Problem of Plenty

We live in a world full of abundance. On the one hand, we have millions of people, who are so poor, that they happily accept what they get, they really don’t know what’s the meaning of the word ‘choice’. On the other hand, there are millions others, who, by plan or otherwise, will their lives with so much ‘stuff’ that it’s always a monumental task on what to ‘choose’.

The Problem:

• If you are a reader like me, then there are always too many books to choose from.
• If your source of entertainment is media, then now there are so many OTT platforms to look out for and on each platform there are too many movies to watch.
• If you prefer web-series then there are lots of web series to watch. And there are no dearth of recommendations from your friends and family of that either.
• Talking about friends, there are too many friends to choose from to catch up with, especially  if you are on a social media. Whether they are genuine or real, that’s a topic for another blog! If you don’t have time for reading books or watching movies and you’re more comfortable reading newspapers or magazines then here again, there are too many to select.
• The Indian family, with diaspora of cousins and no. of options in each cuisine, is always troubled by the nerve wrecking question – “Kya Khaye” !
• Gone are the days when we just had Fiat and Ambassador – only two brands of cars to buy. Now the number of brands of cars and the numbers of models from each brand is in hundreds,  if not thousands.
• If fitness is your mantra and despite all my articles on it, you don’t like running, then there are so many other activities like Zumba, Pilate, Yoga, Cycling, Swimming, etc. which you can engage in.
• If you are more of a team sports person, then also you can try so many different sports.
• Most of us have a lots of clothes to wear in our wardrobes (most of them we hardly wear but like to have them around !!)and have a tough time every morning deciding on ‘Kya Pehney!” If you are a Hindu then there are too many gods to follow!!

But this article is not to make you aware of the abundance of options you have at your behest but more on how to make the right choice and how to select

The Solution:

According to me, simplest way of deciding is rejection rather than selection. If you set of broad parameters for what you do not want, selection can suddenly become far more easier.

Being an avid reader, let me explain it to you for reading. So on record there are 130 million odd books in English globally, which you could choose at any point of time. If you whet out each book in a random list, just the whetting can talk hours leaving no time to actually read !!! However, if you set certain rules,  you can scale down the list drastically in one shot. For example you choose to only read books written after year 2000 – suddenly the number of books comes around 2 million. Next, you only read books by Indian authors – the number further come down to 500,000. Only nonfiction – 200,000. Only female authors – 50,000. Available online – 25,000. Books less than 200 pages – only 3000 books left. Obviously these numbers are random. But you get the drift – a complex act of trying to choose from 130 million books is simplified by narrowing down the list to only 3000 books – that’s the beauty of rejection principle.

You can similarly apply the principle in other instances. Especially women have a tough time choosing what to wear –  how about setting colour of the day for 7 days of the week and one can drastically reduce the number of clothes left to choose from on a given day.

What to eat is another big challenge which we all daily. We could either adopt the same method as we did for clothes or we could come up with new rule like have cuisine of the day and ensure same meal is not being repeated for at least 15 days. This also eases the grocery buying as the purchase can be done in advance so there is no running to the grocery store at the last moment ( and no paying extra to Zepto for a 10 min delivery either!)

And if this all makes you feel that the routine will make life very boring, then the option of breaking the routine is always there !! – you have not taken a pledge not to deviate from the routine!! This is just to give you the easy way out as default.

This was something which I felt that based on my practical learning experience I can share on a blog so a lot of people who face the challenges in day to day life can adopted embrace it and actually benefit from it. Hope this is something which is practical enough for you guys to try out do let me know if you have similar tricks of decision making would love to learn from that

P.S. I am struggling to decide on what to write in this #TheWriteChoice challenge  – If any of you have suggestions, please share !!!