Valhalla Island

Through Daring Fireball I found The Paradox of Choice TED Talk by Barry Schwartz. It’s extremely interesting, well spoken and worth watching the entire 20 minutes.

I’m faced with this problem every time I go shopping for new clothes. I have an idealistic image of the piece of clothing I want to buy and I figure, as there’s so many stores with so much variety, exactly what I want has to exist and I will find it.

Here’s an example from last week. I wanted a plain long sleeve t-shirt in thick 100% neutral coloured cotton with a round neck. A reasonable set of requirements, no? I spent two hours looking for this exact piece of clothing. Many times I found something close but not quite right, right style, wrong colour, right colour, right fit, right material but with a stupid print that said something like “Penn State”. Everything that’s not exactly right gets rejected because exactly right has to exist and taking anything less is buying the wrong thing.

I walked out with nothing. Is it a good thing that I held my ground, didn’t compromise and didn’t spend my money on something I didn’t want or is it a bad thing that I walked out without a piece of clothing I needed?

Once again I’ll link to something I wrote in 2005 that still holds true. One of the major reasons the iPod does so well is that there’s such a limited selection.