Pratique du Shadowing: Why trying to make the “best” choice can make you less happy - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo
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If you're anything like me, and you often struggle with trying to make the right choice, this episode of immersion could possibly change your life.
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Doing research for this episode with the book,
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The Paradox of Choice has honestly been one of the first episodes in a long time where I know
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that I'm going to be living differently after this research.
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So let's start this out with a brief question for you regarding making the right choice or being happy with your choice,
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because those don't always go hand in hand.
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For example, would you rather go on a vacation that is about 70 % perfect or ideal, but you love it, you have a great time?
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Or would you rather go on a vacation that is 95 % ideal or close to perfect,
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but you end up not being able to enjoy it as much?
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I think most of us, given those two choices, would choose option A.
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We'd rather be happy with the vacation option
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but due to this really interesting way of living called maximizing
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which we're going to get into many of us end up living closer to that option B.
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Today we're going to be unpacking the difference between satisficing
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or choosing an option that is good enough and learning to see the good in it and appreciating it.
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I know it sounds a bit trite but stay with me.
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Or maximizing where we try to make the best optimal choice,
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but then we often get plagued with regret or social comparison or wondering if it was the right choice later.
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And it really is not an enjoyable way to live.
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So today we're going to unpack what these terms are, some interesting nuance in the research, and then we're going to talk about practical steps for
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when we might choose to satisfy how to do it a bit more often
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so that we can be happier with the decisions we make and thus the lives that we're living.
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And don't worry, this doesn't mean just settle
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and just choose to only see the good in things
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because actually this can open up more bandwidth or energy for the things
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that are important for us to focus a bit more on.
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Welcome to Immersion, 30
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Minutes Beneath the Surface.
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I'm your host, Pamela, and here we focus on psychology and philosophy topics to find meaning in the modern world.
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Let's dive in.
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So where do these terms come from?
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Herbert Simon introduced the term satisficing in the 1950s as a model of bounded rationality,
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discussing the idea that humans will often choose a good enough option rather than exhausting every single option.
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And we know this is true.
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When you're dating, especially if you live in a place like
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New York City.
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You're not going to date every possible person that could be a viable prospect in the dating market.
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You're going to date a few people and then choose someone or choose to be single.
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You won't try to meet every single person.
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So we know that this is how we make any sort of choice.
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At some point, something has to be good enough.
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We cannot look at every single pair of jeans in your town before choosing a pair of jeans.
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And this idea of satisficing was popularized in Barry Schwartz's book, The Paradox of Choice, which we're discussing in this series.
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And he came up with the term maximizing to describe the opposite.
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When people try to get as much information as possible, to compare as many options as possible, to try to make the best choice,
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as opposed to satisficing, which is making a good enough choice.
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And just hearing about these two modes of living, you're probably already coming up with the pros and cons for maximizing and and satisficing.
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But before we get into some of those, let's do a really brief quiz.
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This is adapted from the quiz that is in Barry Schwartz's book.
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We're going to just do four questions instead of a longer one,
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and it'll help you get a good idea of where you're at on this spectrum.
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Question number one, when you're choosing a song to listen to or a show to watch on streaming, do you often take a while to decide?
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And even after you decide, do you sometimes flip around or wonder if you made the right choice out of all the options.
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When you shop for a new appliance like a coffee maker,
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do you choose pretty quickly and find something that meets your needs and then you're done with it?
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Or do you feel inundated by research options and overwhelmed with trying to find the right option?
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And then for questions three and four, you'll see how much you agree with the following statements.
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Three, no matter what I do, I have the highest standards for myself.
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4. I often fantasize about living lives that are different from my own
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and other paths that are quite different from my actual life.
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And of course you can check out
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Barry's book for the full quiz and there probably are some quizzes online.
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I can link one if I find one in the show notes.
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But here you get the sense that maximizing and satisficing is not across the board.
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So for instance, when I'm choosing a consumer good, like if I was choosing a coffee maker, I would be able to choose that pretty quickly.
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But numbers three and four, when it comes to standards for myself or what life path I'm on,
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these more macro views, I really sometimes struggle or I especially have in the past and it's something that I'm working on.
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So it's helpful to note what are the areas that you satisfy
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and what are the areas that you maximize because generally nobody is across the board one or the other.
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And you might notice these trends for yourself too.
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Maybe when it comes to media, like the first example, you start watching something
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and then you five minutes later click out of it and try watching something else.
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And by the end of the evening, you've watched a little bit of like four videos and weren't really that invested in any of them.
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We're going to get into a little later why that happens,
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how often the more options we consider it makes us less invested in the option we end up going with
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because that lack of satisfaction that's part of what happens when we evaluate this way.
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And so as you might already be starting to gather, it is really important to learn about this for our well -being.
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Maximizers tend to report more regret, more social comparison, or at least more negative views of the self when they do participate in social comparison,
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less satisfaction, more depression or depressive symptoms.
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And it's important to note that the direction is not necessarily causal.
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This is something
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Barry notes in his book is that we don't know
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if these things are just correlated or if maximizing actually makes us less happy.
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I personally think that it is cyclical.
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Barry has noted that maximizing probably makes us feel worse about a lot of things.
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If you think about it, if you're trying to make the perfect choice, even after you make a choice,
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you'll often wonder, was that the right choice?
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You remember that question from the end of the quiz.
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Do you often think about other possible lives?
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Because if you're really trying to make the best choice, you might think, oh, I'm a teacher,
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but I've always wondered about going into administration within the school
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or maybe going back to school and actually becoming a therapist instead.
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And, you know, when I was younger, I wanted to be a marine biologist.
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And I wonder how my life would have turned out if I had done that.
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And maybe you log on LinkedIn
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and you see someone doing something totally different like they went from teaching more into consulting
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and oh it looks like they're making a lot of money
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and traveling and what would
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that life be like versus someone satisficing in this area might be more likely to say
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this is the life I chose this is good enough
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it meets my standards why would I think about all those other paths
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it's not relevant for me going back to some of my personal theories I personally think
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that a little bit of it has to do with personality types.
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If you're very creative or imaginative, or if you have perfectionistic tendencies,
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or if you believe you have a lot of control over your life, a high internal locus of control and a lot of agency,
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all of these things are going to lead you to try to optimize
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or might lead you to imagine other lives for yourself.
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So I think there's a lot of reasons we might be a maximizer.
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Maybe your parents had really high standards.
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Maybe you have a bit of diagnosed or undiagnosed OCD.
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So you feel a bit of a compulsion to keep coming back to a certain thought.
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And maybe working with a certain professional on that would help.
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I think that there are so many causes that could lead someone to be a maximizer that are not as simple as,
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oh, you just want to make the best decision.
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There's a lot that could lead you to be that way.
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Now, you might be wondering, why would having a very high sense of agency lead to issues?
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Isn't that a good thing?
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And largely it is.
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But if you believe that you have a lot of control over your life and you have all of these options,
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you're going to feel bad about yourself if you made a choice that wasn't as ideal.
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You're thinking, I could have prevented that problem and I didn't.
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And the problem is with the more options we consider, we see all of these great options we could have had.
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Let's go back to that example of a vacation.
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And Barry uses a pretty similar example in his book.
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Let's say you're choosing between a getaway to a beach
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or a very cozy cabin in the woods
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or a family trip to the suburbs with some movie nights on the couch and dinners you make together.
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And maybe you end up choosing between five potential trips.
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As you start adding more and more options, you start thinking, why can't I get the relaxation
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that this one would bring and the excitement that this one would bring and the community that this one would bring.
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You start to think I'm missing out on all of these different things, when you're really not, because as we know, we are finite humans.
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And this is why economists always say, opportunity cost is really only the second option.
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Really, you're only choosing between A and B.
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You're not choosing between A, B, C, D, and B because you can't have all of those.
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So you're choosing between your top two choices.
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The problem is, is that as we evaluate A, B, C, D, E, we're thinking about all the good parts about all of those.
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And we feel like we're missing out on all of the good parts of all of those.
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And in our world and life that inundates us with all of the wonderful things about all these other paths, all of these other consumer choices,
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all these places you could go, all these foods you could eat, all of these people you could be with on dating apps,
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like we're going to get into next episode.
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It can feel so overwhelming.
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It can feel like I'll never be able to find the
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optimal path out of the thousands of options surrounding me all of the time.
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It can feel incredibly overwhelming.
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Something we're going to keep diving into in this series, but let's focus here specifically on maximizing and satisficing.
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So I think now let's dig a little deeper into the psychology elements.
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For the areas that you are maximizing in, there is probably something really important to you tied to it.
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If you maximize a lot, for instance, with consumer decisions or how you spend your money,
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it's probably because you really value money or maybe even underneath that just security in general.
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If you're someone that maximizes a lot with your standards for work, that's probably because you tie maybe some of your worth to
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that or maybe you were brought up in a family where delivering high results was expected of you constantly.
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So it can be helpful to ask what are the areas where I'm maximizing
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because I attach a great importance to the results of my decisions
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and what are the areas where I satisfy because I recognize
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that good enough is good enough
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and at the end like I said we are going to get into more specific action steps here
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but I think that
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if we want to go even one layer deeper this is a personal theory
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that I have this is not something in the book like we talked about
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but we're going to touch on from a different angle here.
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I think that certain personality types are associated with maximizing.
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And one of those aspects could be sensitivity, big emotions, maybe even a touch of neuroticism.
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And my take here is that what happens is we have this sensitivity
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and emotions and we're scared of pain because we've felt pain deeply before.
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Then there's the desire to avoid making the wrong decision to try to avoid pain.
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So we deliberate, we think we maximize, then for all the reasons we're talking about this here, this leads to more comparison,
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more regret, more uncertainty, and perceived opportunity costs of Oh, I could have made the right decision, I should have made the right decision.
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This then leads us to feel worse, and have a worse experience with what we chose.
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And this can lead us to feel motivated to avoid future pain with more deliberation.
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This can unfortunately be a negative cycle.
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So it's not necessarily just that maximizing causes regret, fear of regret can cause maximizing.
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So let's look a little bit closer at two more downsides of maximizing and then get into some action steps.
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One of them is the negative aspects of social comparison.
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From a 2002 study, Schwartz et al found in a study of maximizing versus is satisfying.
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Happiness is a matter of choice is the name of the study.
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They had maximizers and satisficers do a anagram puzzle.
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While someone also in the lab that they assumed was a peer,
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but really was someone that was part of the research team also did a puzzle next to them.
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If that peer did the puzzle faster or better, this had a greater negative effect on their mood or self -evaluation.
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So the way we could think about this is a maximizer, if they're around someone doing better than them, they're going to feel worse about themselves,
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the way they view and evaluate themselves, and also they're going to be in a worse mood.
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This begs the question again, how self -esteem is tied into this.
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Does someone become a maximizer because maybe they have lower self -esteem?
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Or do we develop a lower self -esteem because we're trying to maximize, we're trying to optimize and do it all and be the best
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and that makes us feel bad about ourselves when we can't do that?
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And all of these are interesting questions we can maybe get into more another time,
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but we can just let them kind of sit in the back of our mind for now without a clean answer.
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And the final thing
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I want to talk about in the negative side here is a bit more on this aspect of regret.
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It's one thing to sort of wonder if you went to the right college
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and occasionally maybe that pops in your mind of,
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oh, I wonder what it would have been like in my educational experience if I'd gone to a different school.
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And maybe that doesn't impact you that much.
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But if you're maximizing across the board, if you're constantly wondering if you made the right decision for where to send your kids to school,
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or if it really was right to follow through with that divorce, or maybe you should still be with that person,
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or if you're wondering if this course you just signed up for actually was the right decision
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or this other one would have been better, and you're constantly second guessing yourself, it's a really debilitating way to live.
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And unfortunately, I think a lot of people live in this state more than they realize.
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This is an easy thing to kind of think we can compartmentalize like, oh yeah, don't have regrets and don't overthink things.
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But this can be extremely pervasive.
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If you again, just let this concept hang out in your conscious and subconscious mind for the next couple weeks,
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notice the many areas you're doing it and how it affects your well -being.
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I think you might be surprised
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and I also think you might be surprised how quickly your life can change
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when you start to make changes to be more of a satisficer.
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This is something
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that I've been really pleasantly surprised with even just in the recent time I've been applying this
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because I've heard of this concept a long time ago
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but I didn't actually dive deep into the research and application until doing this series.
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So let's now go into six steps to learn to satisfy a bit more often and increase well -being.
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The first step is just to simply see it in action.
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Barry Schwartz discusses why would anyone maximize when clearly it's not the better option.
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It's ironic because he said that if someone's actually maximizing, they wouldn't actually be a maximizer because it doesn't lead to a better life in general.
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So the first step is to see yourself doing it.
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To realize when you're trying to acquire more information into the point of clear diminishing returns.
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More thinking is not making this a better choice.
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And because that is easier said than done, we'll keep moving on to the other steps here.
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Another step is to learn from yourself.
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There are areas where you satisfy, where you say, I know what I want, I choose it, and it's good enough.
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And then what we want to do is learn through observing that decision making process, going to the counter, deciding that vanilla yogurt is good enough,
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eating it, being happy with it.
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How can you expand the bubble of that a bit more often?
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Something that is not maybe an area where you're really entrenched and stuck in that maximizing mindset, but something where it's sort of borderline.
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How can you apply that satisficing a bit more often and train that muscle?
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And then speaking of learning from ourselves, we can also learn from others.
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There are people in my life who do really well with satisficing.
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And I'll give you an example with relationships.
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So someone I know is in a marriage and they've always been pretty happy in their relationships in general.
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And she told me that it really just came down to knowing what she wants.
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And then once she found someone that met that criteria, that's it.
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She's not really going to overthink it.
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The list was not that elaborate.
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I think it was like five things.
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Now, I don't think that she
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She was walking around with a checklist approaching this very analytically.
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She was following her feelings as well, something we talked about in the last episode.
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But having a list of standards really helps because if you're just dating and thinking, I'll know when I find the right person,
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you might keep looking and looking and then who is a good enough fit in a sea of so many options.
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But if you know, these are my standards.
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I've met someone that meets those standards.
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I'm going to commit and move on it's a different way of approaching decisions and this can apply across the board.
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Which brings up a really interesting point that
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Barry Schwartz goes into is that it's not that satisficers have low standards.
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They can actually have very high standards but once they find an option that meets those standards they decide.
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I think sometimes maximizers are unclear what those standards even are.
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If they're shopping for a car
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and they don't really know what they want in a car of course
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that's going to lead to some interesting deliberation and being stuck between choices
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because they might not even know what they want in the first place.
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So a step could be before you make a choice or even before you get into the moment of decision,
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coming up with a list of what is important to you.
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This is where things get a bit more messy or complicated though,
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is because sometimes even the idea of thinking about how you make a choice affects how you feel about it.
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Thinking explicitly about what we value can itself alter what we report valuing.
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For instance, if you think, is safety more important to me in a car or price, you might start then thinking,
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oh, well, safety is really the most important thing.
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That's all that matters.
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And then that might even change how you think through something.
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And there was some pretty interesting stuff in the book here.
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For instance, in a study on relationship satisfaction, people would, I don't know if they were journaling or talking about it,
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but essentially they were evaluating the relationship periodically and it changed how they felt about their relationship.
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So sometimes even just trying to put something into words can change how you think about it.
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If you're making a list of five things you like about your partner, some things might be easier to put into words than others.
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And then maybe there's sort of some intangibles you couldn't put into words that aren't on that list.
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And then maybe you start thinking about your partner differently.
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It's very interesting.
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So this isn't to just say, think about your values and analyze more and it will help.
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But I do think occasionally having a clear list of standards can help
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and simplify things because satisficers are known for once something meets my standards, I choose and commit.
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So knowing your standards and being a bit more clear on them, I would think could help.
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Another step is reminiscent of cognitive behavioral therapy or simply changing our thought patterns.
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When you notice yourself
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getting stuck in these sort of loops of I should have chosen differently
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or oh my goodness I need to make the right choice right here it's really really important we can question
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and push back on our thoughts
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so let's take an example here I recently got back on LinkedIn after being off
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it for a really long time so I think
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that it works really well here because
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when you log on LinkedIn you see basically everyone from your past and how they're doing professionally and only the highlight reels.
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So it can encourage this line of thinking of,
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oh, what would my life be like if I had gone to law school or things like that?
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Now, first of all, I really am glad I didn't go to law school for a lot of reasons,
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but it is something that I considered my first year of college.
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And then actually a professor
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that was an attorney talked me out of it for several reasons based on what he knew about me and my goals.
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But anyway, imagine I log on to LinkedIn and I see someone that has taken a really interesting position in DC.
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They've just done some really fascinating stuff with their career after going to law school, someone that I went to college with.
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And I could think, oh, wait a second, that seems like a really interesting life path.
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Maybe I should have done that.
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Boom, boom, boom, going into a thought spiral.
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Away we go with it.
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That can really go for a while before you even catch yourself,
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especially if you're scrolling on LinkedIn for a while and seeing all of these other possible paths.
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When that happens, you can stop and say, wait a second, what are the reasons that I didn't go to law school?
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Oh yeah, the whole reason that I was considering doing
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that is because I thought it looked like it did on TV with being in courtrooms and talking to people all day.
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And that professor was telling me that that's such a small percent of what it's actually like.
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And he told me what the job was like and, oh yeah, that's right.
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And that decision actually makes sense.
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Or you could even just remember the other parts like the debt you would have had after
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or the stress that might have come with that job.
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And not to say that you're trying to tear down that career or people that do it.
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You're just trying to not get carried away with a certain thought process about my life would have been better
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if I did this.
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You're trying to question those thoughts.
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You're trying to pull them apart instead of letting them carry so much magnitude or perceived truth.
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And you can do this for any decision
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when you start to feel yourself getting pulled down by the weight of regret
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or the weight of having to make the perfect choice, you can remember that there is no perfect choice and push back on those thoughts.
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And finally, we can reduce our choice sets.
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The more options that you examine, the more likely you are to be a maximizer.
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So Barry talks about in his book, our culture these days with all the options we have encourages maximizing.
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It encourages the idea that, you know, a commercial.
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Oh, wait, would my life be better off with that product?
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I didn't think I need that product.
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Now do I need to compare that product to the one I currently have?
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I thought the one I was doing was just fine.
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And it's not just commercials.
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It's just all of the optionality that we have in general these days.
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But when it comes to where you want to live, what you want your family situation to be like, what job you want to have,
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who do you want to spend time with as friends?
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How much time do you want to spend with them?
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What do you want to do with your morning?
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Should you be on your phone right now or should you be meditating?
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Should you have gone on a trip or should you have saved your money?
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We have so much choice now.
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Many of us in many situations.
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Of course, not everyone does have the same degree of choice.
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As I'm wrapping up here, I'm realizing a couple things I didn't get to.
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So a couple more tips.
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One is to examine our expectations, not only our standards, but what we expect from life.
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I remember in college, I asked my positive psychology professor about job satisfaction.
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And I said, If you find a job that is 80 % of stuff you like, 80 % good stuff, is that pretty good?
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Knowing that there's no perfect option.
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I think we were talking about something like this and him and everyone in the class kind of looked at me appalled.
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Like, are you kidding me?
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Of course, that's really high for a job.
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You should be really happy with that job.
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But I think that often we can have these sort of distorted expectations.
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We can think I want some situation to be better than it is.
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It can be hard in a society like ours,
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a consumer society, where we can think I can pick and choose and make something better to then realize, no, maybe my expectations are unrealistic.
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Maybe 60 percent good in a certain area is actually pretty good.
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Maybe it's good enough.
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And often you've probably noticed that when your expectations are exceeded, you actually like something.
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Maybe you go into a movie and you had heard not great things about it.
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And then if you ended up enjoying it, you could end up really liking it, even if maybe it's not the best movie,
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but it surpassed your expectations.
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And we know the opposite could happen.
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Maybe everyone told you something was the best movie.
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So you were expecting a 95 % if you were to give it your own
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Rotten Tomatoes score.
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And then because it was a 85%, oh, that didn't quite meet my expectations.
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So something the book also goes into is how so much of this is relative, but we can learn to adjust our expectations.
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And I don't think that that is settling in a negative way.
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It's just coming into contact with reality, which brings us to the final point is that we get to choose what we spend more time choosing,
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what we want to really focus on trying to maximize.
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Because if we try to maximize everything, we're going to be let down.
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We're going to waste a lot of time in analysis paralysis and regret and comparison in a negative way.
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And we're also just going to fall prey to many mental shortcuts
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or heuristics or poor decision making
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because there's just too many decisions in our life to try to make them all extremely well.
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But if we choose the areas of our life to try to really maximize
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and if it's not causing negative issues in our life and if that additional analysis actually makes us better off,
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this is something we can observe over time through experimentation, then it's worth it.
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This is a book I'm going to come back to because at least for me, decision making has been something I've studied for a long time.
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I've always known about this principle.
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And again, until applying it, it did not actually make my life better.
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Oh, go figure.
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That's like most things in psychology.
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Thank you so much for being with us.
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Speak to you next week.
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We will go into the paradox of choice with dating apps,
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how the way we evaluate relationships is so different in this modern era compared to every generation before us.
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We're going to keep going with this decision -making series for several episodes.
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Would love to hear your thoughts on any of these topics through either a voicemail or a comment.
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And lastly, if this was something that you found helpful, this idea of maximizing and satisficing.
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Sharing with a friend and discussing this topic with them could be helpful.
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Maybe they might even help you see, oh, here's an area where you have a certain tendency, maybe where you didn't even realize,
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or you can help hold each other accountable for working on some of these ways of making decisions
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because it's someone to talk it through with.
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Looking forward to diving deeper on the decision -making series and speak to you next Sunday.
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Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon
Cette leçon d’expression orale s’appuie sur la vidéo « Why trying to make the “best” choice can make you less happy ». Cette vidéo contient 382 phrases et 5248 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 28:24. Le locuteur parle vite, environ 185 mots par minute : attendez-vous à des liaisons et à des sons réduits. 87 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais, le vocabulaire est donc facile à suivre.
Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo
15 mots de la vidéo à retenir, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :
| Mot | Prononciation | Sens |
|---|---|---|
| maximize verbe | /ˈmæksəmaɪz/ | maximiser |
| regret verbe | /ɹɪˈɡɹɛt/ | regretter |
| expectation nom | /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/ | attente |
| satisfy verbe | /ˈsætɪsfaɪ/ | satisfaire |
| evaluate verbe | /ɪˈvaljʊeɪt/ | évaluer |
| helpful adjectif | /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/ | utile, serviable |
| vacation nom | /veɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/ | vacances |
| psychology nom | /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/ | psychologie |
| satisfaction nom | /sætɪsˈfækʃən/ | satisfaction |
| dive verbe | /daɪv/ | nager, plonger |
| quiz nom | /kwɪz/ | quiz |
| topic nom | /ˈtɑpɪk/ | sujet, thème |
| encourage verbe | /ɪnˈkʌɹ.ɪd͡ʒ/ | encourager |
| ideal adjectif | /aɪˈdi(ə)l/ | idéal |
| differently adverbe | /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/ | différemment |
Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez
| Mot | Sens |
|---|---|
| end up verbe | se terminer, se finir |
| come up with verbe | inventer, imaginer |
| bring up verbe | élever |
| check out verbe | mater, regarder |
| let down verbe | laisser tomber |
| look forward to verbe | avoir hâte de, attendre avec impatience |
| open up verbe | ouvrir |
| pull down verbe | rabattre, ramener |
Des phrases à répéter
Des phrases courtes et complètes de la vidéo, à réutiliser dans la conversation de tous les jours :
- You won't try to meet every single person.
- Do you often think about other possible lives?
- Isn't that a good thing?
- Let's go back to that example of a vacation.
- What do you want to do with your morning?
La grammaire de cette vidéo
Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :
| Structure | Dans la vidéo |
|---|---|
| Phrases conditionnelles if + proposition, will/would + verbe — une condition et son résultat | if someone's actually maximizing, they wouldn't actually · if you're just dating and thinking, I'll know |
| Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenant | has honestly been · you've watched · has noted |
| Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le fait | was popularized · is adapted · are just correlated |
Prononciation à surveiller
Le locuteur utilise 124 contractions et formes réduites, comme you're, we're, I'm. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.
- Les sons « th »: gather /ˈɡæðɚ/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, therapist /ˈθɛɹəpɪst/, bandwidth /ˈbændwɪdθ/
- Les sons « sh » et « zh »: expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, vacation /veɪˈkeɪ.ʃən/, satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/
- Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, psychology /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, satisfaction /sætɪsˈfækʃən/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/
Les sons difficiles pour les francophones :
- /h/ — il se souffle, il n’est pas muet: helpful /ˈhɛlp.fl̩/, happiness /ˈhæpinɪs/, highlight /ˈhaɪˌlaɪt/, behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/
- /tʃ/ et /dʒ/ — à ne pas adoucir en « ch » et « j »: psychology /saɪˈkɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, encourage /ɪnˈkʌɹ.ɪd͡ʒ/, jeans /d͡ʒiːnz/, couch /ˈkaʊ̯t͡ʃ/, adjust /əˈd͡ʒʌst/
- /r/ anglais — langue recourbée, sans frotter la gorge: regret /ɹɪˈɡɹɛt/, encourage /ɪnˈkʌɹ.ɪd͡ʒ/, differently /ˈdɪf.ə.ɹənt.li/, paradox /ˈpæ.ɹəˌdɒks/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/
Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo
- Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
- Commencez à la vitesse 0,75×, répétez phrase par phrase, puis revenez à la vitesse normale quand cela devient facile.
- Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme maximize, regret, expectation.
Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?
Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.