) past which options are not freeing, in fact they are paralyzing. They've done studies with customers customizing their cars, it's fascinating but we can skip the long story and just go the toothpaste aisle at the grocery store. Now we have to choose not only brand, flavor, tartar control, whitening, but also size, pump versus tube, and those can all come in combinations or for sensitive teeth or sensitive gums...just walk away. Same with almost everything. Salsa, or tampons, or the gourmet jams in the jam study.

The bottom line is more choices stress us out, so that we defer making the decision altogether or we default to the familiar groove or rut. It's why we order the same food at restaurants, or the same drink at the coffee shop.

hot or cold?
espresso or drip?
soymilk or regular?
whole milk or two percent or nonfat or cream?
sugar or splenda or stevia or nutrisweet or equal or agave or honey or no sweetener OR flavor syrup and what flavor?

Each choice on its own is straightforward or easy. And we think it makes us happy to have them. But maybe it tires us out so that when we're faced withe real decisions we default or defer until later because it's just too hard. And it gives us the illusion of control.

So as a sales person, it has shifted my thinking tremendously from my naive beginnings when I would have resented the sheer number of assumptions going on in every either or proposition. Partly because that was the Sophists method of dialectic in many of Plato's records of Socratic dialogue, an the either or is so limiting by nature and manipulative...and I hate feeling like I'm being lead down a garden path or trapped into saying something when they arrive at a punchline and I feel stupid. So I try to avoid those 'closing' feelings when I'm in a sales situations on either end of a sale. But when I am selling someone now, I carefully limit the options in favor of what I think is probably best going to serve the client in front of me, without burdening them with options that are not relevant to them. And I no longer feel conflicted or guilty about doing that, now that I know how stressful it gets.

The big decisions sometimes need to be buried in smaller ones.

But sometimes default is addiction or habit, and sometimes it's a little bit toxic, but not enough to make you die just enough to make you sick, so something has to shift but not until you reach that tipping point.