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.

If you’ve got a list of twelve options, cross out seven, then rewrite your list with just the remaining five on it, and go to step three. Most of our students and clients freak out at this idea.

“You can’t just cross options off!”

“What if I cross out the wrong one?”

We understand. But we’re not kidding—you just cross them off. Remember, if you’ve got too many options, you really don’t have any, so you’ve got nothing to lose. And you won’t cross off the wrong one. We call this the Pizza-Chinese Effect. We’ve all experienced it. Ed sticks his head in your office and says, “Hey, Paula—we’re going out for lunch. Wanna come?”

“Sure!”

“We’re choosing between pizza and Chinese food—got a preference?”

“Nah—whatever’s good!”

“Okay—we’re getting pizza.”

“No, wait. I want Chinese!”

In that situation, when you gave your first answer (“whatever’s good”), you thought you meant it. You didn’t know that you had a preference until an unwanted decision occurred as a fait accompli.

Do yourself the favor of getting lots of options, then culling the list down to a short and manageable size (five max); then make the best choice that you can, given the time and resources available to you, get on with it, and build your way forward. Note that if you’re doing this with prototype iteration, you don’t have too much at stake, and you will be able to adjust as you go, before you really reach a significant investment. And once you make a choice—then embrace your choice and go with it. When the questions that lead to agonizing creep into your head, evict the thoughts, and direct your energy into living well the decisions you’ve made. Pay attention and learn as you go, of course, but don’t get caught with your eyes fixated on the rearview mirror of decision regret.

This letting-go step relies primarily on personal discipline. Keep your reframed understanding of decision making handy, and be sure to win the internal argument with yourself when you’re tempted to rehash and ruminate. Put in place the support you need to stick with it—find a life design collaborator or team to help remind you why you made the choice or choices you did; make a journal entry about your decision, and reread it when you get confused. Find what works to enable yourself to enjoy your choices fully.

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.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observes that “people tend to flirt only with serious things—madness, disaster, other people.” When we craft experiments, we are flirting with our many selves, a serious endeavor because it matters so much to us. The stronger the attraction, the more vulnerable we are to biases that affect how we perceive alternatives. Since we are not neutral about which outcome we prefer, we can fall into the trap of evaluating our experiments with a positive bias, one that encourages us to escalate commitment, even when we have evidence that it would be better to abandon ship or put the pet project on hold. A related danger is inadvertently putting a current work situation at risk. The exploration feels risk free, because we hide it from work associates. But the project becomes all-consuming, and it becomes obvious to everyone around us that our attention is divided.