Quotes About Trade-offs

It's so tempting to try to do it all, so as not to miss out. But to do all of those 'good things' means you'll do none of them well.

Sometimes exhaustion is not a result of too much time spent on something, but of knowing that in its place, no time is spent on something else.

So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

emotional cost of potential trade-offs does more than just diminish our sense of satisfaction with a decision. It also interferes with the quality of decisions themselves.

I am not suggesting that we will always, or even frequently, be better off "going with our gut" when making choices. What I am suggesting is there are pitfalls to deciding after analyzing. My concern, given the research on trade-offs and opportunity costs, is that as the number of options goes up, the need to provide justifications for decisions also increases.

Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing.

Across many domains of psychology, one finds that X increases Y to a point, and then it decreases Y....There is no such thing as an unmitigated good. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.

Clearly, our experience of choice as a burden rather than a privilege is not a simple phenomenon. Rather it is the result of a complex interaction among many psychological processes that permeate our culture, including rising expectations, awareness of opportunity costs, aversion to trade-offs, adaptation, regret, self-blame, the tendency to engage in social comparisons, and maximizing.

The benefits of having options are apparent with each particular decision we face, but the costs are subtle and cumulative.

there is a cost to having an overload of choice.

On the other hand, the more we think about opportunity costs, the less satisfaction we'll derive from whatever we choose. So we should make an effort to limit how much we think about the attractive features of options we reject.

When Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon initially introduced the idea of "satisficing" in the 1950s, he suggested that when all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved in getting information about all the options are factored in, satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy.

If people think about options in terms of their features rather than as a whole, different options may rank as second best (or even best) with respect to each individual feature.

According to standard economic assumptions, the only opportunity costs that should figure into a decision are the ones associated with the next-best alternative.

A menudo «lo bueno» es enemigo de «lo mejor».

I've set and met my career goals and I'm having tremendous professional success. But it's cost me my personal and family life. I don't know my wife and children anymore. I'm not even sure I know myself and what's really important to me. I've had to ask myself—is it worth it?

it's better to strive for a good solution and avoid disaster rather than trying to find the best solution

Resources are not infinite: you cannot solve tomorrow's problem if you aren't willing to abandon today's dud.

declared preferences and revealed preferences.)

A design can excel at one challenge only by compromising at others.

Given the costs of information, the perfect can be the enemy of the good.

You're going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don't do. You don't get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you're going to take. That's it.

At every turn, when humanity is asked the question, 'Do you want temporary economic gain or long-term environmental loss, which one do you prefer ' we invariably choose the money.

In an age in which economists take for granted that people equate well-being with consumption, increasing numbers of people seem willing to trade certain freedoms and material comforts for a sense of immutable order and the rapture of faith.