The Paradox of Choice and resolving it in your life may just be one of the greatest Change Hero Insights I will ever share, especially since I suffered from an overabundance of choice for most of my life.

“The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. As I will demonstrate, there is a cost to having an overload of choice. As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options. But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction— even to clinical depression.” – Barry Schwartz from The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less

As my Optimize coach, Brian Johnson reinforced recently, in his summary of The Paradox of Choice, if you are committed to excellence and living as the best version of yourself, there is no sounder choice than the one that steps into that excellence and growth.

I have always been amazed by how some people have created such vast wealth, focused on one idea; like Amazon or Facebook. Can you imagine if Jeff Bezos was faced with what he wanted his domain on the Internet to be? He knew that Amazon was going to be the biggest, deepest river of retail, from day one and there was no choice about it, and he drove his idea deep and then wide. He not only knew his domain, he knew what he wanted it to be and was not suffering from the paradox of choice.

When I started as an entrepreneur, I was like the big bang; shooting in all directions. My domain was not clear yet and I didn’t know what I wanted to be clear enough so, I was drawn to turning over stone after stone until I was clear; but in that process, I was constantly overwhelmed by how many choices there were in my life; and the more options I had the harder it got. And that was just my business life!

I noticed over time that this pattern existed in most areas of my life; I would pay attention to just about everything, as if by divine cause because if it came into my life I had to accommodate it. Until I learned the paradox of choice, and that until you declare your intention, direction, and strategy, you will be all over the map; a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

So, resolving the paradox of choice is essential if you want to live a balanced and healthy high-performance lifestyle.

Let me give you an example.
There are thousands of diets out there and they will keep coming as people fight over what’s the best diet based on our ancestry, by what enables someone to lose weight or gain muscle, based on what the government, their health practitioner, guru, or culture or religion says is the way to eat… and even though every diet known to man can be mapped to The 3 Classes of Food, and be classified as nutrient-rich, nutrient-poor or nutrient barren in terms of their quality; the way markets are set up, hundreds of new diets will appear every year and people will chase them like lemmings because they don’t understand the cornerstone of nutrition—the nutrient density of foods—on which to guide their lifestyle choices.

If you want to be energetic, healthy and a fully functioning human being not distracted by fatigue, health problems, and disease, nutrient-rich foods are the only sound choice.

Some essential ideas from the book

Excerpt from the Philosophers Notes Summary.

“Throughout the book, you will learn about a wide range of research findings from psychologists, economists, market researchers, and decision scientists, all related to choice and decision
making. There are important lessons to be learned from this research, some of them not so obvious, and others even counterintuitive.

For example, I will argue that:

1. We would be better off if we embraced voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.
2. We would be better off seeking what was “good enough” instead of seeking the best (have
you ever heard a parent say, “I want only the ‘good enough’ for my kids?”).
3. We would be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of decisions.
4. We would be better off is the decisions we made were nonreversible.
5. We would be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us were doing.

These conclusions fly in the face of conventional wisdom that the more choices people have, the better off they are, that the best way to get good results is to have very high standards, and that
it’s always better to have a way to back out of a decision than not. What I hope to show is that the conventional wisdom is wrong, at least when it comes to what satisfies us in the decisions we
make.”

FREE CONFIDENTIAL CALL with JAM– Serious about change, improving, and optimizing the way you live? Let’s set a time and talk to each other about where you are and how I can help. It’s completely confidential. This call is the best way to get started, so your willingness to change meets expert support and guidance. You can call me right now at 862-216-7959 or choose a time for our call here using my online calendar>>>

About JAM.

John Allen Mollenhauer “JAM” is an expert at helping driven entrepreneurs and business professionals achieve more through a balanced and healthy, high-performance lifestyle; those who feel distracted and held back in their business, maybe even their life because they don’t have the zest and zeal they used to, the support, and clarity they need to succeed in the way or at the level they want. They’ve gone from program to program each of which promises the solution to perform better, achieving their ambitious goals and living the “lifestyle” they envision, but something is missing, something they just can’t quite put their finger on, and they’re ALL-IN to resolve it once and for all.”

JAM is the founder of Performance Lifestyle® Inc—a leading-edge training and coaching practice that guides people on how to ultimately optimize their own lifestyle for energy, health, and performance to achieve their ambitions goals. Thousands of people have been inspired by JAM to make lifestyle changes starting with proactively recovering natural energy, to increase performance and quality of life.