You Say You Have No Choice. Or Do You Have Too Many?
8 Dec
Sometime ago I came across this video of Barry Schwartz on the The Paradox of Choice
In a nutsell, the paradox of choice simply states that while having a choice is good, choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures.
In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis. And in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression.
After watching this video, a lot of things in my life began to make sense. Not only have I experienced this personally, I see it happening to other people around me especially my friends.
In my short stint at a wine shop I often see people walking in to the store expecting to purchase something only to be bombarded by the vast amount of labels. Rather than making any decision, they opt to make no decision.
Take a trip to Giant or Tesco and you can see a whole aisle of cereal, instant noodles or even bottled water.
And then there are times where I feel I that have so many ideas to pursue and I just can’t decide which ones to go after. Which one is better? Which one has a brighter future? Which one is worth my time?
I also have a friend who absolutely hates his job right now. But because he is so deep into his profession, he finds it hard to decide what he should do next.
He wants to make the perfect choice.
He needs to know that the choice that he makes would be the best of his future.
But he is afraid of making one because what if he chooses the wrong one?
Just yesterday, me and my brother went out for dinner. If any of you have been Wai Sek Kai in SS2 before, you will know that there is a lot of food stalls to choose from. When my brother came back to the table after ordering I had a gut feeling of his choice.
Somehow I knew that he would order a plate of fried rice. Instead of cracking his head to decide what to eat, he coped with this paralysis by ordering the easiest, safest choice.
There is no shortage of this discussion on the web. Every now and then I would come across an articleon mentioning this paradox. Sometimes its about love and our partners, sometimes it is about the career choices, or it could be an advertising article discussing consumer behaviors.
Or it could be about decision making on web design and user experience like this article here. It ties in all the research, lessons, strategies about decision making and applying it to web design.
I feel that I could go on and on about this so I guess I’d stop here.
If any of you encountered such an experience before do share on the comments below 
