Facing the Paradox of Choice in Your Career (Issue 181)
You may feel overwhelmed by potential career paths
The Paradox of Choice is a controversial phenomenon that suggests that an abundance of options isn’t necessarily a good thing. The more choices you have, the more you feel paralyzed by indecision.
Numerous research findings confirm this human reaction across a variety of scenarios. Show people three options, and they will easily be able to pick one. Show them 20 options, and now they feel overwhelmed by the burden of comparison.
Also, people will often experience regret and dissatisfaction with their eventual choice. With so many options, shouldn’t the one that they selected be perfect?
In this TED talk, psychologist Barry Schwartz mentions a study that looked at participation in retirement plans. They examined data from Vanguard that they collected from about a million employees at over 2,000 companies.
They discovered that for every ten additional mutual funds an employer offered, the rate of voluntary participation went down by 2%.
“You offer 50 funds — 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it’s so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you’ll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes.”
You may think that this only occurs on a discrete decision-making level. Which box of cereal should I buy today? Not a simple decision when faced with an entire aisle with hundreds of choices in the average supermarket.
Which health insurance plan is best for my family? From personal experience, I know how complicated and painful this decision is.
However, the paradox of choice also occurs on a much larger scale with entirely different paths that you can take in your life.
For example, given who you are, your education, and your work experience, you might think that the decision of career path A versus B shouldn’t be an overwhelming one. Every step you’ve taken in life has funneled you deeper and deeper into a specific ladder to climb, hasn’t it?
But this is far from the truth. Options increase the longer you live, the more you learn, the more skills you acquire, and the more aware you become of how big the world of opportunity is.
Why does this happen?
When I work with clients on defining their next career move, people fall into two different camps:
“I have no idea about what I want next for my career. I feel like I don’t have any good options.”
“I have too many options for my next move. They all have good and bad points, and I’m overwhelmed with how to make a choice.”
I often find that this happens when people have decades of career experience. They have learned so much, done so much, and accomplished so much that they could do almost anything well.
They don’t face a lack of options at all. They have too many potential paths that they could take, with no way to predict their future satisfaction with a specific choice.
In some ways, this ties back to my previous article on creativity as a sculpting vs. painting approach. When you are just starting in your career, it faces you like a blank canvas.
You have no serious experience yet, and you now face the daunting task of placing that first dab of paint. You can just get started! If it’s a mistake, it’s easy to scrape it off and start again.
However, when you’re in the middle of your career (or later), you’ve amassed a large block of focused knowledge, skills, and experiences. Add your natural talent to the mix, and now you face a somewhat overwhelming mass of potential that you could shape in so many different ways.
This makes you feel like a sculptor. Where do you strike, and what do you remove first to change your career path? Make a mistake now, and it may be irreversible. This brings the distinct problem of loss aversion into play as well.
You may feel like moving onto path B with your career, but how can you give up the 15 years of experience that you’ve developed on path A? The pain of this decision is real, and I hear about it almost every week.
Even when someone is ready, willing, and able to accept the risk of giving up their first career, choosing their second act career is far from easy. They don’t want to repeat the mistakes they made before.
The decision causes even more stress because they have a burning desire for greater fulfillment and happiness. It has to be perfect.
First, be thankful
I know it is stressful to face these choices. I’ve transformed my career a few times over the past decades.
So, first take a moment to realize why this is happening to you. You are experiencing this precisely because you are smart, talented, experienced, and good at what you do. That’s why you have so many options.
Good things brought you to this point!
I know it does not feel wonderful right now, but some people never have much of a choice. Because of a variety of circumstances, some people could never ask, “What should I do with my life?”
Be thankful for your natural talents and the opportunities you’ve been given. Realize that you are in this situation because you do have potential.
You do have choices.
You do get to decide what happens next in your life.
This is still an area of growth for me as well. Practicing gratitude helps keep things in perspective.
We tend to focus on the pain or friction in our lives as we strive to make changes that will increase our happiness. In doing so, we lose sight of all the good in our lives.
Reframe the stress of this moment as an opportunity. Rather than being overwhelmed, you are excited. Being able to make this choice is a rare gift that many will never have.
Next, determine what is most critical
Facing multiple choices is even more overwhelming if they have many complex attributes.
I deal with this every year as I compare different health insurance plans for my family. Dozens and dozens of variables lined up in apples to oranges comparison scenarios.
Retail stores also love it when they can overwhelm your rational decision-making ability with highly salient attributes, which often mean nothing. “Oooh, look at the diamond-matrix-pentile mega-pixel quantum-dots in that infinity edge screen!”
Trying to make a complex decision like that is like trying to boil the ocean. Don’t let yourself get sucked into that game with your career options.
That’s why I ask my clients to create a list of the key attributes that are most important to them. Then, I have them rank and weight them objectively.
Take the complexity that is overwhelming you and break it down into a handful of attributes that you can compare as quantitatively as possible.
For example, if freedom is your number one attribute, quantitatively score and rank your job options based on the freedom they will enable in your lifestyle. However, if total compensation is your most important attribute, then rank your choices accordingly.
I want to take a moment to remind you how important it is to examine this list of attributes with fresh eyes. We get into a habit of comparing our options in the same ways that we always have, or in ways that others encourage us to think.
For example, people tend to consider total comp as the most critical factor when comparing job offers. But other factors will have a more significant impact on job satisfaction and happiness in the end.
For example, one study found that adding 20 minutes to the daily commute for work has the same negative effect on job satisfaction as receiving a 19% pay cut. Ouch!
Then, set your sights on the horizon
When faced with a decision about the next step for your life or career, it is easy to become fixated on the next few months. If you’re a natural planner, you may be thinking a year or two out.
But this isn’t very helpful for planning a lifetime journey. With short-term thinking, all steps feel like a similar move forward. It’s hard to compare and contrast them.
Taking a moment to define your long-term goals will help.
Where do you really want to be in 10, 15, or even 20 years?
How do you want to be making a living when you are that age?
What do you want your life to be like then?
I went through a similar exercise many years ago. I had spent about 20 years in Silicon Valley working in the tech industry. Most of my career planning involved thinking a few years out, trying to chart the next obvious move to continue moving up the ladder.
When I became a VP at Yahoo, the options began narrowing. There weren’t many great jobs for a VP of Product within a reasonable commuting distance.
Luckily, I slowed my pace and took a “gap vacation” when I left Yahoo. It gave me some time to clear my head of the old corporate perspective and the Silicon Valley rat race.
I thought about what I really wanted for my eventual career and lifestyle. I also thought about where I wanted my family to live.
I began mapping paths between my long-term goals and the options available to me. It became clear that doing more of the same would not take me to my desired destination anytime soon.
It wasn’t easy to visualize a path to get there in my conventional career either, using typical planning forward. So, I tried something different, as I describe in the next section.
Finally, engage in reverse planning
Research has found that planning in reverse is often more effective than traditional planning for complex goals. Deciding what you want to do for the rest of your life definitely qualifies as complex. Once you have established your long-term life and career goals, start planning backward from that moment in time.
What needs to be in place for that future scenario to be true? Evaluate each of the options you are considering with that in mind.
Which one is more likely to take you to that long-term destination? Which one seems really attractive right now, but the cold hard truth is that you can’t picture how that path would ever take you to the destination you have in mind?
I’ve faced this a few times during my life and career. One path would look exciting, but I had to admit that there was a 5% probability that it would succeed to the point of delivering me to my desired long-term destination.
The other path wasn’t nearly as exciting, but I calculated there was an 80% probability of it giving me what I knew I really wanted in the end.
Guess which path I ended up taking?
Choose what will take you where you want to be
I left Silicon Valley. I’m currently writing this from my new home in the Sierra Nevada mountains, surrounded by a forest, less than an hour from South Lake Tahoe.
I’m living where I have always wanted to live.
I sold my BMW and drive an old Toyota pickup now.
I no longer have a commute at all, and I love my home office.
I spend my days investing in my business instead of working for someone else.
I work with fantastic clients who are terrific people, instead of fighting with Machiavellians in a corporate office.
I figured out what was most important to me, and I gave up chasing things I had been conditioned to believe were necessary.
It’s fun and exciting to play the “startup lottery” and dream about winning big, until you finally realize that 90% of them fail. It’s not nearly as exciting to go to work every day, manage your expenses, and slowly but surely save enough money for more reasonable goals.
My path is just that: my path. It’s not necessarily your path.
I would never presume that I could tell you what decision you should make for your own life. That’s not the point of this article.
But if you’re at a crossroads with your career and feeling overwhelmed, I hope you now see that you’re not alone. Many talented people feel precisely the same way when they face this paradox of choice.
However, as I explained, there is a way to make it through to the other side and not regret the choice you end up making. It requires breaking free of expectations, identifying your real long-term goals, and some counterintuitive planning.
Do this well, and you’ll be much happier with your decision in the end.
Schedule a free call with me if you’d like to discuss your situation and brainstorm some ideas for getting what you want next for your career and life.
Larry Cornett, Ph.D., is a career coach who spent 20+ years in Silicon Valley at Apple, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and several startups as a designer, leader, and product and design executive. Whether you’re fighting for a promotion, navigating a layoff, or planning your exit to independence, he combines executive experience with psychological insight to help ambitious professionals reclaim their power and build an Invincible Career.
➡️ Ready to create an exciting future? Book a free call today to learn how!
