Why Searching for the Best is Actually the Worst

[00:00:00]Herbert Simon wore one brand of socks.

[00:00:02]He ate the same breakfast every morning for decades, half grapefruit, oatmeal, and black coffee. He owned exactly one beret at a time. He lived in the same house for 46 years, and he believed that you only needed three sets of clothes.

[00:00:15]As he told his daughter, one on your body, one in the wash, and one in the closet ready to go. This simple man was also one of the most decorated thinkers of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize in economics. He won the Turing Award, the highest honor in computer science. He was a founding father of artificial intelligence, >> [music] >> and he made breakthrough contributions across six different fields. But, for a man who made so few novel choices every day of his life, perhaps his most curious characteristic is that he spent the majority of his career studying one [music] question. How do human beings actually make decisions? For Simon, the act of making a decision was something he considered to be a cost. Whether choosing a dishwasher or a spouse, searching for the very best takes time [music] and energy that most people forget to account for. So, for Simon, the optimal strategy, it wasn't optimizing at all. Find something good enough and stop. He called this satisficing. It's a combination of the words satisfy and suffice. When Simon did face a real decision, he'd consider a few alternatives, make his pick, and then move [music] on. He didn't agonize.

[00:01:19]He didn't second-guess. For most of the 20th century, economics was built on a model called the rational actor. The idea is that when people make decisions, they carefully weigh every available option and select the best one. It was the very foundation of how economists understood human behavior at the time.

[00:01:35]But, Simon disagreed. In fact, he thought it was impossible to be perfectly rational. In his view, to truly find the best option for any given decision, you'd need to understand [music] every alternative available to you.

[00:01:46]You'd need to accurately predict the consequences of each one, and you would need the time and mental capacity to compare them all against each other.

[00:01:53]But, no human can actually do this.

[00:01:55]You're always working with incomplete information and limited brainpower. So, the search itself becomes a problem.

[00:02:02]Maybe this is something you've experienced. Every hour you spend comparing, every option you add to the list, >> [music] >> is a cost of time and in some cases your sanity. Does the term decision paralysis come to mind?

[00:02:13]Psychologists who followed up on Simon's work [music] have shown that his personal philosophy was both efficient and wise. Shortly after Simon died in 2001, a team of researchers created a maximization [music] scale to measure where a person falls on the spectrum between maximizer and satisficer. And they found that it's almost always bad to be a maximizer.

[00:02:35]Maximizers tend to be less [music] satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They're typically less happy, more prone to regret, more likely to compare themselves endlessly to others.

[00:02:44][music] And they're more likely to opt for reversible decisions, even though it prevents them from committing [music] one way or the other. And there's actually evidence that maximizing tendencies are on the rise. Satisficers don't necessarily have low standards.

[00:02:57]Their standard is good enough for me or [music] for what I'm trying to do here, rather than the best out there. And that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices instead of haunted by the ones they didn't [music] make. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term flow, put it well.

[00:03:12]"By making the decision to invest in a choice, regardless of better options that may come along later, a great deal [music] of energy gets freed up for living instead of being spent on wondering how to live," he wrote. A century ago, the poet Robert Frost was making the same point in probably the most famous poem ever written by an American. You probably know the lines, even if you don't know the poem. "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." [music] Every graduation season, that poem gets read as a celebration of bold individual choice. Take the brave path. Be the one who deviates. But that misreads Frost's actual point. Look at the actual text.

[00:03:54]The two roads in the poem are described as the same, "just as fair," he writes.

[00:03:58]"No footsteps either way that morning on either of them." Frost wrote the poem partly to tease a friend, Edward Thomas, who on every walk they'd take together would dither over which path to take, and then at the end of the walk, insist that they should have taken the other one. The famous last stanza, the one written onto a million graduation cards, [music] is the narrator picturing a future self she turns a meaningless choice into a defining one. The difference the poem talks about didn't actually exist. There's a name for what makes this kind of [music] agonizing so seductive. It's called Fredkin's Paradox. We spend the most time on the decisions where the options matter the least, because when the options look alike, we can't tell them apart. So, that's why we spend a lot of energy trying to do it. The closer the choices, the harder it becomes to pick. Right now, we live in a world where we're chronically maximizing everything, just like Edward Thomas on those walks. Gen Z has coined the term life maxing. [music] In fact, they use maxing for just about any topic these days. Looks maxing means to improve the way you look, obviously, to the max. Money maxing means to extract the most amount of money from any given opportunity. There's also sleep maxing, fiber maxing. What about max maxing? Whatever type [music] of maxing suits your taste most involves making every single decision optimally to achieve the absolute [music] best.

[00:05:12]And right now, according to the calculations of an Oxford professor, we have over 100 million times more options available to us than our ancestors from the pre-industrial age. Social media has intensified the problem by acting as an infinite comparison engine. When you can see a curated highlight reel of everyone else's career, relationship, home, and vacation, the concept of good enough begins to feel like settling. The pull to keep searching for something better has poisoned even the most mundane moments for many of us. In fact, research shows that giving viewers many videos to flip between actually makes them more bored than if they simply focus on one from that same set. The mere notion that something better might be out there spoils the experience of the moment itself. And now, with artificial intelligence, the promise of optimizing everything becomes even more enticing. Our schedules, our diets, our wardrobes, our dating, even our creative output. But if Simon was right, the danger of these tools isn't [music] that they won't work, it's that they will expand the menu of options and comparisons even further, deepening [music] the disap pointment and the very paralysis they promised to cure. It has simply never been easier to do too much.

[00:06:20]The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami captured the maximizer's tragedy in a short story. In the story, a lonely young man and woman meet on a street corner and intuitively recognize that they are the 100% perfect match for each [music] other. It's a miracle. They hold hands and talk for hours. But then a sliver of doubt creeps [music] in. Was it really all right for one's dreams to come true so easily? They decide on a test. If they truly are perfect for each other, they can part, and they'll inevitably meet again. Then they'll know for sure, and they'll just get married right then and there. The boy walks off to the west, and the girl to the east.

[00:06:53]They really were perfect for each other.

[00:06:55]But, sadly, >> [music] >> they never meet again.

[00:07:00]If you like this video, you'll probably love my story about how Southwest Airlines turned their business around when they only had 140 bucks left and had to sell one of their planes and couldn't service all their routes anymore. It's a fascinating story of innovation under constraints.

[00:07:14]>> [music] >> And I cut it for my new book Inside the Box. That was probably a mistake because it's fascinating. But now I'm offering it for free. You can read it by clicking the link in the description. Thanks so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.