The anticipation of this night has been building for a full calendar year with the opponents being decided only a few weeks before. It’s the 2020 College Football Playoff National Championship between Clemson University and Louisiana State University, and there are about ten minutes remaining before kick-off. Picking up the slender television remote, I scroll through the various apps before landing on ESPN. Having taken a group of students as volunteers to the inaugural championship game in 2015 between Oregon and Ohio State at AT&T Stadium in North Texas, there is a deep appreciation for the intensity and excitement of the moment in Louisiana. However, the anticipation of the game is somewhat tempered once the ESPN screen loads.

Although my expectation was to power on the television, scroll to the app, and simply watch the broadcast, that was not my experience. What I encountered instead were 13 options for viewing the game! Yes, you read that correctly! Without sharing all of those options with you, they varied from each team’s radio broadcast to the referees, to the sounds of the game. As an educator in the sport industry, a fan of college football, and an appreciator of options, even this seemed a bit extreme. Of course, I’m content to mute the announcers and just watch two competitive teams vie for the title, especially with all the extra microphones attempting to mimic the feel in the stadium, I cannot hear the in-depth analysis anyway, but that is not the focus here!

What was truly ironic is not two hours before my finger pushed the red power button on the remote, I was reading a book by Barry Schwartz entitled The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. With a chuckle I climbed into bed to watch what resulted in a pretty decent football contest; but the parallels to the content of the book remained stirring in my mind. One aspect of having to make a decision about which of the 13 versions I wanted to view was that I had to scroll past the other 12 to arrive at the actual, normal televised version of the event. Providing a perfect example as to the purpose of Schwartz’ book, ESPN demonstrated that in our modern American culture, we often have too many choices which can lead to the “negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear.”

Choosing this book to read stems from the desire to equip emerging adults to handle the transition into adulthood so that they may flourish personally and professionally; and Schwartz clearly agrees with the majority of research related to Gen Z which emphasizes the paralyzing effect that having too many choices has on one’s satisfaction with life. In the post entitled Just Do Something, we shone light on the need for this generation to engage in action steps in order to move towards the next season of their life, but often these well-educated, financially stable emerging adults are at a loss for where to start. The world is wide open to them but filling them with anxiety about what to do next.

Paradox of Choice opens with a simple shopping attempt to purchase a pair of denim jeans. If you have participated in this activity within the last decade, you understand where the author struggled with his choice. Just as I was provided with too many choices in viewing a football game, Schwartz shares other examples of too many choices from cereal to eating out to job opportunities. “Choosing well is difficult, and most decisions have several different dimensions,” so Schwartz offers suggestions for decision making by understanding the difference between “maximizers and saticficers.”

With a generation that has been accused of being paralyzed by FOMO (the fear of missing out), leaders of Gen Z (and all of us really) are challenged to locate tools that will assist in the decision-making process. Although “much of what we need to flourish is highly individualized,” the premise of the book is that people who accept “good enough,” or opt to be saticficers, in some situations, are more satisfied with their choices than the maximizer whose “goal is to get the best” and then is “not comfortable with compromises dictated by the constraints imposed by reality.” Sometimes it will be necessary to take action and make a choice and not weigh ALL the options available. Less can become more in many situations.

Not wanting to provide an entire book review here, I encourage you to read more about maximizing and satisficing, recognizing that sometimes we do have Too Many Choices. In chapter 11, Schwartz does close with ten suggestions to hopefully avoid the negative of “having too many choices” which includes “psychological distress, especially when combined with regret, concern about status, adaptation, social comparison, and perhaps most important, the desire to have the best of everything—to maximize.”

Please feel free to share strategies that might be helpful to others when faced with Too Many Choices in finding a balance when it comes to making, not only simple, but difficult decisions.