decision paralysis Quotes

Too many choices can overwhelm us and cause us to not choose at all. For businesses, this means that if they offer us too many choices, we may not buy anything.

What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam.

I've been wanting to cut my hair now for at least a year. I've often fantasized about it but I haven't been able to do it because of the contracts that I've had.

We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.

Flea markets tend to be overwhelming. A lot of times, when I go with a first-time shopper, they don't buy anything. The rooms in my new book involved real people with real design dilemmas. They were paralyzed to make a decision.

That’s one difficulty about a democracy. Nothing ever gets decided—even after its been decided.

So many ideas come to you and you want to try them all, but you can't. You're like a mosquito in a nudist colony, you don't know where to start.

...not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act.

I can't make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right—and then I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started. God, what a job!

Decisiveness is a characteristic of high-performing men and women. Almost any decision is better than no decision at all.

Despite his unimpressive appearance and manner, he was a brilliant fellow with a crystal-clear mind.... It was just that, when it came time for him to act like an executive, he was like a great many other people; when the time comes to make decisions, they have difficulty doing it.

The mark of a bad leader is not to make the wrong decision. It is to make no decision at all.

I might have missed my calling as an editor. In the spring, the sight of my empty garden beds gives me the horticultural equivalent of writers' block: So much space! So many plants to choose among, and yet none of them seem quite right!

But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others.

In fact, even in that store Draeger's they had 348 different kinds of jam actually in the jam aisle. And what we found over about, say, 10 years of research is that as the number of choices actually increase people are less likely to make a choice and sometimes they do this even when it's really bad for them.

Decisions can be a major challenge for all of us.

Beaurocracy destroys initiative.

A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing, but who, as a group, can meet and decide that nothing can be done.

There's nothing scarier than unlimited choices.

When you abandon making choices, you enter the vast world of excuses.

The maxim ‘Nothing avails but perfection’ may be spelled shorter: ‘Paralysis.’

Inaction and indecision in the present is because of fear of consequences of the future.

Ironically, when a bunch of very smart people are sitting around a table for hours trying to figure out whether they should do something, that tends to not necessarily lead to the best results.

The idea of choice is easily debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be endlessly choosing.