Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: The freedom conundrum: Is freedom a friend or 'faux'?

Episode Date: January 18, 2020

What does freedom mean to you? How much freedom do you have and enjoy? Freedom, fulfilment and happiness seem to be what we are all chasing – but what does freedom really mean? Freedom for me is having the choice to do what I like, when I like, where I like with who I like. It is about choice. On one hand, we have never had so much freedom of choice. But at the same time, our level of perceived happiness seems to be decreasing and there has never been a higher growth in the incidence of anxiety and depression. So today I want to explore this conundrum in some detail, drawing on Barry Schwartz’s excellent observations and insights from his book ‘The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less’, and share some strategies on how you can fully enjoy your freedoms without suffering some of the apparent side effects. Get Invested is the podcast dedicated to time poor professionals who want to work less and live more. Join Bushy Martin, one of Australia’s top 10 property specialists, as he and his influential guests share know-how on the ways investing in property can unlock the life you always dreamed about and secure your financial future. Remember to subscribe on your favourite podcast player, and if you're enjoying the show please leave us a review. Find out more about Get Invested here https://bushymartin.com.au/get-invested-podcast/  Want to connect with Bushy? Get in touch here https://bushymartin.com.au/contact/  This show is produced by Apiro Media - http://apiropodcasts.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the Get Invested Podcast, where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how on where they invest their time, their skills, and their money, and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy, and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad and sometimes for no impact. Get Invested will help you to start living by design,

not by default. I'm going to help you to make it happen, not let it happen. You'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more, work less and leave a living legacy by investing now. Listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started, make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream, not someone else's. More episodes can be found on iTunes or at bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. Thanks for listening and now let's get invested. Hi Freedom Fighters What does freedom mean to you?

How much freedom do you have and how much freedom do you enjoy? Freedom, fulfilment and happiness seem to be what we're all chasing But what does freedom really mean? freedom for me is having the choice to do what i like when i like where i like with who i like and here's what some others have said when i asked them what freedom means to them freedom stands for something greater than just the right to act however i choose it also stands for securing everyone an equal opportunity for life liberty in the pursuit of happiness to most reasonable people freedom means more than just free to do whatever I want.

Freedom is bound up with the idea of possibilities. The idea of limitless possibilities is the ideal of limitless freedom. The idea that anything is potentially possible, that's what freedom means. Others said that freedom is me living my life however I want to. And someone else said, I think that freedom is your ability to carry out what you want to do. and freedom means freedom from necessity freedom to do what you want without having to sell yourself in order to survive for others it's about having freedom of choice and for some it's about having more and more of the very best of everything that picture of utopian perfection

overflowing with abundance. So, for some, freedom is that ever-elusive exercise, while for others, freedom seems to be taken for granted. What about you? What does freedom look and feel like? Do you feel like you've got much freedom? On the one hand, we've never had so much freedom of choice, but at the same time, our level of perceived happiness seems to be decreasing. And there's never been a higher growth in the incidence of anxiety and depression. Check out these stats. Because according to Beyond Blue and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, one in eight, which is 13% or 2.4 million Australians, are currently experiencing high or very high psychological distress. 15% of Australians, that's one in

seven have experienced depression. And that's equivalent to about 2.83 million people. 26.3% or over one quarter of Australians have experienced an anxiety disorder. And that's equivalent to just under 5 million people. And one in six or 17% of Australians are currently experiencing depression or anxiety or both. This is equivalent to 3.2 million people. And according to the ABS, in 2018, one in five, that's over 20%, or 4.8 million of us, have had a mental or behavioural condition, which is an increase in nearly 3% from around 4 million in the two years since 2015. And in the US of A, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness affecting 40 million adults that are aged 18 and older. That's over 18% of the

population every year. So why does it seem that the more freedom of choice we have, the less happy we are? And why does it seem that in many instances, often with those in third world countries who don't appear to enjoy our access to life's privileges but they seem to be much happier even though they've got much less. Now I think back to a time many years ago when I was in my early 20s. I was working as a project architect designing a wilderness safari lodge in a very remote part of Papua New Guinea called Tufi, a beautiful part of the coast. And a Kiwi Savaya and myself work six days a week in this absolute coastal paradise and I'll never forget an old wizened local fisherman turning to me one day and saying in broken pidgin English

me no kissin what pala you you work long cut up and talk hard for six day one pala week to asawa have a one laptop belong window on pala week what a asawa have a blast of a laugh belong me now i love pigeon english so it's an absolute crack up but let me translate what the fisherman actually said was that i don't understand you white fellas you work long and hard for six days a week to do on one day a week what i do all of my life and while i didn't do anything about it at the time his words of wisdom have always resonated and i'll never forget them and that old question of how much is enough keeps coming up. So this conundrum got me thinking, why is this? Is there any link between our relentless pursuit of more and more freedom and the

corresponding decline in happiness and increase in these debilitating and paralysing mental conditions? Why is it in the Western world that we've never had so much freedom of choice and things had never been better and yet our mental outlooks had never been worse. This conundrum of contrast has been gnawing at me for some time. We've never had it so good and never enjoyed so much abundance and freedom of choice yet we seem to be less and less happy about it.

Why? I've been reflecting on this for quite a while when I stumbled upon a great book by Barry Swartz that seems to perfectly capture the reasons behind the growing disease of our time. in his book, The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less. And while it was written over 15 years ago now, it seems to be even more relevant now than it was then.

So today, I want to explore this conundrum in some detail by drawing on Barry Swartz's observations and insights and sharing some strategies on how you can fully enjoy your freedoms without suffering some of the apparent side effects. it seems that most global affluent societies are driven by an underlying paradigm or a way of looking at the world and it goes something like this the more freedom we have the happier we are the more well-being we enjoy and the better off we are so we should take every opportunity to enhance our freedom and it seems we can't have too much freedom and it appears that almost

everyone living in the Western world believes this. It's like an unwritten right, a sense of entitlement. So if this is true, what does it mean to enhance freedom? Freedom seems empty unless there are real choices available for us to make with this freedom. So a logical extension of this is that the way to enhance freedom is to enhance choice. If more freedom means more well-being and more happiness, and more choice means more freedom, then what follows from this is that the more choice we have, the more well-being we have. Following this argument, the way to maximise freedom is to maximise choice. The more choice we have, the more freedom we have. And the more freedom we have, the more well-being we have.

Now, this way of thinking appears to become very deeply embedded in our psyches. And it But it doesn't occur to us to question the logic or impact of this. So today, we're going to question this by using Barry Swartz's thought-provoking research. So let's start with some examples. When I was growing up in the 1960s, you went to the local deli or the general store, and you could buy one type of white bread and one type of bottle of full cream milk and one type of Nescafe instant coffee. today in your local woolly supermarket market they'll offer you a choice of over 365 types of

bread yeah that's a different bread for every day of the year along with 237 different types and brands of milk including full cream skim reduced fat skinnies lactose free a2 goat's milk soy almond coconut blah blah blah you can also lose yourself amongst 239 different coffee product options. This is an absolute mind-boggling amount of choice. So let's have a look at another example in the world of telecommunications. During my very early school days, the only phone a family had was a Postmaster General's Department, or PMG, rented plastic rotary dial phone. And if you're lucky, you might have been able to get an ivory or a fern green colour instead of just black. And my cousins on the farm were on what was called a party line. If a phone

call was received at the local exchange, the operator would ring the line and every phone that was connected on that line for miles would ring. And anyone on that line could listen to the phone call. Often 20 more people were tuning into your chat. But then in the 1980s, phone communications were revolutionised with the introduction of the first mobile phone system that was actually a car phone it weighed 14 kilograms you could store just 16 numbers on it and it alerted owners of an incoming call by honking the horn or flashing the headlights now today you can confuse and lose yourself with over 332 mobile phone plans by 33 different providers offering over 24,000 different phone devices. And mobile phone subscriptions in

Australia now outnumber the people who can use them. Apparently we've got an estimated 31 million mobile phone accounts that are active across our population of 25 million. If you go into a phone store and ask for a phone that just makes calls, the answer is know what you're talking about. It's clear we're experiencing an unprecedented explosion of choice. And what about our work? We're now blessed with technology that will enable us to work every minute of every day from everywhere and anywhere on the planet. This incredible freedom of choice with work means we have to make a decision again and again and again on whether we should or shouldn't be working. We can be watching our kids play

sport with our mobile close handy. And even if they're switched off, every minute we're asking ourselves, should I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I send that text, a hangout, personal message? Should I be checking Facebook? And even if the answer to the question is no, it's going to make the experience of your kids sport very different and very distracted. Everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life's a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in has moved from limited choice to unlimited choice. And the question is, is this good news or bad news? And as Barry Schwartz says, the answer is yes. We all know what's good

about it, but what's bad about it? All of this choice has a number of potential negative effects on you. One is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. Take the example of the famous university jam study. Research has presented an array of tasty jams and enticed shoppers to buy a jar. In one version, there were six varieties shown to shoppers. In another, there were 24 jams. The second, larger array of jams attracted much more interest. But the smaller array led to 10 times more jam purchases. Less choice, it appears, leads to more active decisions.

Sometimes, too many options confuses and repels us. Researchers call it the paradox of choice. You might call it feeling overwhelmed by options. We've seen this happen in our work helping investors build good rental homes. A large home builder that we were dealing with reduced the number of options available after they had selected a plan and went about starting to customise it.

The way the company used to operate for home buyers to customise their homes was to use a home consultant in their design centre. Clients had to choose from 24 splashbacks for kitchen counters, 34 tile floors, 17 ovens, 21 refrigerators, 9 master bathtub packages, 13 master bath counters, 159 carpets 37 hardwood floors 41 vinyl sidings 150 kitchen cabinets 65 countertops 21 kitchen faucets 43 bathroom faucets and 26 fireplace options amongst many other choices on average their home consultants were spending about 20 hours with each client outfitting the property

the company then dramatically reduced options in many of these categories and introduced a limited number of finished boards as a cost-cutting measure and the results were striking. Reduced client decision paralysis resulted in four hours with a home consultant rather than 20. There were more purchases, less regret and higher customer satisfaction. The streamlining also enabled the builder to build homes more efficiently and economically because the construction crews could work faster with fewer errors when there were fewer variants. These cost savings were passed on to the clients in the form of no-cost upgrades, where the standard models contained features that would have been priced as upgrades previously. So while choice reduction

was undertaken to save money, it also increased client purchases and, most importantly, and increase client satisfaction. Here's another quite dramatic example. A study of Vanguard Investment Plans, a major mutual funds and index company, found that for every 10 more mutual funds offered, the rate of participation went down by 2%. So if you offer 50 fund options, 10% fewer participate than if you only offer 5.

Why? because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you just put it off until tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. And we need to understand that this means that many who put it off are going to have to eat dog food when they retire

because they don't have enough money put away, because they never got around to making a decision to invest in anything. so paralysis and not making any decision is a consequence of having too many choices and this is summed up well in the following poem poem by award-winning poet sylvia plath in her book the bell jar that she wrote when she was considering all of her life options when she was finishing uni. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous pop. Another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Europe and

Africa and South America. Another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and above and beyond these figs, I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest. And, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black and one by one they plop to the ground at my feet you see the impact of too much freedom of choice is that we do nothing we're paralyzed into inaction and so it's not just something trivial small like choosing what type of bread or what flavor of coffee it can be something

extraordinary consequential like choosing a life path or choosing a life partner and the paralysis you see when you see someone choosing the type of bread or type of coffee, you also see when you see people trying to make much more monumental choices. And the sad thing is that everything suffers in comparison. And that means the more options there are, the more comparisons you make, the more any of those options will suffer in comparison them with the other options that are available. And there's a funny book called Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, where he laments the problems of finding, developing, and sustaining significant and lasting romantic relationships in modern urban society. He believes that Tinder and Facebook

are catastrophic. And he thinks they're catastrophic because with unlimited options, why would you settle for anything less than perfection? A perception develops where perfection may only be one swipe right away. And more importantly, he thinks that because there are unlimited options, people don't expect to have to work to make their relationships great. Why work at it when there's always another person to check out? And he believes that for the most part, what makes relationships great is what people do in them after they've been formed,

not what people bring to them before they've been formed. So anything that stops you from forming a relationship with someone who may be perceived as less than perfect, however you define perfection, stops you from cultivating the kind of intimacy that would probably come if you both committed yourselves to making this union that neither of you could do on your own. Now it takes hard work to make great relationships and when there aren't many fish in the pond

people are more willing to do the work but when there appears to be an infinite number of fish in the sea people aren't willing to do the work and the result is more matches that are collectively much less satisfying. Now the second effect is that even if we happen to manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice

we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would if we had fewer options to choose from. And Swartz believes there are several reasons for this. One of them is that with over 175 salad dressings, 230 soups and over 40 toothpastes to choose from in the supermarket if you buy one and it's not perfect it then becomes easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better.

And what happens is that this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of making the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. And then there's the perceived opportunity costs as the way in which we value things

then depends on what we compare them to. When there are lots of alternatives to consider, it's easy to imagine the attractive features of all of the alternatives you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you did choose. These perceived opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific.

And the more options that you are to consider, the more attractive features of the options are going to be reflected by us as these opportunity costs. So whenever you're choosing to do one thing, you're choosing not to do other things. And those other things may have lots of attractive features and it's going to make what you are doing less attractive. Next, there's the escalation of expectations. This hit me when I recently went to buy an ice cream. Now, when I was a boy, I'm starting to sound like an old and ancient now. Ice cream only came in one flavour, vanilla. It was

a very occasional special treat and it was always the absolute bee's knees. Then in my teens they introduced three flavours, vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. And you could even buy all three in one tub of Neapolitan. What a jackpot. Now I fell in love with chocolate ice cream, so the chocolate always disappeared first. And my love for chocolate ice cream has stayed with me. So recently, I stumbled into a street-side Norgan Vars ice cream parlor on a very hot summer's afternoon, and I was just dying to cool the jets with some of my favourite chocolate delight. But when I asked for a chocolate ice cream, the response was, What type, sir?

I replied, what do you mean? Chocolate. But what sort of chocolate, he asked. Now I'm thinking, how hard can this be? Just give me good old-fashioned chocolate. Now, after a puzzled look, I got, well, we don't have that flavour, but you can choose from chocolate peanut buttery swirl, peanut buttery fudge, chocolate peppermint crunch,

chocolate therapy double choc, super fudge chunk, chocolate fudge brownie chocolate roasted and toasted chocolate chip cookie chocolate fudge brownie chunky monkey half baked cookies and cream chalk toffee candy cane english toffee fudge ripple hokey pokey mint chocolate rocky road rum and raisin stracchietella nutella dolce lecce caramel almond brittle cinnamon chocolate milk and cookies new york super fudge chunk fish food chocolate ice cream that the tonight dough totally baked chocolate and vanilla ice cream chocolate comfort devil's food chocolate chocolate macadamia coconutally fair dublin mudslide dutch chocolate chocolate chocolate chip oreo cookies and cream chocolate

industrial chocolate choco cherry chocolate chip chocolate custard computer chip coffee choc swiss mocha chocolate obsession chocolate orange honeycomb crunch milk chocolate old English toffee, vanilla choc fudge or Vienna coffee choc. So which one do you want? Now that's 53 different flavours and combinations of chocolate ice cream. And after recovering from the shock, I said I just wanted the kind of chocolate ice cream that used to be the only kind. He didn't even know what I was talking about. So I ended up spending an extra half an hour trying mini spoonfuls of what I thought would be the best of these different types of chocolate ice cream, until I could barely recognise or taste the difference

anymore. So I just surrendered and chose one in frustration and walked out of the store with the best chocolate ice cream that I'd ever had. Yes, all this choice made it possible for me to do better. But here's the kicker. I felt worse. Why? The reason I felt worse is that with all these options available, my expectations about how good the chocolate ice cream should be went up. When it only came in one flavour, I had no particular expectations. But when they came in a multitude of flavours, damn it, one of them should have been absolutely perfect.

And what I got was really good, but it wasn't perfect. So I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations that people have about how good those options are going to be. And what that is going to produce is less satisfaction with the results, even when they're good results. Now, that old saying that my grandpa used to say around the fire,

that everything was better back when everything was worth, is starting to ring true and the reason when there was a choice of one was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise nowadays in our affluent industrial world that we live in with perfection being the expectation the best we can hope for is that the stuff is as good as we expected you'll never be pleasantly surprised because our expectations have gone through the roof. And this brings us back to the conclusion that the current secret to happiness is to lower your expectations. And settling for what you get isn't such a bad thing. One consequence of buying an average chocolate

ice cream back then when there was only one kind to buy is that when you're dissatisfied and when you ask why, who's responsible, the answer's really simple. The world is responsible. Why? What else could you do? But when there are multitudes of different flavours available and you buy one that's disappointing and you ask why, who's responsible, it's equally clear that the answer to the question is you. You could have done better.

With a plethora of different types of chocolate ice cream available, there's no excuse for failure. so when people make decisions and even when the results of the decisions are good they feel disappointed about them they blame themselves as I've already mentioned clinical depression has exploded in the western industrial world

in the last generation and I believe a significant contributor to this explosion of depression is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves they think that they're at fault and so the net result is that we do better in general but we feel worse so let's revisit our underlying paradigm and our way of looking at the world that we're led to believe is true but is starting to appear false now there's no question that some

choice is better than none but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. Now there's some magical amount, I don't think anyone knows what it is, but I'm confident that we've long since passed the point where options improve our well-being. What we're talking about here is a particular problem of modern affluent western societies and what's so frustrating and infuriating about this is that our multitude of expensive complicated choices is not simply that they don't help, they actually hurt. They actually make us feel worse off. What this amounts to is that the proliferation of possibilities afforded by modern life,

coupled with the emphasis on our freedom of choice, can mean that we blame ourselves excessively when we fail to choose wisely. And since excessive self-blame can lead to depression, there's good reason to believe that our society's abundance of choice is correlated with the modern epidemic of unhappiness. So what can we do about it in a world where we have unlimited choice and heightened expectations of perfection in everything we do without the time to do anything about it?

Well, in Swartz's view, we need to switch from being maximisers to satisfiers. a maximizer is someone who seeks expects and accepts only the very best as a result their choices are more demanding and less fulfilling perfectionists fall into this group and for many years i fell into this category until my good wife sonja slapped it out of me although i must admit i still have these tendencies i like going down endless rabbit holes researching the topic of freedom for this episode, it's an absolute case in point. But imagine that you're shopping for a pair of runners. If you aspire to make the absolutely best purchase that can be made and therefore feel the urge to check out the alternatives, to be sure that you've found

just the right pair, you might be a maximiser. As a decision strategy, maximising is an overwhelming task since maximizers aspire to choose only the very best. If you're a maximizer, every option has the potential to snare you into an endless tangle of considerations. For example, since there are endless possibilities out there and only the best will do, maximizers necessarily spend a long time on product comparison both before and after they make a purchasing decision. In fact, studies conducted by Swartz and his colleagues show that when faced with a choice, maximizers also exert a lot of effort on trying to imagine all the other possibilities, even those alternatives that are only hypothetical. For instance, when confronted with a choice between an expensive high-performance

pair of runners and a cheap pair, the maximizer will be very quick to imagine finding a hypothetical cheap pair of high-performing trainers. Now, not only do maximizers overwhelm themselves in this way, but once they've finally overcome the difficulty of choosing and actually made their choice, they're more likely than others to feel unsatisfied with it. For this reason, maximizers are especially susceptible to buyer's remorse. For instance, a maximizer who succeeds in buying a great pair of shoes after an extensive search which will nevertheless be irked by the options they didn't have time to investigate, and their imagination of what might have been takes over, making the item they've chosen less attractive.

In our world of infinite choices, it's difficult and emotionally exhausting to be a maximiser, never settling for less than the best, because the more we invest in a decision, the more we expect to realize from that investment. But as you'll hear shortly, you don't have to continue to be a maximizer. There's a simple choice you can make and it will allow you to live a much happier existence by becoming a satisficer. Schwartz defines a satisficer as someone who's able to settle for good enough. With this approach, choices are less demanding and more fulfilling. I'm sure you all know people who can choose quickly and decisively These people are satisficers

and they're characterised by having a certain standard they adhere to when choosing instead of having to have the best as their goal Satisfying is a fairly simple decision strategy It means searching until you find the option that meets your standards and stopping at that point So a Satisfier's world is divided into two categories, options that meet their standard and options that don't. So when making a choice, they only have to investigate the options within the first category.

For instance, a Satisfier looking to buy a new pair of training shoes will settle for the first pair she finds that meets her criteria, in terms of fit, quality, appearance and price. a satisficer isn't concerned about better shoes or better bargains just around the corner but aside from saving time what's the advantage in satisficing well satisficers are more happy with the choices they make and importantly they're also more happy with life in general because satisficers don't compare among endless alternatives when choosing and they don't experienced a decrease in satisfaction that comes from contemplating what the other options might have afforded them. And since they don't strive for perfection when making decisions, they won't

spend time thinking about the hypothetical perfect world in which options exist that offer complete satisfaction. This makes it much easier for them to be satisfied with their choices and with life in general. In fact, in questionnaires measuring happiness and optimism, satisficers are consistent high scorers. So, are you currently a maximiser or a satisficer? Now, Swartz developed a quick survey that will help you to pinpoint where you are on the spectrum, so you can then decide what, if anything, you need to change so you can enjoy life more. Here's the following 13 quick statements that distinguish maximizers from satisficers. You just need to rate yourself from 1 to 7, with 1 being completely disagree and 7 being

completely agree for each of the following. So see how you go. Whenever I'm faced with a choice, I try to imagine what all the other possibilities are, even ones that aren't present at the moment. No matter how satisfied I am with my job, it's only right for me to be on the outlook for better opportunities. Three, when I'm in the car listening to the radio, I often check other stations to see if something better is playing, even if I'm relatively satisfied with what I'm listening to. Four, when I watch TV, I channel surf, often scanning through the available options even

while attempting to watch one program. Five, I treat relationships like clothing. I expect to try a lot on before finding the perfect fit. Six, I often find it difficult to shop for a gift for a friend. Seven, choosing movies on Netflix is really difficult. I'm always struggling to pick the best one. Eight, when shopping, I have a hard time finding clothing that I really love. Nine, I'm a big fan of lists that attempt to rank things, e.g. the best movies, the best singers, the best athletes, the best novels, et cetera, et cetera. Ten, I find that writing's really difficult, even if it's just writing a letter to a friend,

because it's so hard to word things just right. I often do several drafts of even simple things. Eleven, no matter what I do, I have the highest standards for myself. Twelve, I never settle for second best. And last but not least, 13, I often fantasize about living in ways that are quite different from my actual life.

If your average rating is higher than 4 for these questions collectively, then you're likely to be a maximiser. When Schwartz looked at averages from thousands of subjects, he found that about a third scored higher than 4.75 and a third lower than 3.25. Roughly 10% were extreme maximisers, averaging greater than 5.5, and 10% where extreme satisfies, averaging lower than 2.5. So where did you end up? Where did you rate?

Now unfortunately I still tend towards being a maximiser, but luckily my wife Sonia is always there to balance out my obsessions. So faced as we are with endless choices, you're fortunate if you're a satisficer, since the number of available options won't have a significant impact on your decision making. And the good news is that most of us have the capacity to be satisfacers, even those who consistently feel overwhelmed by choice.

And what's required is to let go of any expectation that the best is the only acceptable solution and to settle for the first option that does the job. This means learning to say a quick no to everything that doesn't do the job so you can say yes to the option that matters. Or in other words, if an option doesn't result in an immediate hell yeah response, then it's a no. It's a bit like a goldfish confided to a bowl

and when the bowl shatters, you don't have freedom, you have paralysis. If everything becomes possible, you decrease satisfaction and you increase paralysis. But let's be clear here. I don't think having a lot of choice is what creates sadness and depression. I think sadness and depression happen when you combine all this choice with incredibly high standards and expectations. So to enjoy life more, everybody needs to create their own self-defined fishbowl because the absence of some form of boundaries to your world is a recipe for misery and disaster.

So where's the sweet spot of choice but not infinite choice? And how do you achieve this? It won't be the same for every person or every situation. But what's clear is much more is not better than less. And the hard part of all this is to find our sweet spot of freedom of choice for each and every situation. It's hard work, but it will pay off, because you can enjoy the benefits of freedom without paying the price.

And what does any of this all have to do with happiness? Well, as our material affluence grows, our happiness grows, but it levels off. And it levels off at a much lower income level than you might expect. A well-known research study by two Nobel Prize winners in the US indicated that any income over $75,000, and this was some years ago, so it's probably equivalent to about $120,000 in Aussie dollars, doesn't produce much more happiness and well-being.

So what is true is that adding material affluence and the freedom of choice that it brings doesn't do much for the collective well-being of the people who experience that level of affluence, which means that many of us may be directing our resources in the wrong places. Repeated studies demonstrate that what really makes us happy is the quality of our relationships and our connectiveness, our network of family, friends and loved ones,

and the community groups that we attach to. The stronger our social ties, the happier we are. But here's the interesting thing. Close relationships and social ties don't liberate us, they actually constrain us. They don't set us free. They create self-imposed limitations. If you're close to your family, you're likely to base your life around staying close to them. Your job will likely be in the area within 100 kilometers of where your family lives. So all of a sudden, the world of possibilities and limitless freedom of choice has been reduced.

The more connected you are to your town, the people in the town, and your family members, the more you're going to limit your own possibilities so you can reinforce the benefits of this. So even though these close connections limit us it's a price worth paying because all of the benefits that come with being closely connected with others make it worthwhile.

And this is not actually a price that you're paying as it's part of the benefit. When you're constrained by your network of connections to others all of a sudden you're not faced with a limitless number of options, you're faced with a smaller number of options. The fact that you care about the welfare of these people suddenly makes an unmanageable array of options into a manageable set of choices. So in our modern world of limitless possibilities,

these connected constraints become part of the benefit of ties to others, not a cost. so the message here is that we all need self-imposed restraints and limits based around our core values of what's important to us along with the vision that we have for our preferred life and then we use these as a magnet a compass and a filter to start saying no to anything that's not in alignment and not taking us closer to what we believe and how we want to live this is contrary to the commonly held and i believe mistaken notion that more and limitless options and unfettered abundance is the road to freedom fulfillment and happiness it keeps coming back to how much is enough for you and your family what are the guiding limits

and the filtering lens that you're going to use to look at the world to achieve your unique brand of freedom and happiness so that you have the right amount and type of freedom to create the kind of life that you really want without having so much freedom that you find it almost impossible to put one foot in front of the other for fear of being disappointed. This is why I start every conversation with the people that we help to invest in property with questions around what does your ideal life look like and how much does that lifestyle cost. It's really important to get clear on this as a starting point. It's what we call living by design not by default. It's about creating your own guiding principles, rules and rituals, which then become your happy

habits. So, here we are, living at the pinnacle of human possibility, awash in material abundance. As a society, we've achieved what our ancestors could at most only dream about, but it's come at a great price. We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn't satisfy us to the degree that we expect. We're surrounded by modern time-saving devices but we never seem to have enough time. We're free to be the authors of our own lives but we don't know exactly what kind of lives we want to write. The so-called success of modernity turns out to be bittersweet and everywhere we look it appears that a significant contributing factor is the overabundance of choice. As we've seen, having too many choices produces psychological distress,

especially when combined with regret, concern about status, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire and expectation to have the best of everything. But the good news is that there are steps we can take to mitigate and even eliminate many of these sources of distress. But they aren't easy. They require practice, discipline and perhaps a new way of thinking. So what can you do to optimise your wellbeing by hitting the sweet spot of our unlimited freedom of choice? To manage our energy and make better decisions, we need to analyse where we can reduce decision making in our lives using rules and systems so we can focus on what matters. Try to be a satisficer whenever possible, and only maximise on the things that really

matter. Here's a summary of a number of different attitudes and approaches that may help you in this endeavour. Firstly, choose when to choose. According to some studies, our current world results in us making an average of 35,000 micro decisions a day, which leads to decision fatigue and overload. Important decisions are usually not decisions that you want to make when you're tired, or at the end of a string of hard and involved decisions where decision fatigue sets in. Research reveals that good decisions require mental energy that gets depleted by repeated decision making, amongst other things, and impacts decision objectivity and quality. In one study, prisoners who appeared early in the morning before a judge

received parole about 70% of the time, while those who appeared before the same judge late in the day were paroled less than 10% of the time. Effective conscious decision-making requires cognitive resources, and because increasingly complex decisions place increasing strain on these sources, the quality of our decisions declines as the complexity of decisions increases.

In short, complex decisions overrun our cognitive powers or our brain power. That's because decision making is an energy consuming process. According to Prince Gooman, a minimalist co-founder of 15 Centre and professor of neuromarketing, when it comes to making decisions, our brain functions in two modes. One mode is largely automatic, it makes reactive decisions based on intuition. But the second mode is deliberate, it makes rational analytical decisions. He explains that the second mode is finite, which means we can only make so many logical decisions before the tank's empty.

Now you're likely wondering, how many decisions on average can we make every day before the tank's empty? Each of our dozens of daily decisions requires our conscious attention and mental energy. To make such a decision, we need to compare options, analyse the pros and cons, try to predict possible outcomes, etc, etc. Now imagine doing this 75 times a day. Do we take an umbrella or not? Do we get to work by taxi or use a bus?

Do we order pizza or sushi? Do we watch a movie or go for a walk? Watch this movie or that movie? The list of decisions we need to make daily is long and diverse. It's no wonder we feel tired by the end of the day. So now that you know that your decision tank gets empty around 75 decisions, it's clear that excessive unimportant mini decisions waste this finite resource and take a toll on your day-to-day well-being prince german explains that the many decisions we make every day

from deciding to respond to a mobile notification to picking which shoes to wear eat the fuel we need for making really important decisions so it's logical to minimize the small and low priority choices we make wherever possible and save that energy for decisions that matter. If I reduce options, I minimize decisions. And if I minimize many decisions, I have more willpower left in my tank for the important stuff. So decide which choices in our lives really matter and focus our time and our energy there, letting other opportunities pass us by by creating habits and rituals that eliminate the need for these basic decisions. It's probably the reason why steve jobs only ever wore black t-shirts and blue jeans he didn't have to decide what to wear

so he could reserve his decision making power to much more important decisions by restricting our options we'll be able to choose less and feel better so stick to things that you always buy avoid the new and improved tendency don't scratch unless you there's an itch and remember that you can never take advantage of every single opportunity in the world so stop trying to find them all. And try introducing a few non-negotiables into your weekly schedule. If your Saturday morning walk, gym class or going for surf is a non-negotiable for you or maybe Sunday brunch with the family, lock it in and the decision's already been made. Here are some other simple routine tips that might also help you out. Firstly, don't schedule

back-to-back meetings leave at least half an hour between secondly tackle your big important tasks in the morning leave emails and social media to the end of the day thirdly have the same breakfast every day and organize your lunches in advance also have a work a loosely work uniform where you wear the same outfit every day or a work week collection of five outfits you wear every week this makes it easy because every day you put on the same thing you don't have to think about it one less thing to worry about in your life all your focus can then be on the more important decisions if you fully set up regular appointments to exercise at the same time every day a week creating these types of rules and second order decisions is a great way to limit your decision

making then we move to the second major suggestion of swartz and that is to be a chooser not a picker. Shorten or eliminate deliberations about decisions that are unimportant to you. If none of the options meet your needs, create better options that do. Thirdly, satisfy as more and maximise less. Try to be as satisfied as whenever possible and only maximise on the things that really matter. Fourthly, limit how much you think about the attractive features of the options that you reject. Unless you're truly dissatisfied, stick with what you always by. Don't worry that if you do this, you'll miss out on all the new things the world has to offer. Fifthly, make your decisions non-reversible. Agonizing over whether you could have done

better is a prescription for absolute misery. Knowing you've made a choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving other areas of your life rather than constantly second-guessing over the decisions that you've made. Six, practice gratitude. Start every day with thank yous. Add a gratefulness practice to your life to remind you of what you already have. You'll be absolutely amazed at how much better you feel. Seven, regret less.

Now, that's a lot easier said than done. Eight, expect adaptation, which is the fact that the fun wears off over time when you get used to the new choice, be it a new car, house, clothes, gadget. Recognise that you're going to get used to things quickly, so don't expect that any purchase or change will have a lasting impact on your happiness. Set yourself decision time limits as well. Spend less time looking for the perfect thing so that you won't have huge search time and cost to impact against the satisfaction you derive from what you actually do choose. Nine, control your expectations. Reduce the number of options you consider

Again, be a satisfier rather than a maximiser And allow for some serendipity 10. Curtail social comparison Stop worrying or caring about how you stack up against your peers 11. Learn to love self-imposed constraints Establish a set of non-negotiables, your rules and rituals By deciding to follow your rule we then avoid having to make a deliberate decision again and again.

Also learn to say no to abundance and then following your own rules eliminates these unnecessary choices in our daily life. So to summarise all of this let me quote again from the paradox of choice. The fact that some choice is good doesn't necessarily mean that more choice is better. However, as demonstrated, there's a cost to having an overload of choice. As a culture, we are enamoured and enamoured of freedom, self-determination and variety, and we're reluctant to give up on any of our options.

But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, distress and to dissatisfaction. All of this means that we'd be better off if we embraced voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice instead of rebelling against them. We'd be better off seeking what was good enough, something that's good enough to do the job instead of seeking the best.

We'd be better off if we lowered our expectations about the results of our decisions. We'd be better off if the decisions we made were non-reversible. And we'd be better off if we paid less attention to what others around us are doing. Now all of these conclusions fly in the face of conventional wisdom that believes that the more choices you have the better off you are, that the best way to get good results is to have very high standards and that it's always better to have a way to back out of a decision than not. Given what we've talked about on this episode it appears that

this conventional wisdom is wrong when it comes to what satisfies us in the decisions that we make And as author John C. Maxwell famously put it, life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you. And it's clear to me that if you want to enjoy your version of freedom, we need to follow the sage advice of Jocko Willink, a retired Navy SEAL whose continued success revolves around the simple belief that discipline equals freedom. real freedom follows from having a disciplined mind a disciplined body and a disciplined spirit thanks and be disciplined freedom fighters well freedom fighters how good was that to get a summary of all this investment gold in the show notes, just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au. That's H-E-L-L-O at khgroup.com.au. Or check us

out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash Get Invested. I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the Get Invested podcast. So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow. Thanks for watching!