The WAY to WOW Shows
Boost Your Success - Navigating the Paradox of Choice
November 24, 2020
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[0:01] [Music] who are you and where are you going what do you want for the next 24 minutes we're going to design and attain your ideal life [Music] on the way to wow show together we'll find the ideal path to get you back on the track to success and happiness

[0:36] on the way to wow show with your host kevin bemel if we're going to find our way to wow we're going to be making a lot of choices and that's right up the alley of one of our guests today barry schwartz who's going to talk to us about the paradox of choice because he's very concerned about how this works with happiness and then after that we're going to talk to a woman who's really spent her life working with horses

[1:13] first as a hobby and now professionally tremendous insight that we can get from these beautiful graceful animals but now we're gonna go have a cocktail our guest bartender today is will cutting will has been in the hospitality business for over a decade and he's currently the beverage services manager for two hot spots here in los angeles the friend and the little friend there must be some story there but i can't tell you what it is he's also an award-winning mixologist

[1:49] and he wrote a book and i'm gonna actually let will tell tell us about the book you wrote excellent yeah it's called uh the 21 craft cocktail essentials um so i always had this theory first thank you for having me i really appreciate being here this is fantastic pleasure um yeah so the book is called 21 craft cocktail essentials and i always had this theory that if you know how to make a foundation of really good cocktails really well the sky's the limit you can go infinite numbers of directions and personality flares if you just have that solid foundation to build on so i picked up my favorite cocktails that are the 21 of those and i detail them all out in nice uh pictorial depictions and uh nice little

[2:25] explanations and tools and stuff like that so it's anywhere from the expert just making sure they have a solid foundation to the novice and hopefully bridging that gap between between two professions between people that just want to have a good cocktail and people that want to be making those quality cocktails for them okay fantastic and we'll we'll put the url where people can download it in the show notes okay that sounds great great what are you gonna mix up for us today well i know that we're gonna have a great conversation with jennifer talking about horses i'm really excited about that absolutely so um being that i've had a little bit of experience my partner now actually teaches vaulting so like i get to be around horses a lot more than i ever did in my life and it's really exciting so the thing that always hits me is just

[3:00] that smell of sage in the air so i made a cocktail for you guys this morning um and i played it all out in my head last night and i r did it this morning and everything just sort of came together and it was perfect so it's called the sagebrush cocktail oh perfect so i'll go through the ingredients for you just in a second so it's got to have some fresh citrus that's one of my favorite things and just that sage and citrus and cocktail it's gonna be a vodka based cocktail okay and i've used a semi-sweet uh black tea syrup okay because i want to add some grit in there if you've seen the people that work with horses they've got grit absolutely they've got some grip so we needed a little bit of depth in that cocktail okay and of course we're gonna put the sage right into it

[3:36] uh we're gonna shake it all up and then we're gonna finish it off with some of this lovely covenant belong to blonde so colvin is actually owned by some friends of mine jeff and jody morgan and jeff was a he was actually a musician he he was performing in uh on the cote d'azur in france eventually became a wine rider and then started his own winery so this is his first uh sparkling wine and you know fortunately he's a friend of mine because when he this is the second year he released it and it was sold out in about a week incredible so it's it's it's it's really great stuff oh fun stuff i love that so great i'm so excited to have this i'm so excited to put it into

[4:12] the cocktail yeah and uh let's go ahead and get that open just so we're ready at the very end and i love that sound every time the cork pops you just know it's ready to have fun yeah right it's that it's that sound of of uh good times are ahead okay for me i like to go with uh kind of the cheaper ingredients first so just in case i mess anything up um i haven't messed up the whole cocktail so i'm starting off with some fresh lemon juice and i'm making two cocktails so i'm doubling up this recipe at the moment so we're getting an ounce and a half of fresh lemon juice okay and then i'm going with my black tea

[4:47] syrup semi-sweet so by semi-sweet instead of using equal parts of the black tea and sugar i'm using two parts of black tea and one part sugar okay so i want to get more of that grit flavor coming through mm-hmm excellent yeah okay two parts of that yeah wow well yes i'm doubling that up so okay gotcha gotcha for the two cocktails so we're getting an ounce and a half in each cocktail and that and then i'm gonna put some sage in i usually go about five to seven leaves or just a healthy pinch so i'm kind of doubling that up again and then lastly the vodka and we're getting an ounce and a half of vodka as

[5:22] well okay and you know as and just just a substantial uh substantial vodka right right i like a a vodka you know i try to source as locally as possible whenever possible but otherwise i look for something that's got some good body good legs to it so when you switch it around the glass like a wine it just kind of sticks to the size oh okay good got some viscosity to it yeah it's got legs that'll just keep running sure for this one because we are going to um add the sparkling into it i just want a very small amount of ice i'm going to okay just using a few little bits because i just want to mix it and dilute it

[5:57] and chill it but i don't want to over dilute it so just uh just a hair there yeah okay there we you got the go shaker there what that one's called i think the boston shakers with glass so this is just a tin on tin oh okay and i don't use the boston shaker because i break glass you go like this and now you got cut hands and nothing to drink i had a bar manager i'm also putting an ounce and a half of champagne in this i'm put adding it into the tin afterwards just to make sure it's diluted all the way through okay i'm not topping it off i obviously

[6:32] don't want to put that in beforehand because it'll explode oh gotcha yeah yeah of course so i'm going to measure that out again and yeah i had this manager once that came in and didn't really see eye to eye with each other and he threw away all my 10 on 10 shakers and replaced him with boston shakers and i may have broken a few extra it was a learning opportunity for him is really what it was yeah i mean i'm not too stubborn on too many things but that was kind of one of them [Laughter]

[7:09] all right you gotta love that there kind of swish it around a little bit yeah it'll be okay because i'm gonna pour it back out uh through the strainer and it'll okay delay so i got a good little shake there and then you get the lovely golden brown hue oh yeah from the tea just a little bit translucent yeah beautiful excellent so a cocktail as long as in addition to looking good should also smell good so i'm going to add a little bit more of the sage on top there and that brings out a little bit of the scent to sort of laura just wakes it up you know so it's

[7:44] like it's i don't want it's it's almost dormant at this stage but if you smell it from here it's got a really nice scent to it yeah but you just give it a couple little taps oh yeah oh wow major difference right major that smells like it's outdoors the first one was kind of like i just got it from this like oh that's good and familiar we lost the cage the sparkling but we'll be okay it's already open and then i'm rubbing some lemon oils around the cocktail as well so i put it just a couple inches below it so it doesn't get on your lips and then also smells like lemonade sd3 experience and then i'm just wafting the lightest and sweetest of the oils on top of the

[8:20] coyotes as well so then you get a nice lovely looking and smelling sagebrush cocktail ah beautiful cheers thank you sir i know jennifer is going to love this absolute pleasure [Music] so will mixed this up for us and you know it's got sage in it sage always makes me think of horses so should be good let's see okay wow

[8:57] oh sorry i got it i'll take all the flattery [Laughter] you're a genius thank you so much well my limited experiences with horses there's always tons of sagebrush around so this cocktail made the most sense yeah right i mean all those old westerns from the 30s was the sagebrush of this and but that's that's my impression sagebrush and forces go together my guest is jennifer granger at the ripe old age of 12 jennifer got her first horse and

[9:35] i think it's you know really that it was the start of a a lifelong love affair uh i i will confess i love horses okay i you know really believe like uh ronald reagan said the best thing for the inside of the man is the outside of a horse and i think that's true for for women as well but the interesting thing is in her earlier life jennifer was a corporate executive she worked for the organization that eventually became live nation doing promoting live concerts all over the

[10:11] world i think live nation did right um and then eventually she got into um kind of a different end of that business and then um in 2008 just some some changes in your life and and you uh decided to go into working with with horses and people professionally um maybe i don't know finally coming home if if that's is that a inaccurate idea yeah definitely came full circle um if you would have talked to 15 year old me i would have said i'm going to be a horse trainer this is you know it was i loved it and and every time they'd give

[10:46] me an office you know with a window i would sit outside and daydream about riding you know i'd kind of look out over the valley and go oh there's a great that could be a great trail over there so yeah just but all through your corporate career you stayed involved with horses it did yeah one of the aspects of the three pillars of attainment is the idea that we need to be multifaceted in our lives to reach that that way to wow so how did being involved with horses while being a corporate executive

[11:21] help you craft your overall life well i mean for me it was it just you know it when i was working in the corporate world i did a lot of trail riding i wasn't as involved in the show right showing in those years and just being out and being out in nature and just being with my horse and you know there's something really amazing that happens that um your heart rate syncs up with your horse's heart rate and it's you know all the stuff that

[11:57] science is telling us now but our heart rates sync up and just being out there and you know at the time i kept her out in palace verdes and it's you know this beautiful peninsula and overlooking the ocean and you know you're just so in nature and the things i would see you know i got to see you know big huge rattlesnakes and you know you know you're kind of walking by them and you're like okay just stay there um you know in the hawks and i got to see pheasant and you know red fox and all just all these amazing things

[12:32] i even oh i got to see a cougar i was out on the trail and we were kind of came around a mountaintop and there's a mountain lion coming at us and you know kind of saw us and stopped and turned and then went over the side but you know all these things that you just don't see because we could go so deep into nature and you know really experience that so it's a very very you're in a very different environment obviously in the corporate world yeah so how how does being in that different environment but

[13:08] with this this other creature right a horse where we were talking about this earlier right the horse responds to our state right so so on the one hand when you're in the corporate world where we're negotiating with people or working with people and they're responding to our state the horse does too and yet it's in a completely different environment how does that how do you think that dynamic helps us as as people well when you're working with the horses you can't think about anything else i mean if you it you know you just have to set your

[13:43] problems aside and you have to focus and you have to be in the moment because they're in the moment they don't think about past or future or anything like that it's what we're doing right now and they also you know even though they're bigger than us and they weigh close to a thousand pounds they depend on us to keep us to keep them safe you know we're predators they're animals of prey um in the horse's mind they just think they're you know a bunny rabbit and so yeah and last when i say that um but you know they they do and so they

[14:18] depend on us especially when we're out trail riding we have to be very aware of our environment and aware of you know what's going to affect our horse and how our horse is going to feel about it you know we might look at it go it's just a kid riding by on a bicycle and the horse goes oh my god it's going to eat me you know so we have to think about that is it reasonable to say that when we're working with a horse we have to be more aware of the horse in some ways than we are about ourselves absolutely yeah so how do how do we do that do you

[14:55] think well you know there's you kind of go through phases so when you're first learning you're just learning the basics of your positioning and how to how to give the horse cues and things like that so once you've gone through that it opens up space in your mind to where you can become aware you know the horses they speak they you know they don't speak they speak a silent language it's all body language so you know if i'm out riding my horse like the time we ran into the the cougar out on the trail so we're up

[15:31] riding in the mountains up kind of the top and the the trail winds through and we were downwind from the cougar it's the only reason we saw it so the horses knew that the cougar was there and every time the trail would widen wind around the side of the mountain top and we'd get hit by a blast of wind the horses would raise their head up and they'd try to turn around and my friend and i were like these horses are normally so good like what is going on but the horses were telling us and they knew you know and thankfully we got to see it because we were thinking gosh our horses are so bad we you know we're the ride before we

[16:08] were patting ourselves on our back for how great we were doing with these horses and then all of a sudden you know they wanted to spin and go back home and we're like what is going on and then we see it and then it's like oh you guys were trying to tell us something and we weren't listening that was our fault we didn't protect you from that you know so you go through those experiences with your horse and you start to build a reservoir of trust and they have to trust you and you have to trust them and you know once we learn to speak their language and once we

[16:43] learn that okay you know you're gonna throw your head up that means you're an alarm so you're you're telling me okay i'm alarmed here you know and maybe your heart rate is going up so what can i do to help with that alarm can i identify what you're you know you're alarmed about is it you know somebody riding buying a bike is it something that i don't know about and i have to kind of go okay how can i help you through this you know so so final question a lot of what you're describing to me sounds like the way we ought to be relating to other people our family and such yeah

[17:20] do you in general do you find that people who are who are good with horses are better with people i don't know i you know a horse is easy to be good with a person i i think that you for people who have trouble letting themselves be vulnerable it's much easier to be with a vulnerable with a horse you can get hurt by human you know like emotionally hurt by humans and i think that horses give us that safe space if you're not maybe necessarily practiced in feeling emotions or being vulnerable

[17:56] you can really learn to have that and practice that and get good at it with horses um you know and horses are so forgiving and i i don't know if we're forgiving you know i mean sometimes i think we don't forgive ourselves and that causes the problems but i think it's as i get older i do kind of think that way that they do help us with our you can you can see why there are so many different programs that basically uses horses for therapy oh yeah it seems like they put your life in real perspective you know like

[18:31] i don't know if you have the same experience but when i'm around a horse like all of those worldly problems just get really really small absolutely yep that's that's it i mean i have adults that come and they just come and see me once a week and you know i always joke with them i'm like i'm the cheapest therapist you'll ever have [Laughter] well jennifer your your insights were fascinating and you have a thing for our uh our collage don't you i i i brought you a blue ribbon wow blue ribbon i finally got one you can see best in show for the way to wow right

[19:07] that's right anywhere you want to put it jennifer it's up to you we'll put it right up there there you go thank you so much for coming and talking with us really was a true tremendous pleasure all right thank you [Music] so my next guest is a particular treat for me because i have been an admirer of his work for quite a number of years now dr barry schwartz emeritus professor of

[19:42] psychology at swarthmore and uh you're an adjunct professor at uh haas school of business at berkeley now is that yeah yeah okay um so the way i found out about dr schwartz uh barry is through a ted talk he did quite a number of years ago about something called the paradox of choice to date 20 million people have seen this ted talk and i'm telling you it is both a scream funny

[20:18] and it is also incredibly informative and for me um it it helped me to understand something that had bothered me for quite some time and then i went and bought his book the paradox of choice so um uh barry i thank you first of all for for coming on the show we really appreciate it so kind of jumping right in and and people said okay so so tell me what is what is this whole paradox of choice about i said well um it starts out because and and correct me if i'm wrong um

[20:53] people tend to be either satisficers or maximizers so would you tell us what those two points of view are or two positions are if you will okay let me just step back first of all it's a pleasure to be with you let me step back and take one step back uh before i get into that distinction and explain what the quote paradox of choice is we in western democratic societies have essentially taken it for granted

[21:30] that freedom is good that choice enhances freedom so that choice is good and the more choice people have the more freedom they have and therefore the more choice people have the better off they are we've taken it for granted and the amount of choice people have in societies like ours have just just exploded and it is true that choice is good but it isn't only good and the paradox that i wrote about in the book is that when you give people too many options instead of being liberated by all of this they're paralyzed

[22:06] they can't pull the trigger uh and so you make them worse off not better now there's uh by now a lot of empirical evidence that some point will be reached where it is is different for different people and in different domains where you just kind of start tearing your hair out of your head and going please please take this away um the work that my colleagues and i did that are kind of an enhancement of this is we ask ourselves whether this problem of

[22:43] too much choice is a problem for everyone and our thinking was like this if you're out to get the best how many options do you need to look at before you make a choice the answer is you need to look at all of them because how else do you know what the best is now that's not a problem when all you've got is lease and levi's but it becomes a very big problem when there are 2 000 or 10 000 or 50 000 different kinds of genes to choose from uh so people who are out to get the best

[23:18] we call maximizers only the best will do there's another set of people who we call satisficers who are not looking for the best they're looking for good enough and you can have high standards about what good enough is or lost standards but whatever the standards are as soon as you find something that meets those standards you choose it and you stop looking and so a maximizer needs to do what we call an exhaustive search which in the modern world is an exhausting search and the

[23:54] satisficer doesn't the satisficer just looks at one option at a time and as soon as he or she finds something that meets the standard you say that's it and you don't worry about what you've left on the table and so we've done a lot of work we created a little scale that distinguishes tries to distinguish these two categories of people um and what we find is a people do differ in this regard and b people who are maximizers tend to get better results and feel worse about the results they get just you know you um we did one study

[24:31] with uh college seniors looking for jobs maximizers got better jobs and felt much worse about the jobs they got yeah and and so this points up to my next one i think this is something that you wrestled with in in your book so if there's kind of a sweet spot if you will in terms of optimal number of choices how do we restrict that choice right because um you've got on the one hand you could you could assign it to the government or you could assign it to i don't know parents or how how do we wrestle with the need to restrict

[25:06] choices in order to increase happiness so there's there's no there's no entity from high that's going to limit the number of options that we have available so it's sort of up to us to find ways to limit them and in the pre-digital days where you'd have to schlep from store to store driving across town you might impose limits on yourself but now when you basically can be sitting on your couch eating popcorn why would you ever stop searching and

[25:41] the result uh is that is that we are confronted with minimal uh cost to us with as many options as we want to look at so it takes a lot there is a sweet spot we don't know what it is or more accurately it's almost certainly not the same for every person and every area of life but we now know unequivocally that there can be too much of a good thing and so if you're in the marketing side you should ask how many options can i

[26:16] offer people so that they will be invited by them rather than paralyzed and there's going to be a number and that number is almost certainly smaller than the marketers think it is uh you know and and as consumers we can try to impose a certain amount of discipline on ourselves i'm only going to go to two stores i'm only gonna look at three websites i am never going to click the button on the website that says show all that you know that is the the invitation down a rabbit hole

[26:51] that leaves you depressed and without a new toaster unfortunately our our time is up um but i i you know i'm i'm encouraged a little bit i read an article just recently that coca-cola is cutting down the number of of options it offers from i think something like 500 to maybe 400 so it still seems i mean still seems overwhelming to me but perhaps we're going in the right direction as as you know consumer uh products groups it seems in general are looking to to offer fewer options so

[27:27] so maybe there's there's hope for us yet barry thank you but i think we're gonna have to rely on ourselves more than we are on the marketers i i you know what i suspect you're right nonetheless indeed so um we're gonna have um sierra put up your thing to wrap things up here are you ready okay here we go we have a we have a copy of the cover of barry's book the uh the paradox of choice it's gonna go right up here on the collage oh and she's she's putting you front and center

[28:02] making the choice is easier right there you go barry thank you so much and i i hope um we'll get an opportunity to check back in with you from time to time um and and and find out about some of the other work that you're doing is as we work with people to make their lives better take them on the way to wow thanks so much for being here thank you bye-bye that's our show for this week stay tuned next week when we have rafaelan the founder of lapid negotiation services talking about how to deal with difficult people pretty

[28:37] timely subject i think right now courage at all time my friends marie you are still my bell [Music]

[29:26] you