Just Pull the Trigger

Today we have more options than ever before. From what to eat, to what to wear, to how to get around the list of choices is almost endless. In a lot of ways that’s really great - for the first time you can get incredibly tailored experiences that match almost exactly to your specific wants and needs. But it isn’t all good. Having so many choices is actually an incredibly daunting reality because now you have to consciously make those choices. At each decision point, there is some level of stress involved in evaluating the options and selecting just one from a potential myriad of them. With exponential increase in decision points, there is a possibility for exponential increase in stress, something your average American is already up to their eyeballs in.

In a vein related to the low-information diet recommended by many people such as Tim Ferriss, this environment has added increasing value to the skill set of being able to make a decision and stick to it. To transcend analysis paralysis and actually take action. The reality is that many of the choices in front of us are great choices and that our fear of selecting the wrong one is simply unfounded. 

To illustrate why this is important, let’s consider how I ended up eating McDonald’s as my first real meal when visiting Dublin, Ireland. Weary after a long day of traveling, a group of friends and I arrived in Dublin around noon a few days before St. Patrick’s day. We were excited to have finally arrived and we were starving. After dropping our bags at the hotel, the mission was to find some good local food and start the trip off right with a big Irish breakfast and some Guinness. Walking out from the hotel, we quickly came upon our first restaurant. After reviewing the menu posted outside on the door, we decided to keep walking a bit. The menu looked pretty good actually - delicious sounding options and reasonable prices - but we figured we should “see what else was out there.”

So onward we went, stopping at restaurant after restaurant, each time finding a reason that the restaurant wasn’t quite good enough. As we trudged onward we became more and more hungry and as a result more and more frustrated. After an hour of exploring we came across the golden arches of McDonald’s, the international sign for guaranteed shit food and unhappy employees. But at this point we were so hungry we didn’t care, we simply saw something familiar and we jumped at it. One sad Big Mac later and no Guinness, we had subdued the cries from our stomachs in exchange for a small piece of our souls. The following day for breakfast, we went back to the first restaurant and had one of the best meals of the entire trip. If only we had stopped there when we first arrived...

Sometimes you just need to pull the trigger (metaphorically speaking) on a great option and relinquish yourself from the never-ending search for the perfect option. 

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