For the majority of us, we are blessed to have an abundance of choice. But consequently choices can be a burden, my first realization of the burden of choice was when I was faced with two important choices which I thought might of defined my life and being at that fickle state, I randomly googled the word ‘choice’ and that was my first encounter with American Psychologist Barry Schwartz with his lecture “The paradox of choices: why less is more“.

His intriguing lecture started out with the old adage: “with more choices, more benefits would be derived out of it” he then opposes to the adage, saying that choices actually leads to paralysis. meaning? Infinite choices  > high expectations over the options > exhaustion of the decision making process > dissatisfaction over the high expectation you’d expect from your decision > regret over the opportunity costs, and ultimately leads to unhappiness.

In the book “The Art of Choosing“, Sheena Iyengar supports Schwartz notion that ‘more is less’. As Barry Schwartz, Sheena Iyengar is a psychologist and she explains in her book that we make choices every day from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep and those choices make up who we are.

In her book, she did a fairly interesting  research that involved elementary school students which consists of what Iyengar called Anglo-American students, and half were the children of Japanese or Chinese immigrants who spoke their parents’ native language at home. “Ms. Smith” showed each child six piles of word puzzles and six marking pens. Each pile contained one category of anagram — words about animals, food, San Francisco, etc. — and each marker was a different color. A third of the children were told to pick whichever category and marker they wanted to play with. Another third were told they should work on a specific category with a specific marker. With the final third, Ms. Smith riffled through some papers and pretended to relay instructions from the child’s mother.

To the Anglo children, their mothers’ instructions felt like bossy constraints. The Asians, by contrast, defined their own identities largely by their relationship with their mothers. Their preferences and their mothers’ wishes, Iyengar writes, “were practically one and the same.” Doing what they thought their mothers wanted was, in effect, their first choice. (Read more through the New York Times review)

I was intrigued by the result of this research of what I though depicted the decision making process of an Asian society. As the author herself, being what they call a third culture kid, I have been living in two separate cultures,  in Asia  where your choices are dictated and defined  by parents, religion, or society, as well  living in an international environment where you have the independence of making your own choices.

In consequence, having the independence to make your own choices can be liberating and give more meaning to your life, but with the infinite amount of choices, it requires skills to ensure you make the right choice and stick with it.

Choice is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today, to who we want to be tomorrow – Sheena Iyengar