It’s 2019. The industrial revolution began over 200 years ago. Political democracy was ratified almost 250 years ago. Capitalism began its ascent somewhere around 500 years ago. In 2019 the world is a much different place and changing at a much more rapid pace than ever before. The rise of technology, the commitment to political freedom, and the resilience of free markets have resulted in remarkable life improvements. We have more free time, we understand the concept of a vacation, we even live longer. But maybe the most impressive change in the last 500 years is the incredible increase in the number of options we have. We’ve got multiples of ketchup options at the grocery store, we’ve got multiples of grocery store options within driving distance, we’ve got endless options for entertainment built right into our TVs, we’ve got so many bars and restaurant options we can’t keep track of where we’ve been and where we’d still like to visit (just me?), we’ve got innumerable product options staring at us from our phone screens, we’ve got travel options, vacation options, gym options, school options, cell phone options, clothes options, housing options, the list goes on. The sheer volume of options seems a little crazy when you think about it, but we love all our options. Options are great, they’re an essential part of freedom, they give us the ability to direct our lives to a degree. For most of history people didn’t have many options. As far as work went, the option was to essentially do what your parents did (which was probably farm). Now we’ve got thousands of career options, and that’s a wonderful thing.
The flipside of all these options is the requirement to make lots of choices. Options are great, choices are work. They’re work because you have to sift through all of the options, but more so because you eventually have to make a decision. The word ‘decision’ comes from the Latin root ‘decidere’ which literally means ‘to cut off from.’ Making a decision involves choosing one option instead of a bunch of other options, it means cutting off the other options, it means giving up the other options. So that’s a problem, what if we really liked having all those options? Options equal freedom!
The real problem with our abundance of options is that it gives us the illusion of freedom but it’s often crippling. We begin to idolize our options to the exclusion of making decisions, to the exclusion of making progress. We become content to maintain the beautiful platter of options without ever making a commitment to any. I suspect that this is especially true in our work. I love to vacillate on different strategies for my business, different side-hustles I could start, different events I could host. I love to ‘keep my options open’ so to speak. But in the end, that’s just wasted time. You could spend your entire life keeping your options open and never accomplish anything. The fear is that once you commit something you’ve got to be all in and you’ve got to say ‘no’ to the other options, but the alternative is to live a life of waffling waste filled with eternally open options. That’s definitely worse. So make a decision!