Sheena Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing – the book and the wildly popular TED talk – posits a profoundly paradoxical idea. Despite what we might think, we don’t like choice, or at least not too much of it. Which is why arranged marriages lead to more lasting love than “romantic” marriages and ALDI stocks one version of everything. To make the best decisions in our lives, there is a “magic number” of options we should aim for…and it’s less than you think. The Columbia University pscho-economist is famous for conducting the original “paradox of choice” studies as - and this bit blows my mind – a fully blind woman. She and I talk through all the fun paradoxes of our odd relationship to choice and how to navigate them to make the best, most joyful decisions.
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