Given the abandon with which I jumped into the blogging world, you might be surprised to find that the lag time between buying my domain name and publishing my first post was 5 months…and the blog itself was in idea-gestation phase for nearly a year before I claimed my online space. By some stroke of dumb luck, I discovered Scott Bishop’s 28 Day Challenge on the same day I authored my first post. Without giving it a second thought, I got on board and faithfully rolled out a post a day for the month of February. I had committed, and not posting was not an option.
My posting has fallen off as of late, and it’s not because writing hasn’t been on my mind. It has been – I can’t tell you how many articles and informative tidbits I’ve bookmarked as blog fodder. The problem? Analysis paralysis. I’ve been “what-ifing” myself to death, leaping from one idea to the next, writing bits and pieces without committing to any idea long enough to fully develop it. It feels like I’m accomplishing something (and there’s nothing wrong with brainstorming), but staying in this ideation mode is slowly destroying my capacity to create. Contrary to popular belief, having more options is not always beneficial to one’s decision-making.
Dr. Sheena Iyengar, a management professor at Columbia University, demonstrated the pitfalls of having an abundance of options in her infamous jam study. The study “showed that when shoppers are given the option of choosing among smaller and larger assortments of jam, they show more interest in the larger assortment. But when it comes time to pick just one, they’re 10 times more likely to make a purchase if they choose among six rather than among 24 flavors of jam.”
To further demonstrate the more serious implications of having too many options, Iyengar studied more than 800,000 employees’ participation in their employer-sponsored 401(k) plans. She found that “When given two choices, 75 percent [of employees] participated, but when given 59 choices, only 60 percent did. In addition, the greater the number of options, the more cautious people were with their investment strategies.”
That’s the terrible thing about staying in “what-if” mode – the more options you develop for yourself, the harder it is to actually turn those thoughts into tangible actions.
How do you defeat analysis paralysis? I’ve found that making one seemingly insignificant decision can trigger a waterfall effect that spills over into other areas of your life. I’d been hemming and hawing about changing my hairstyle, and I finally did. In a big way. Freshly cut and newly blond, I felt empowered by the results of my decision. I went home, waded through my bookmarks, and decided on a list of topics I’ll write about in the upcoming month. I stopped thinking about rearranging my living room and finally getting my spare bedroom in order and actually did it.
Sometimes, the only way to move forward is to brashly take a healthy number of options off the table. In his brilliant The Art of War, Sun Tzu advises “At the critical moment, the leader of an army acts like one who has climbed up a height and then kicks away the ladder behind him…He burns his boats and breaks his cooking-pots; like a shepherd driving a flock of sheep, he drives his men this way and that, and nothing knows whither he is going.”
Take a stand. Make a decision and move forward. What-ifing keeps you in a safe zone – one in which you never stick your neck out and allow the could-happens to come to fruition. It’s like bowling with bumpers – easy and risk-free, but without copious amounts of alcohol, ultimately unsatisfying.
