Psychology Today and Kirsten Vala deal with whether it is better to be a happy satisficer or a successful maximizer.
The point of the article is that students in particular graduate with a multitude of skills and interests, but often are overwhelmed when it comes to choosing the ultimate career goal.
I feel this is nowhere more obvious than in graduating from law school or in deciding on a ultimate practice area. We all feel at some point like a kid in a candy shop trying to make a choice on one flavor or one tasty little morsel. But, what if after making that decision you were stuck with only that flavor that one pick for the rest of your life? Would you be satisfied?
It depends, I take it from the article, as to what type of person we tend to be. The research by the Swarthmore College professor Barry Schwartz and Columbia Business professor Sheena Iyengar looked at who was happier with their choices -- "maximizers" who consider every possible option, and "satisficers" who look until they find an option that is good enough.
As you might expect, the enlightened among us, those that undertake exhaustive research or study as to their ultimate best decision would be the most satisfied with their final decision. But, the study found this not to be true.
Although maximizers typically ended up with better paying jobs than satisficers, they were not as happy with their decisions.
Professors Schwartz and Iyengar speculates as to why this is true and suspects the world of possibilities can be seen as the world of missed opportunities, and when you study every possibility you can become fixated more on what you have given up or failed to gain.
To me, maybe is that, especially among lawyers, maximizers try to judge the avenue they ultimately take in terms of making more money -- hence the drive toward Big Law. In the process they ignore things like the lack of a commute, the cost of belonging to such an organization, the billing wheel on which they find themselves, and the thought that they really do not get to help real people. I do not know, but it is plausible.
The professors think that maximizing is only really a problem if the person utilizes it as a full-time strategy. In fact, most people change their decision-making style to fit different situations. But, what this means to me is that all of us suffer to some extent with possibility that we made the wrong decision, and that based upon our decision that we missed opportunities to do something different with our lives or our careers. I find that true in my life and my practice.
The professors come to the conclusion, I think, that as a general rule that we need to strive to settle for "good enough" and to lower our expectations so that we will have fewer regrets and can be generally happier.
What do you think?
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