Barry Schwartz > Quotes

“Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Focus on what makes you happy, and do what gives meaning to your life”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“When asked about what they regret most in the last six months, people tend to identify actions that didn’t meet expectations. But when asked about what they regret most when they look back on their lives as a whole, people tend to identify failures to act.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“The secret to happiness is low expectations.”
― Barry Schwartz

“We are surrounded by modern, time-saving devices, but we never seem to have enough time.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues have shown that what we remember about the pleasurable quality of our past experiences is almost entirely determined by two things: how the experiences felt when they were at their peak (best or worst), and how they felt when they ended. This “peak-end” rule of Kahneman’s is what we use to summarize the experience, and then we rely on that summary later to remind ourselves of how the experience felt.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“we have a tendency to look around at what others are doing and use them as a standard of comparison.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“choose less and feel better.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“The existence of multiple alternatives makes it easy for us to imagine alternatives that don’t exist—alternatives that combine the attractive features of the ones that do exist. And to the extent that we engage our imaginations in this way, we will be even less satisfied with the alternative we end up choosing. So, once again, a greater variety of choices actually makes us feel worse.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”
― Barry Schwartz

“On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn’t satisfy us to the degree that we expect.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Something as trivial as a little gift of candy to medical residents improves the speed and accuracy of their diagnoses. In general, positive emotion enables us to broaden our understanding of what confronts us. This”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Most good decisions will involve these steps: Figure out your goal or goals. Evaluate the importance of each goal. Array the options. Evaluate how likely each of the options is to meet your goals. Pick the winning option. Later use the consequences of your choice to modify your goals, the importance you assign them, and the way you evaluate future possibilities.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“What we don’t realize is that the very option of being allowed to change our minds seems to increase the chances that we will change our minds.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Knowing what’s good enough requires knowing yourself and what you care about. So: Think about occasions in life when you settle, comfortably, for “good enough”; Scrutinize how you choose in those areas; Then apply that strategy more broadly.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“I think that in modern America, we have far too many options for breakfast cereal and not enough options for president.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“The way that the meal or the music or the movie makes you feel in the moment—either good or bad—could be called experienced utility.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Knowing that you’ve made a choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have rather than constantly second-guessing it.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“But clearly, the lesson is that incentives can be a dangerous weapon. A critic of this research might say that the problem is not incentives, but dumb incentives. No doubt, some incentives are dumber than others. But no incentives can ever be smart enough to substitute for people who do the right thing because it’s the right thing.”
― Barry Schwartz, Why We Work

“We are free to be the authors of our own lives, but we don't know what kind of lives we want to 'write.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“PART OF THE DOWNSIDE of abundant choice is that each new option adds to the list of trade-offs, and trade-offs have psychological consequences. The necessity of making trade-offs alters how we feel about the decisions we face; more important, it affects the level of satisfaction we experience from the decisions we ultimately make.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Emotions properly trained and modulated, Aristotle told his readers, are essential to being practically wise: We can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either case not properly. But to experience all this at the right time, toward the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner—that is the median and the best course, the course that is a mark of virtue.”
― Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing

“Buying jeans is a trivial matter, but it suggests a much larger theme we will pursue throughout this book, which is this: When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

“So it seems that neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we did feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occurring. And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices.”
― Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less