Quotes About Choice

One should be just as careful in choosing one's pleasures as in avoiding calamities.

Fainting with heat, he suddenly found himself in the cold, cold river. He had turned into a fish. Tail, body, fins - everything was fishlike, except the head, which was his own and still ached. He swam through the muted, cool, underwater darkness and thought that now he would remain a fish forever and never go back to the moutains. "I won't return," he said to himself. "It's better to be a fish, it's better to be a fish...

The writer is often faced with two choices--turn away from the reality of life's intimidating complexity or conquer its mystery by battling with it. The writer who chooses the former soon runs out of energy and produces elegantly tired fiction.

Fortunately, in real life, we are not in danger of these bizarre extremes unless we consciously work our way into them. I can see no situation in which I will be presented with a Draconic choice between reading books and watching movies; or between English and Igbo. For me, no either/or; I insist on both. Which, you might say, makes my life rather difficult and even a little untidy. But I prefer it that way.

You cannot plant greatness as you plant yams or maize. Who ever planted an iroko tree--the greatest tree in the forest? You may collect all the iroko seeds in the world, open the soil and put them there. It will be in vain. The great tree chooses where to grow and we find it there, so it is with the greatness in men.

As Viktor Frankl wrote, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." You have the power to choose how you respond. You are a product of your decisions, not your conditions. In

One solution to this is to bundle our decisions with "tripwires," signals that would snap us awake at exactly the right moment, compelling us to reconsider a decision or to make a new one. Think of the way that the low-fuel warning in your car lights up, grabbing your attention.

Studies of the elderly show that people regret not what they did but what they didn't do.

Moments matter. And what an opportunity we miss when we leave them to chance!

WHEN LIFE OFFERS US a "this or that" choice, we should have the gall to ask whether the right answer might be "both.

You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options. • You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information. • You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one. • Then you live with it. But you'll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.

This and that." Often, for example, we'll get stuck in a mindset of prevention OR promotion. If we can do both, seeking out options that minimize harm AND maximize opportunity, we are more likely to uncover our full spectrum of choices.

You cannot choose any of the current options you're considering. What else could you

What happened here is decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan, which in this case was a painful and invasive hip-replacement surgery. This behavior clearly is not rational, but it is human.

decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us and make us retreat to the default plan

Parents are often shocked, too, to hear that, once you control for aptitude, a person's lifetime earnings don't vary based on what college they attended. In other words, if you're smart enough to get into Yale, it doesn't really matter (from an income perspective) whether you go there or instead choose your much cheaper state university. The

What if we started every decision by asking some simple questions: What are we giving up by making this choice? What else could we do with the same time and money?

If you've finished Switch and are hungry for more, visit the book's website: heathbrothers.com

You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options.     ââ'¬Â¢ You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information.     ââ'¬Â¢ You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one.     ââ'¬Â¢ Then you live with it. But you'll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.

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One rule of thumb is to keep searching for options until you fall in love at least twice. If you've only identified one good candidate for a job, for instance, you'll have the strong urge to talk yourself into hiring her, which is a recipe for the confirmation bias.

In the short term, we prioritize fixing problems over making moments, and that choice usually feels like a smart trade-off. But over time, it backfires.

The Paradox of Choice

What if we didn't just remember the defining moments of our lives but made them?