I have been struggling to find something to write about.
It's not that I don't have ideas. I have a long list of ideas. Every week I add to it, like a client conversation, a social media post, something I hear at a conference. Yet, I've been struggling to commit to writing.
Not because the ideas are bad. Because there are too many of them, and nothing has jumped out at me. I cannot choose.
I only really understood what was happening when I listened to David Epstein on the Good Life Project, talking about why more choices tend to make us less happy, not more. Here I was, overwhelmed by choice about what to write, listening to a podcast about why choice overwhelms us, and still unable to pick a topic.
David Epstein made his name with Range, a brilliant argument for the first half of life: explore widely, sample many paths, resist specialising too early, keep your options open. It's a compelling case, and a popular one; it gives permission to the wanderers among us.
His new book, Inside the Box, argues almost the opposite. Constraints, limits, and boundaries, the very things we spend our twenties and thirties trying to escape, turn out to be what makes creativity, focus, and satisfaction possible.
He credits Herbert Simon as the thinker who shaped this second act. Simon spent his career studying how humans make decisions. He concluded that true maximising, weighing every option to find the objectively best one, is essentially impossible, yet this is what economics textbooks taught us humans do.
What works instead is "satisficing". Setting a "good enough" standard and stopping there. Simon applied this to his own life with almost comic discipline: he wore one brand of sock, so he never had to choose again. Strangely, I have applied this discipline to my commute to Johannesburg, and I take the same flights, limit calculations of arrival and departure times, and choose the same aisle seat.
The people who try to maximise, who insist on finding the best possible choice from every option available, tend to be less satisfied with what they choose, more prone to regret, and more likely to compare their choice to the ones they didn't make. The "best imaginable" is a standard that can never be obtained. In my own life, I've found it exhausting to try to meet the highest possible standard for every decision.
I watch this play out with clients too. The clients who move forward aren't the ones who model one more scenario or consider all the options for their will. They're the ones who choose a "good enough" plan and commit to it. Simon's socks, in financial planning form.
I haven't deleted my list. But my deadline left me no choice but to choose a good-enough topic and commit.
So, the next time you're struggling with a decision, just ask yourself: is there a "good enough" decision that can move me forward?
Ps: The blog will take a mid-winter break while I’m out walking in some open spaces. I look forward to sharing fresh perspectives with you on my return.
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Kind regards,
Sunél
