Quotes from Barry Schwartz

What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.

I don't really read 'business books,' and I didn't think 'The Paradox of Choice' was a business book. I'm very surprised and gratified that the business world thought it was one.

The secret to happiness is low expectations.

Of course, bankers were always interested in making money. But when bankers had clients, they bore some responsibility for the clients' welfare.

People who work in financial services don't have one shred of concern about the well-being of the people they serve. They're only interested in themselves.

Too little attention is paid to the dark side of incentives. They are anything but a magic bullet. Psychologists have known this for years, but it seems largely hidden from the world of commerce.

Years of research in psychology has shown that rewards and punishments can be very effective in changing behavior. But, at the same time, they can create an addiction to rewards and punishments.

The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise. The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough.

The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.

Our institutions and values are in jeopardy as the mores of the market pervade all social life in this country. Loyalty, honesty, courage, discipline, patriotism, and commitment to family are being crowded out by the goals and rules of economic rationality -- do whatever makes the most money.

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.

Focus on what makes you happy, and do what gives meaning to your life

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.

The secret to happiness is low expectations.

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.

We are surrounded by modern, time-saving devices, but we never seem to have enough time.

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.

we have a tendency to look around at what others are doing and use them as a standard of comparison.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of choice in our lives robs us of the opportunity to decide for ourselves just how important any given decision is.

choose less and feel better.

Happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.

On the other hand, the fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better.

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.

We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn't satisfy us to the degree that we expect.