The concept of a Maximizer vs. a Satisficer is something I came across recently via Brian Johnson and Optimize. It’s from psychologist Barry Schwartz in this book “The Paradox of Choice— Why More is Less.”

According to Schwartz:

“The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better. As I will demonstrate, there is a cost to having an overload of choice. As a culture, we are enamored of freedom, self-determination, and variety, and we are reluctant to give up any of our options. But clinging tenaciously to all the choices available to us contributes to bad decisions, to anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction—even to clinical depression.”

The big idea is that the amount of choice we have is a negative thing and leads to indecision and sometimes even suffering and according to Schwartz we “would be better off if we embraced voluntary constraints on our freedom of choice, instead of rebelling against them.”

Further, from Schwartz, “if you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer and need to be assured that every purchase or decision was the best that could be made. Yet how can anyone truly know that any given purchase or decision is absolutely the best possible? As a decision strategy, maximizing creates a daunting task, which becomes all the more daunting as the number of options increases.”