I am a recovering maximizer. For much of my life, I treated every decision — what meal to order, which Bluetooth speaker to buy, what exercise regimen to embrace — as a search for the very best. In retrospect, I think, the result was rarely a better outcome. What I’m certain of is that I wasted a lot of time agonizing and second-guessing myself afterward. I regularly fell prey to Fredkin’s paradox: The more similar our options, the less choosing between them matters but the harder it is. Thus, we can spend the most energy on the least important decisions. While researching my book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” I learned that it is usually bad to be a maximizer because maximizers are often less satisfied with their decisions and their lives and more prone to regret. Thankfully, I also ran into the work of the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, who coined the term “satisfice,” a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice” that describes the approach of finding “good enough” criteria for decisions and, once they are met, forging ahead. Simon lived it. He wore one brand of socks and owned one beret at a time; he ate the same breakfast every morning and lived in the same house for 46 years. He told his daughter Katherine that one needs “only three sets of clothing: one on one’s body, one in the wash and one in the closet ready to wear.” By removing small decisions, Simon saved attention and energy for the work that mattered most to him. In a guest essay for Times Opinion this week, I argue that searching for the best is the wrong goal because searching itself is a cost that we forget to count. In an age of seemingly infinite choice and A.I. tools that now promise to optimize everything from our schedules to our love lives, the most valuable decision-making skill may be the willingness to stop looking.
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