The Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and the Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir, authors of the book Scarcity, have concluded that we make bad decisions when we are strapped for time, too busy to think, and struggling to manage our obligations. Even if we take only a few hours a week of unplanned time, we can develop a bigger-picture focus or strategies for how our business actually runs.

A well-known joke tells of the economist in the wilderness who, when he sees a bear approaching, pulls out his computer and begins to calculate an optimal strategy. His colleague, appalled, says: ‘We don’t have time for that!’ ‘Don’t worry,’ replies the economist smugly, ‘the bear has to work out an optimal strategy too.’ Behind the joke lies a deeply serious point. The bear gains a decisive advantage by not suffering the illusion that the approach based on calculation might work.

What does this research tell us? First, that we love having options (“Whoa! Twenty-four jams?! Let’s check this out!!”), and, second, that we can’t deal with too many of them (“Um...so many...can’t decide; let’s go get some cheese”). In fact, most minds can choose effectively between only three to five options. If we’re faced with more than that, our ability to make a choice begins to wane—many more than that and our ability to choose completely freezes. It’s just the way our brains are wired. We’re attracted to having alternatives, and our modern culture almost idolizes options for their own sake. Get lots of options! Keep your options open! Don’t get locked in! We hear this sort of thinking all the time, and it seems to make sense, but there absolutely can be too much of this good option thing. When you toss in the Internet and the fact that we can now be made aware of seemingly every idea and activity on the planet after a subsecond Google search, most of us are suffering a pandemic attack of too many options.

The key is to reframe your idea of options by realizing that if you have too many options, you actually have none at all. If you get frozen in front of your daunting list of possibilities, then, in fact, you have no options. Remember that options only actually create value in your life when they are chosen and realized. We often teach our students that when an option grows up it becomes a choice. So, when you’ve got twenty-four jam options, you actually have zero options. Once you understand that, in choice making, twenty-four equals zero (and, boy, is it hard to believe when you love your options and worked so hard to find and come up with them), then you are free to take the next step: narrowing down.

Sophie was experiencing what behavioral economist Dan Ariely calls “loss aversion,” our human tendency to want to keep all options open. In a famous series of experiments profiled in the New York Times, Ariely showed just how far we’ll go to keep from closing doors. Students in the experiment played a computer game that paid real cash to look for money behind three doors on the screen. After they opened a door by clicking on it, each subsequent click earned a little money, with the sum varying each time. As players went through the 100 allotted clicks, they could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy, players learned, was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards. But if they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking visually and eventually disappear. Ignoring those disappearing doors turned out to be impossible. In fact, participants wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. And they frenetically continued keeping all their doors open even as penalties for switching got stiffer, costing not just clicks but cash fees.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.