Why Choosing Wisely Shapes Agency, Meaning, and Mattering | Barry Schwartz - EP 724

Coming up next on Passion Struck. What we're trying to suggest in the book is that it's important to think of our lives as ongoing narratives that there's a trajectory to life that it isn't simply about attaining one pleasurable moment of experience followed by another pleasurable moment of experience with no particular connection between them. That is to say, life needs to have meaning. There are different ways that people can get meaning out of life and in a pluralistic society like ours, you certainly see that. Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week I sit down with change makers, craters, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey friends and welcome back to episode 724 of Passion Struck. Last week we closed out our Meaning Maker series with two powerful conversations. On Thursday, I was joined by an investigative journalist Charles Piller, examining truth, integrity, and institutional failure. And on Tuesday, I sat down with New York Times bestselling author Jim Murphy exploring inter excellence in the unseen foundations of extraordinary performance. Together, those conversations asked our hard question. What happens when the systems we trust stop serving human significance? Today we begin a new series called You Matter, an exploration of what it actually means to feel significant in our modern world that measures, ranks, optimizes, and replaces. This series is about mattering and we explore it as lived experience. Do our choices register? Does our presence count and how to modern systems quietly drain us to doubt that it does? This conversation is especially timely as we lead towards the launch of my upcoming children's book You Matter Luma on February 24th. A story designed to plant the truth of intrinsic worth early before the world teaches kids to confuse value with performance. But today's episode is not about children, it's about choice, agency, and regret, and how the sheer abundance of options can erode meaning rather than expand it. My guest today is Barry Schwartz, one of the most influential social psychologists of our time, and the author of the paradox of choice and his new book Choose Wisely. Barry's work exposes something most of us feel but rarely name. That most freedom does not always lead to better lives. That endless choice can exhaust us, and that when every decision is framed as optimization, we slowly lose authorship over our own lives. In this episode, we explore why too many options can undermine agency instead of empowering it. Now modern systems replace judgment with metrics, and what that costs us. The difference between satisfaction and meaning, why regret has become a defining emotional pattern of modern life, and how reclaiming mattering requires limits, commitment, and discernment. Before we begin, a quick note. If you'd like to watch these episodes in addition to listening to them, you can join us on our YouTube channels, at John Armyles and PassionStar Clips. Now, let's begin the UMatter series with renowned psychologist Barry Schwartz. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. It is truly an honor today to welcome Barry Schwartz to PassionStruck. Barry, how are you today? I'm great, John, and it's a pleasure to be with you. As I had told you a little bit about me leading up to this interview, I have really been immersed in this study of science and mattering for over seven years now, and I am currently in the final stages of doing my final edits for a book I have coming out called The Mattering Effect. And I was actually speaking with Rebecca Goldstein, who has an amazing book herself, The Mattering Instinct, which I would encourage our leaders to really read. She was telling me about her own fantastic work on the topic, and then she reminded me of a meeting that you had in 2019 with David Yaden, Marty Seligman, and a number of other colleagues that I'm calling the Dream Team. In the paper that came out of that meeting, you define mattering as an action-oriented context-dependent construct, something that effectively functions as a successor to action. My question is this, in my own research on mattering, I have identified something I'm calling the High Performance for so many leaders today, high achievers, treat life, like it's a spreadsheet of isolated wins. If mattering requires us to see the impact of our actions, does this isolated win mentality specifically blind us to the impact that creates a sense of mattering? Well, it certainly can. It doesn't necessarily have to, but isolated wins are just that, and lives have trajectories, and you do things that have effects on other people that continue into the future, and you may not be mindful of the longer-term effects of your actions. If you tend to think of life as a spreadsheet, and you enter your assets and liabilities in the cells of the spreadsheet, and at this moment in time, and at that moment in time, and then you just add them up, you lose the ramifications of things that you do because you're treating every moment in life as an isolated moment. Now, the virtue of doing that, if you want to have a science of something, is that it can be analytically precise, and that's a good thing, physics has taught us. The drawback is that it may be that you are getting an analytically precise measure of something that's the wrong thing to measure, and that's my worry. And the look I just came out with is a critique of rational choice theory, which comes from economics, for precisely that reason. It atomizes and tries to quantify the things we value, and in that way, it distorts, I think, the kinds of issues we think about when we have decisions to make. And the book you're referencing, which we're going to discuss in a little bit, is titled Choose Wisely, Rationality, Ethics, and the Art of Decision-Making, which you co-wrote with the philosopher. I did. So I loved the combination. Well, so do I, and I met him in my very first year at Swarthmore College in 1971, and we have been the closest of friends ever since. We've taught together, we've worked together, we haven't written much together because he tends not to write, because he can see what's wrong with every idea he has before he finishes writing about it. I have lower standards, so I publish. So we published a paper together in 1978, and this book is the next paper, the next thing we published together. So we have a long and wonderful history, and he taught me a lot, I taught him a little. I love it. Well, getting back to this topic of mattering before we dive into the book, this group of people who met at that meeting came up with something called the organizational mattering skill, which makes a really brilliant distinction between two Greek concepts of achievement and recognition. In a high stakes environment, I see people drowning in recognition, play-os, they have the renown, the titles, the broad, the board seats, whatever, but they have no internal sense of arrete. Why do you think this is happening, and does it have something to do with self-efficacy? Well, my take on this, which I agree with your assessment of the situation, but I think there's enormous pressure to not to externalize consequences of our actions and our plans, and to externalize them on a dimension that can be quantified. We live in a market-driven society, and the standards of measurement and achievement are so colored by what markets value that it's very hard to avoid putting what you do inside that framework. And the problem with doing that is that it leaves, I would say, the most important stuff out, but you can certainly see it. You I spent my whole life in educational institutions, and over the half century, there's been more and more effort to make quantitative and precise what our expectations are of students and what their performance is. As if you could capture the sort of qualities of mind of a student with a single letter. Now, we have to give grades. I understand their practicalities. The problem comes when we reify the grades that we give, and they think that the grade actually is a complete representation of the mind and the work of the student who got that grade. So I think the pressure to think about life in that way is very is pervasive and powerful, and we don't even realize off in that one. We do that. We're distorting what we should be thinking about and what we should be aspiring to. So I'm not surprised that it happens, and you almost have to live in a monastery to avoid being influenced by the sort of ideology of the market. It's really interesting that you've proven this up, and I'm going to ask one more question on it. But for many of our listeners, they are probably too young to have lived through the Vietnam War, and I was too young to live through it, but I went to the Naval Academy and we studied it heavily, and I had a rare, extremely liberal teacher when I was there who taught a course examining and wore through motion pictures. And he actually used to bring up Robert McNamara a lot because he'd call it McNamara's War. And Robert McNamara, and I'm going to let you tell the audience about this as you reference him a lot, and you use him as the ultimate warning of what happens when we try to manage complex human systems through math-based results alone. And I'm going to let you tee that up here in a second. But the reason I'm bringing this up is I was researching the book, I interviewed Jim Nolzaki, and what you were just talking about with students, he brought this vision to me that what we're doing with mattering now is we're making it into a marketplace. These businesses are making it into a marketplace of mattering where they're using math-based algorithms to really govern our lives. So I was hoping maybe you could take this Robert McNamara and what Jim Nolzaki said and maybe expand on it. Be happy to. The story that we tell in the book, first of all, listeners should know that McNamara came to the Department of Defense after a distinguished career running Ford Motor Company. And so he really had this very analytic turn of mind and the notion that your job was to take the fog of war and remove the fog so that things could be reasonably precisely measured and could lead to effective strategies which could then be reasonably precisely evaluated. So that was his approach. And one of the many problems with the Vietnam war was that it wasn't obvious that we were winning which seems bizarre given the United States and the opposition, the asymmetry, and it was becoming increasingly unpopular with the public, very unpopular. And the political side of the question of how to fight the war included the question, how do we get popular support for what we're doing? So the question that arose was, well, how can we, what would matter to people? And the conclusion was if people saw that we were winning, they would be less upset that we're fighting. So then the question became, how can we show people that we're winning? And again, for listeners who are too young, this was one of the first of what has come to be called asymmetric wars. We have this massive army with massive artillery and we're fighting in a jungle against rag-tag bands of opposition. So it really wasn't at all obvious at any given moment who was winning because the metrics weren't clear. They decided a pretty good proxy for the question, who's winning, is who's losing more people? In other words, body counts became the measure of who was winning and who was losing. Now, we could have a long conversation about whether body counts are actually capturing what matters, but that isn't really the point of the example. The point of the example is that once they decided that was what they were going to focus on, they changed the way they fought, because the objective became maximizing enemy casualties. So instead of using that as a metric for assessing how the war is going, it became the metric for how the war is going. And it isn't necessarily true that strategies that maximize casualties are also going to be the same strategies that maximize your advantage. So because of this need to quantify and to be able to point to something as an indication that we were on the right track and that we were making progress, the whole framework, excuse me, the whole framework within which the strategic decisions were made got completely distorted and thousands of people died needlessly. So this is a case where rationalizing what you do that is being able to quantify it precisely really distorted the objectives and all of that got lost in the public conversation. So it didn't even, it didn't seem as though it was being distorted, but it was and we take this as a kind of vivid and very consequential example of what can happen when you're focusing on the wrong things. And we think that again, the sort of framework of market calculation pushes us to focus on the wrong things. I'm going to extrapolate this on a second, but to me when I hear this story, it's almost as aesonine and we're one, the forces were doing trench warfare, hundreds of thousands of people lose their lives trying to gain inches of territory, it's ridiculous when you think about it. Yeah, there's a wonderful book by the way that I'm rereading by the novelist Pat Barker called Regeneration and it's set in a psychiatric hospital during World War I and this psychiatrist is treating people who are have been psychologically shattered by their participation in the war, including a couple of poets and if people want a vivid reminder that war is hell, it's a wonderful book to read. Thank you for sharing that. I just wanted to make this analogy really real to people. I spent most of my life after I got out of the military as a business executive working for companies like Dell and Lowe's and the C-suite and when I look at what McNamara was doing in Vietnam, it's what major corporations throughout the world have been doing for the past three decades. So we measure everything based on shareholder value, yep, customer success metrics, things like that and then we wonder why 70% of the workforce worldwide billion people are disengaged. It's because we're treating them as body counts instead of bodies and that's really what I try to bring forth in the book is what's happening to so many people today and why it's leading to hopelessness, loneliness, burnout, all these different conditions that are now become in chronic epidemics globally. I couldn't agree with you more. The paper that I wrote with Richard Trill and Fry 50 years ago was essentially that argument applied to factory work where in effect the people working were regarded as interchangeable parts in the same way that the equipment was and the idea was to create jobs that were so low skilled that if somebody left that person could be replaced instantly by someone else and the underlying assumption is the only reason people work is to get paid and as long as we pay them okay they won't care what they do. So why don't we make what they do as horrible, boring, monotonous and repetitive as possible and they won't care because they're getting a paycheck. So this argument was that we had what this process did was turn work into something where there was no opportunity for satisfaction except for the paycheck because everything else had been removed and that's what you're describing and in those days our focus was on the blue color but the same process has continued to occur and it is now operating in the white color workforce as well which is as you say why so many people they're looking for the next job the day after they start the current one because it's clear they're not going to get any needs or desire satisfied except for a good-sized paycheck. I remember my time at Dell which I talked about the most. I was working 100 hour weeks traveling globally two weeks out of the month barely seeing my family and no one cared, no one ever asked if you're doing okay they're just they care are the projects running on time are we making the money we should is the budget right and then when you're not doing that to all I was dealing with was HR issues and people. And it's even worse than that because even if people asked you if you were doing all right you might ask yourself why are they asking me that and my sense is that the reason they're asking you that is that they want to make sure you remain productive they don't really care about whether you're doing all right but their assumption is that if you're not it'll show up in your productivity so they want to keep you happy enough that you remain productive enough for them to see value and continue to employ you so even when they ask the question they're almost certainly asking it with the wrong intentions. Before we continue I want to pause for a moment conversations like this can feel quietly disorienting when the sheer number of choices we face is questioned our instinct is either to optimize harder or to disengage altogether but mattering isn't built through optimization it's built through discernment inside the ignited life each episode in the U-Matter series is paired with guided reflection prompts designed to help you reclaim judgment without collapsing into paralysis or regret. This week's prompts focus on recognizing when choice has turned into pressure identifying where optimization has replaced authorship and clarifying what it means to choose an alignment with what actually matters. You can explore them at the ignitedlife.net now a quick break for our sponsors thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to PassionStruck on the PassionStruck network now back to my conversation with Barry Schwartz. I couldn't agree more with you. In ChooseWiseLay you argue that an ideally meaningful life is one of organic utility rather than a mirror list of the accumulated experiences or as you say in the book rocks in the basket. I want to back up here for a second because most of the listeners are probably not having any clue what organic unity means but I was hoping that you could explain this. I'll try. What we're trying to suggest in the book is that it's important to think of our lives as ongoing narratives that there's a trajectory to life that it isn't simply about attaining one pleasurable moment of experience followed by another pleasurable moment of experience with no particular connection between them. That is to say life needs to have meaning. There are different ways that people can get meaning out of life and in a pluralistic society like ours you certainly see that. So we're not trying to tell people what they ought to think of as meaningful. What we are suggesting is that people ought to be thinking that in living their lives they should be aspiring to meaningfulness which I think is a very close cousin to matter. Meaningful means that what you do matters, what you do makes a difference. It can make a difference to the world, it can make a difference to the people who are close to you, it can make a difference to our collective knowledge about how the world works. There are different ways that it can make a difference but you want somehow to have some confidence that the world will show that you once lived in some way. For most of us I think a lot of that aspiration is reflected in family because more of us can hope that our legacy will be embodied in the continuing members of the family. Fewer of us can dilute ourselves into thinking that we're actually going to change the world for even for strangers or change in a fundamental way how we understand the world but everybody, almost everybody can see that their life will matter in the way it's synonymous in the lives of people who are close to them going forward. And the argument in the book is that the framework that we use, that we are encouraged to use that has the honorific designation rational is one that focuses not on life as an narrative, life as a trajectory but instead on moment by moment wins and losses each of which can be quantified each of which can be quantified on a single scale, a utility scale say how much utility did this last week of work bring me and then you can say well I got the utility from my paycheck I got utility from my interactions with clients I got utility from my interactions with co-workers added all up and you get an answer to the question how much utility was this week providing me that's way too narrow of framework for assessing a life it's way too narrow a framework to use for making decisions that may have long-term consequences for you and others yet it's the framework that we are encouraged to use and rewarded for using in the society that we live in so this book is an attempt to suggest to people that it is leaving almost all the important stuff out to think about your life in that way and one reason why I'm so impressed with Rebecca Goldstein's book is that sort of is the point of the book and I'm eager to see yours when it's done as well. Thank you very and I'm going to try to bring this to the listeners in the way they can understand it is I think about rational choice theory you're basically treating people as interchangeable units of maximizing behavior so in many ways when I think of the modern crisis of burnout it's actually a crisis of replaceability is that a way to think about it? Well I think it is there is a certain sense again to use the term you like mattering the more replaceable you are the less you matter what it means to matter is that you can give an answer to the question what is my unique contribution to the world and if you're just an interchangeable part the answer to that question is almost certainly that your contribution is essentially nothing and the attraction of homogenizing people in this way is that it can make the enterprise that you're a part of more efficient but you pull out one transistor that stops working and you replace it with another one instead of inquiring as to what went wrong with this transistor so you pull out one person who's underperforming and you replace that person with another one so the efficiency the drive to be efficient and thus more profitable is what encourages us to treat people as interchangeable parts with no with no aspirations no trajectories no important personal identity and I think people who manage other people know that's not what these people they're managing are but from their point of view the only thing that matters is the aspect of the person that is going to be manifest in the work that person does inside the workplace and yes that leads to burnout now it should be said that you can also burn out because everything matters too much yeah I love the idea that I can take my work home with me on the other hand when you can take your work home with you what's to stop you from simply working every waking moment of every day and letting that crowd out other aspects of your life that are important you have to find a way to maintain balance if your supervisors aren't putting pressure on you to put in 100 hour weeks you can put pressure on yourself to put in 100 hour weeks so you get burnout from feeling like you don't matter and you get burnout from caring so much that you can't let it rest and you can't make the work you do just part of a full life rather than all very my wife is going to be listening to this and saying is I've been working on this book got what you're saying is exactly what's been happening to me I work from home and when you have a deadline it is so easy to walk down the hall and I still my whole career that way and it is easy the nice thing about having little kids running around is that they'd simply demand they stop doing but when the little kids get bigger it's really entirely in your hands how much you can maintain balance in your life and we depend you know then the choose wisely book on the framework that Aristotle created 3,000 years ago and for him really it was about balance because of the many virtues that you wanted to cultivate in people all of them were important and sometimes they were in conflict and so what you needed to be a good person from Aristotle's point of view is all of the virtues all of the attributes that he regarded as virtues in the right balance and deployed at the right time and so you could be the smartest person in the world and be a monster because the virtue of intellectual power simply overshadowed everything else and you can't live a life just because you have the biggest head in the room life demands more of us than that so for him balanced finding the right amount finding the mean he called it is at the heart of what he called you daimonia which a marty seligman translates as real happiness authentic happiness so I've become pretty active on substank I think it's a great way to practice writing which I love to do but also the ideas out there and I recently did a post that I called the architecture of significance and what I was trying to do and I think it relates well to your book is I said that so many people today are trying to build an architecture and success and if you look at the ancient builders people who were building the great cathedrals the pyramids great wall of china most of the people who were working on these projects new going in that they were never going to be alive to see the fruits of their labor but they treated it as a legacy that they were passing down for their offspring and what I think people are doing today is we are trying to build that cathedral in our lifetime so we want to come up with the strategy we want all the accolades we want this living monument to ourselves something that I call we become a manquisher and what I'm arguing is that a monument which is take the national monument in dc it's great to look at from the outside but you surely can't live in it it doesn't really provide a lot for you and what I am suggesting is that people need to form their lives as an architect of significance where when you start looking at the foundation the windows the pilings the roof it should be something that becomes more like an orchestrator or something I call a creative amplifier where what you're trying to do in your life is to amplify the benefits for the rest of society so that what you're creating is something that leads a much longer legacy of goodness something I think dacker caltner who we talked about mentions as moral beauty to humanity yet I think society rewards us for being the architect of success especially on social media things like that what do you think of that analogy I think you're right but what I would want to emphasize is it takes a certain a certain set of beliefs or faith that the future is going to be like the present in some relevant way to work on a cathedral knowing that not only will you not live to see it finished but neither will your kids you need confidence that eventually it will be finished and that confidence comes partly from a sense of continuity in the society you live in and what has happened in modern societies is that the time units that matter have really gotten smaller and smaller there's no reason for us to have confidence that our grandchildren's world will be anything like our world and if that's true then all of a sudden your time horizon shrink if I'm embarking on a project that's going to take three or four generations to complete why believe that the third generation is going to care about this project that change has really happened a moment was a lot longer two centuries ago than it is now and that even if your boss isn't pushing you to have a very narrow window of concern the world is pushing you to have a very narrow window of concern and that really is going to take a lot of the potential meaning out of projects and can and shrink our aspirations the reason we want to leave a monument is that we don't have any confidence that the world will care about what we did 20 years from now and if you're a scientist doing relatively trivial experiments in the hope that every experiment you do is adding a brick and eventually you'll have a wall and eventually that wall become part of a cathedral then you can really be content with the modest contributions that you're making because without those contributions there would never be a cathedral but when you stop being so sure that there is a cathedral in the future well then what you're doing day to day looms much larger than the ultimate contribution the ultimate result that you've made a modest contribution to and it's really hard to criticize people for being short term in their thinking because society has become short term in its thinking and we're to some degree we're victims of so I think your fingers on the problem but I don't think it's fixable simply by changing attitudes of individual people recently I've been reading I think it's nexus and the book is all about the propagation of information and how much is sped up over time and it's really interesting to me because when you look at the evolution of the printing press and you just look at religion up into to the printing press you take something like the Bible they had to be handwritten and so in a given year maybe you had 150 200 of them if you were lucky you replicated all of a sudden now you can have 10,000 of them replicated and so it gets distributed well now that we're in the information age it's like something happens in Jakarta and we hear about it in the United States 30 seconds later yep so not only do we hear about in the United States everybody in the world here's about it 30 seconds later that's right but think about that think about you'd be having a job as a scribe where it might take you a year to produce a Bible why would anyone do that in a world that feels incredibly temporary you need to have some confidence that people are going to care about this book in order for you to devote a year of your life to producing it so that so copying a book was almost as much work as writing it so I must say when I wrote this last book I was asking myself does it still make sense to write books in the world we're currently living in will anyone read something as 250 pages long what's it's like reading worn piece and and it's a little defeating to think that the time the rhythm of life has changed so much that it's in it it seems like an impossible burden on people to ask them to read a book not to mention writing it well very I spent the time to read yours and it's interesting I read probably a hundred to 125 books a year because as an author myself on this podcast I feel like I'm doing it to service the person I'm bringing on if I don't know subject matter at least and I will be honest to say that there's some books that peak my interest more than others and I read your work carefully when I released my first book I went on about 80 podcasts and I think out of the 80 maybe three people read the book so it goes to what you said but I think your book is a fantastic book and it gave me so many ideas as did that research that you and Selegman and others did and Rebecca in 2019 and but let me just say something about that research because it's an interesting lesson in the problems of taking a scientific quantitative approach so the paper is about mattering which is a vague concept and it tries to come up with tools for making it more precise and measurable since if you want to do study it scientifically you need to be the thing you're studying needs to somehow be measurable quantifiable and people can agree that what you say you measured is what you've met actually measure there's a certain respect in which that was very premature because figuring out whether your quantified assessment of mattering is what's needed requires that you have a pretty good understanding of what mattering means so there's a lot of conceptual work that needed to be done before you rolled up your sleeves and figured out how to study it scientifically and we in that meeting put the cart before the horse by trying to quantify something before we fully understood what that something was and of course one of the things we know about human beings is that they're very impressed with quantitative evidence because it seems so solid and scientific so once you've quantified something it dominates the conversation the quantification dominates the conversation and the subtleties about figuring out what mattering means which I presume will be in your book and I know are in Rebecca's those sorts of discussions don't happen because the focus is so much on how can we measure it so I had my reservations about the whole project as we were working on it because I thought maybe it would be a good project to do after we spent a year talking about what mattering meant which we didn't do it made me think of the discussion I had with David Yaden who was one of the people who was in the room with you and what David is doing now is really interesting because he's studying psychological states at Johns Hopkins by examining people who are on mine altering substances but one of the things he is trying to do is to look into the eye of someone to understand what this mattering state looks like so you are right I think that's one of the reasons it's a difficult topic because it hasn't been nearly studied as much as people think it has no it's one of these things where I can't tell you exactly what I can't tell you give you a precise definition but I know what I mean yeah we concepts like that are enable us of what enable us to get through the day there are lots and lots of things that we have imprecise or only semi-precise definitions of that we don't all mean the same thing by but we mean enough the same thing that we can actually have a conversation about them and insisting that everyone means exactly the same thing is not always the best strategy because it stops you from working out what that concept should be and I don't think Rebecca is the is the last word on what mattering should mean and I'm suspecting that your book won't either be but as efforts are made to try to get as clear as we can about what it is and why it's important over time you would imagine that an understanding will develop and be refined and we will make a fair amount of progress in taking a vague term and making it much less vague but you shouldn't start with precise definitions you should end with precise definitions I kind of agree with you more so we have to disagree about something well let's talk about something that you and I both care about so I live here in Tampa Bay and throughout most of the year we were shorts here because it is so warm but I grew up in in Pennsylvania and Lancaster and not too far from where you taught for all those years and I have always loved wearing blue jeans in fact I always love environments where I get to wear blue jeans and I understand you love blue jeans as well I do and I have several sponsors of the podcast who sell blue jeans and the one of the most frustrating things for me is there are like a million different types of blue jeans out there on the market how does this whole topic of blue jeans relate to you so this is my claim to fame I wrote a book 20 years ago I am now with a former student writing a revision of it because the world has changed so much in the 20 years since the book came books called the paradox of choice and the central argument in the book is that we all believe correctly that being able to make choices is essential to well being it's what enables us to live the kind of life we want it's what enables us to feel autonomy and control over our lives it's good and we all know that the point of the book is simply to illustrate to show that yes choices good but it isn't only good and when there's too much of it instead of liberating people it can paralyze them in addition to paralyzing them it can lead them to make poor decisions in addition to that it can lead them to be dissatisfied even when they make good decisions and so the book lays out why it is that there can be too much of a good thing in this case the good thing being freedom of choice and the book begins with my trip to buy a new pair of jeans at the gap which is where I used to buy my jeans and by walked in and told the clerk my size and normally buying jeans took five minutes and the clerk said you want slim fit easy fit or relaxed fit do you want button fly or zipper fly do you want boot cut or taper do you want slim or regular you want acid washed or stone washed on and on the options went and she said and I said I want the kind that used to be the only kind but of course they didn't make that kind any more and you and understand this is in a place that only sells gap jeans right so it's not like there was an infinite set of possibilities but compared to what I was used to there was effectively an infinite set of possibilities and I tried all the different styles on and I walked out with the best fitting jeans I'd ever purchased I did better and I felt worse and it wasn't because I spent so much time buying jeans it was because as I was trying all these pairs on I came to the view that one there had to be one style it was going to be perfect if they made them so many different styles one would be perfect and what I got was good but it wasn't perfect so I felt my standard had gone up and because my standard had gone up I felt like the decision I made hadn't met that standard and that never used to be a problem when I bought jeans they fit however they fit and I walked out with them and went on with my life so that's what led me to write the book I'm happy to say that in the 25 years or so since I started writing the book there's been hundreds of studies done on this problem of choice overload and none of the arguments in the book require modification it has stood up the only thing that requires modification is that what I regarded as an unmanageable amount of choice seems trivially small in comparison to the options that people face in the digital world the gap had eight styles now you go to amazon and you find 80,000 how do you choose a pair of jeans from 80,000 possibilities so that's my claim to fame during the holidays my wife was shopping for jeans and she likes to get them at the White House Black market and the same thing happened I happened to be there at the store with her and they have this picture that has all these jeans on it and I think they should put the same model wearing all the jeans so you can see how they all fit but they don't do that but they were like 12 different ones I'm like how do you pick it but certainly once you find the one that fits that's them when you got to remember but probably next year they're going to change it they're not probably certainly next year they will change it that's why one of the things that I have come to do when it comes to shopping is when I find something that really seems like this is the right thing I buy three of three or four copies of it so that when the one I bought wears out another one I encounter on because I know that if I go back to the store they won't have that kind anymore so I now buy and bulk hoping I read long enough to use all the things that I buy so much truth to that well I'm excited to read the updated version of that book as well which I have a copy of but I recently interviewed Alex Emas who helped Richard Taylor update the winners curse and I was happy to see that the winners curse also lived up to the test of time but they did significant re-architecture to that book well we've done the same the new book is going to have four chapters that are completely new stuff that wasn't discussed at all in the last edition because as I say a lot of research has been done since that book came out happily there are no sentences that say 20 years ago I said this and it turns out this is wrong so accept this instead it's just the things have developed and the understanding has been refined over the 20 years and it's gratifying in a way although it would have been more gratifying if somehow people read my book and decided their mission should be to simplify the world which is not exactly what happened so one of the other things that I wanted to talk about was relationships and in the book you talk about how transactional relationships are increasingly replacing deeper ones and I think that this is one of the biggest issues that we're facing in today's world and I want to relate this to another theory that Richard Ryan and Edward DC did self-determination theory where one of their most important elements in that in addition to autonomy etc was connectedness how do you think what's happening today is eroding aspects of self-determination theory? well here's my problem with their framework connectedness is very important but connectedness implies constraint the more connected you are to other people the more the effects of your decisions will be reflected in them and so if you are an island then you can express your autonomy and self-determination and do whatever you think is the right thing for you to do and you don't have to worry so much about the consequences for other people because you're an island the less of an island you are the more connected you are the more you have to consider the effects of your decisions on other people and be constrained by that so there is a sense in which the desire for self-determination and autonomy is in conflict with the desire for connectedness because connectedness will inevitably reduce your autonomy and self-determination and how you reconcile two really important aspirations I want to be a free autonomous agent I want to be connected to other people is the problem of our times in my view these two things need to be kept in balance there have been periods in history where connectedness to other people was so oppressive that you basically couldn't break out of the shackles that surrounded you when you came into the world and people weren't able to live the kind of life they thought they should and now we're living in a time that's just the reverse you can do anything you want but it doesn't seem like anything you want matters very much because it's just you it's not you and the people will depend on you in one way or another so figuring that out is really very challenging and when you put so much emphasis on the self-determination part I think it's inevitable that you will neglect the connectedness part and it's not accidental which I assume is what you have in mind and asking this that loneliness seems to be the problem of our age with eight and a half billion people on the planet it's hard to imagine that loneliness this is a problem but here you are living in a city with eight million people and you don't know anybody you know when you go into your apartment you close the door there's no one else there on earth it's just you and that's not a healthy way to live well we think there are others because they're out there in social media or in our gaming universe but it's such a superficial kind of relation to others that it's really not it's not an adequate substitute for the kinds of entanglements that were a part of normal life in the past what does it mean to say I have four thousand friends what can that mean or two million followers or two million followers I don't know what kind of a commitment Taylor Swift has to all of her followers but I suspect it's not what DC and Ryan have in mind when they go connected this she's actually a case study in making her fans feel seen in her and value she is she does an amazing job of making everyone somehow feel like the most important person on earth during her concerts and it's a gift to do that to be able to do that so that's my problem with the DC and Ryan framework that two really valuable things are push us in opposite direction push us in different directions and our job is to figure out again as Aristotle would say the mean connected but not so connected that you're completely constrained constrained but not so constrained free but not so free that you're not willing to accept the constraints that other people impose on you very one thing in the time we have left I wanted to make sure we covered is that a fourth theme of your book is that no formula substitutes for judgment correct why is it that we don't use that judgment as often as we should well I think there are a couple of reasons for one is that judgment is not a great thing to depend on if you don't have good judgment you need good judgment not just judgment and another book I wrote with a different colleague some years ago about wisdom we made the argument that wisdom is learned but it can't be taught and what we meant by that is the way you develop good judgment is by using your judgment paying attention to the results and slowly developing better and better judgment as you learn more about the subtleties of the kinds of decisions that you have to make so you don't one reason that we rely on rules is that we don't trust the judgment of the people who are we are asking to follow rules that's one second the thing about judgment is context matters and every situation is in some ways unique and what that means is that the pattern of decisions we make may not be completely transparently coherent in the eyes of someone else and in the age we currently live in as soon as you promote one person but not another you can almost count on being accused of bias so the way we protect ourselves from those kinds of accusations is to turn the decision into one that can be made by formula so when the person doesn't get the promotion accuses you of bias you can point to your spreadsheet and say person A did this and this and you didn't do these things person A got promoted and you didn't get promoted so you've got nice clear objective evidence that it was performance measurable performance and not judgment not bias that led to your decision and there's more and more pressure as a kind of insurance policy for organizations to demand that people in positions of decision making authority be able to have stuff they can point at that shows A they treat everyone the same and B they actually have good reason for the decisions that they make so this pushes people to develop rules even if the rules even if they know that the rules are really not up to the complexities of the situation and the last thing I'll say is that relying on people to use their judgment requires that we trust people not only to have good judgment but to have good intentions it isn't enough that I think you can make hard decisions well I have to also think that your aim in making decisions is a good aim so do we trust the people we interact with the people who supervise us the people we supervise the students we teach the professors who teach us do we is there enough of a relationship of trust trust that we have the welfare of other people firmly in mind such that when I make a judgment call in dealing with a student the student will trust that I might imagine a mistake but at least the student will trust that my aim was to serve the interests of that student as I saw them and we don't live in an environment where there's a general atmosphere of trust quite the opposite we live in an environment where there's an atmosphere of deep suspicion if you are suspicious of other people's intentions if you are wary about the quality of other people's judgment you're going to make a rule every chance you can to protect yourself from bad intentions and bad judgment so that's why it's more of a problem now than it was and in fairness to modern society the more diverse society is the harder it is to use your judgment in a way that seems reasonable and fair to everyone because people come into a situation with such different perspectives that you almost feel obliged to wedge them into something more formulaic so they can treat them all the same we don't treat our children the same I don't know how you raised your kids but one of the things that having a second kid teaches you is that you thought you got it figured out with the first kid well you were wrong because the second kid needs a completely different set of operations on the part of the parents every kid isn't unique but we get to know our kids well enough that we can actually make different decisions for kid two and we did for kid one we did ten not to know our employees as well I certainly don't know the 300 people who are in my introductory class well enough to tell or what I do to the particular needs of each student can't do it throughout my career as I would change jobs and go on interviews I would have described myself back in the day as a servant leader I now think that more of us need to be gardener leaders is a term I use but when I would get the question that you always do in an interview section people would ask you describe your leadership style I would always say it's situational and people would just give me this look like what the heck are you talking about how can you do situational leadership I'm like a different situation determines how you're going to lead in it right meaning we all have different personality types so if I try to use a particular leadership type on every single employee I'm dealing with especially direct support the way I motivate one person is completely different than the way you have to motivate someone else and it's the same thing that you just said with you know absolutely but then you open yourself up to being accused of being unfair partisan what have you the right answer to the question what's your leadership style my view the right answer that question is it's situational and instead of giving you a look of what the hell is he talking about people should be nodding and say ah he understands that everybody is different but instead you get these looks of how did you manage to arise so high in the organization with a leadership style like that so we agree about this completely and I don't think it's encouraged in the actual institutions that we operated it's actively discouraged I have this funny story I was at lows at the time and they brought in foreign ferry to evaluate to all the leaders in the organization who are deemed to be high potential see sweet executives and I remember I'm talking to this organization of psychologist and she was one of the people I told about situational leadership and she references Marshall Gold Smith's book what got you here isn't going to get you where you need to be and that's what she told me when I brought up situational leadership and I just sat there and shook my head if you're evaluating our leadership and you as an organizational psychologist don't value situational leadership man we are doomed yeah but it's hard to publish journal articles about situational leadership because you can't have nice neat graphs measuring easily quantified variables yeah that is the truth very a question I love to ask people as the last question on the show is what does it mean when you hear the words passion struck for you to live a passion struck well what if I you were to use that phrase what it would mean to me is figuring out somehow what your mission on earth should be that is to say why do I really want to spend my time and energy on and why and passion struck as a phrase suggests that this is something that happens to us like a bolt of lightning and maybe sometimes it is that way but it's also possible but it's something that we can discover with hard work thinking about what gets us excited what we have the talent to make a contribution to and so on so it's less about being struck than it is about intelligently searching with the hope with the goal of figuring out what what where the passions lie the thing that makes and I think it's a wonderful thing to to aspire to when my kids were growing up I tried without being too pushy to encourage them to have very modest tastes with regard to material things and the reason was that I said this to them I don't ever want you to take a job because you can't afford to live the life you want without it I want you to take a job because you're excited about the job and not because of how well it pays and that can be a huge sacrifice and the more modest your tastes are the less of a sacrifice it is to take the job that excites you rather than the job that compensates you well and so I want you always to have the freedom to say no to the high paying job and yes to the lower paying job and a good way to do that is develop to develop habits that are modest and so there is it seems to me that's a useful lesson for people to have in mind if you want to find something that you're passionate about you also want to organize your life so that you can actually pursue that thing and sometimes you make day-by-day decisions that push us further and further away from pursuing our passion because these decisions we make put demands on us that work that only certain kinds of activities can satisfy those that those that pay well one of my grandkids lives in Seattle she's a young adult and she came to the conclusion about two years ago sadly that either she was going to spend her life doing work she hated and living in a place she loved or doing work she loved but living in a place she hated in other words she came to the view that there was simply no way she could live a life in Seattle a very expensive place to live and do the work that excited her because the work that excited her wasn't going to pay her enough for her to live in Seattle I think she was maybe a little too pessimistic but certainly this kind of thinking is not unreasonable we find ourselves in situation sometimes beyond our control where we have to abandon the passion whatever it is because it won't be possible to live a decent life in pursuit of that passion and that's that's really a sad thing so that's what I take passion struck to mean was I approximately what you had in mind? it's always interesting for me to hear everyone else's thoughts on it I have my own definition of it but I think one of the best ones I was ever given is I had this gentleman who leads up an MBA school at the Catholic University and he had previously been a Swiss guard for Pope John Paul II and Pope John Paul II used the exact phrase to him this gentleman was completely at the time floating like Abraham Lincoln described himself like a piece of driftwood from side to side not knowing where he needed to go in life and that the Pope said to him that what God wants for you is to become passion struck he wants you to solve a problem that only he has given you the tools and superhuman talents to solve that benefits humanity for its betterment and that's how the Pope described passion struck that to me is really what I hope people take from it is that passion for some people comes as a lightning bolt for others it comes as you said we really have to struggle for what it what it means to us but once you find that problem then when you can solve it then is the relentless hope of mine that people start cultivating their lives around it if you live it like I was for so many years as a corporate executive I was exhausting every bit of my life doing things that were counter to what was making me passion struck and it was exhausting the life out of me yep because every single day I was peddling on a treadmill farther and farther away what was bringing me and that's exactly what my advice to my daughter when she was a teenager was meant to prevent happening if your material tastes and expectations are modest when you get smacked in the face by your passion you'll be better able to pursue it than if your material tastes and aspirations are not modest so whether you're waiting for the thunder bolt or you're looking for it either way it's nice to make sure that you have prepared your life so that when you find it you'll actually be able to act on I just have to go to the study of Paul Waldinger is working on it the Harvard Adult Study of the aging yeah and they wrote a wonderful book you know good life the people who had the most money were definitely not the ones who were the half- yes or most fulfilled it was exactly the people that you have just described who were the most fulfilled in life and isn't that what human flourishing is all about that's what I think well Barry it was such an honor to have you here today thank you so much for joining us on Passion Star it was great to be with you you asked wonderful questions and I learned a lot that brings us to the close of today's conversation with Barry Schwartz if this episode stayed with you it's because it's touched something familiar the quiet fatigue of too many options in the deeper exhaustion of never feeling settled inside your own choices here are three reflections I'm carrying first more choice does not equal more freedom second agency requires limits we don't become authors of our lives by optimizing everything we do it by deciding what actually matters and third mattering grows through discernment when we stop chasing the best possible option we make room for significance to take root Barry reminds us that a meaningful life isn't built through constant comparison it's built through presence responsibility and chosen constraint if this conversation resonated please consider sharing with someone who feels stuck and indecision or leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify it's one of the most powerful ways to support the show if you'd like to continue the work we do here on the show visit the ignitedlife.net for episode reflections watch the full conversation on YouTube at John our Miles or Passion Star Cliffs or explore intention driven apparel at startmattering.com later this week we continue the you matter series with Daniel Ellenberg where we examine how expertise authority and modern performance culture shape who get seen and who quietly disappears if the only way that you can matter in a way is to prove your masculinity that's a very ineffective and vulnerable way of living and ironically that trying to hide vulnerabilities by proving masculinity but it's ultimately and ironically the most exposed you can potentially be because improving masculinity can always be disproved very moment and a lot of guys live like that until then remember you don't matter because you choose perfectly you matter because you show up in state I'm John Miles and you've been Passion Struck 500 orders a month was manageable Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with shipstation the only platform combined in order management where else workflows inventory returns an analytics in one place what used to take five separate tools shipstation does in one go to shipstation.com and use code start to try ship station free for 60 days