Forty-three tabs open comparing blenders. You've been at this for two hours. Somewhere around minute ninety, you realize you've forgotten why you even wanted a blender in the first place.
If this sounds familiar, you might be what psychologists call a maximizer, someone who needs to find the objectively best option rather than a good enough one. Here's the tricky part nobody warns maximizers about: this trait, which feels like diligence, is actually quietly costing you both time and happiness, in ways that are measurable and well documented.
Why More Options Made Things Worse, Not Better
In my practice, I've watched sharp, capable people spend weeks paralyzed over decisions that satisficers, people who choose "good enough," resolve in an afternoon. The maximizer isn't lazier or less decisive by nature. They're running a much more exhausting internal algorithm, one that requires comparing every option against every other option before landing anywhere.
Here's the cruel twist. Research consistently shows maximizers, despite investing more effort and information-gathering into decisions, end up less satisfied with their choices than satisficers. More options and more research produce more regret, not less, because a maximizer always has visibility into the road not taken.
The Blender Isn't the Actual Problem
Think of decision-making like a search algorithm. A satisficer stops the search the moment they find something meeting their criteria. A maximizer keeps searching until they've theoretically covered the entire possibility space, which for most real-world decisions, is functionally infinite. You're not failing to decide. You're running a search that was never designed to terminate.
How This Shows Up Differently by Personality
If you're highly conscientious, maximizing probably feels like responsible diligence rather than a problem, which makes it especially hard to recognize as something worth changing, since it's dressed up as a virtue.
If you're high in neuroticism, the fear underneath your maximizing likely isn't really about the blender at all. It's about the deeper fear of making a "wrong" choice and what that might mean about you as a careful, capable person.
If you're a Thinker, you might resist satisficing on principle, feeling that settling for "good enough" is intellectually dishonest when a better option theoretically exists somewhere. That principle, held too rigidly, becomes its own trap.
Pause and reflect: Think of a recent decision that took far longer than its actual stakes warranted. For ten seconds, imagine how differently that day would have gone if you'd simply chosen the third reasonable option and stopped there.
Building a Satisficing Practice
Try this experiment for low-stakes decisions specifically: set a firm time limit before you start researching, five minutes for a blender, fifteen for a vacation destination. When the timer ends, choose from whatever you've found. Notice, afterward, whether your actual satisfaction differs meaningfully from the version where you'd searched for three more hours.
I remember a client, an accomplished editor, who applied this exact practice to restaurant selection after years of forty-minute deliberations that exhausted everyone she dined with. She reported, somewhat begrudgingly, that her meals tasted exactly the same either way. The information was humbling. It was also freeing.
Reserving Maximizing for What Actually Matters
This isn't an argument for careless decision-making everywhere. Some choices genuinely warrant thorough research, who you marry, where you live, major financial decisions. The skill isn't abandoning maximizing entirely. It's learning to reserve that exhaustive energy for the handful of decisions that truly deserve it, and releasing it everywhere else.
It's not your fault that thoroughness got rewarded so consistently throughout your life that you never learned when to stop applying it. That's a lesson most schools and workplaces never actually teach.
If you find yourself maximizing everything regardless of actual stakes, that pattern often traces back to specific personality traits around certainty and control. Worth understanding directly rather than white-knuckling every decision forever. Let's map it together at MyTraitsLab.
The Hidden Cost to Relationships
Maximizing doesn't just cost you time. It often costs the people around you too, the friend who's waited forty minutes for you to pick a restaurant, the partner who's learned to dread simple planning conversations because they know what's coming. Naming this pattern out loud to the people close to you, and asking for their patience while you practice satisficing, tends to improve those relationships considerably faster than trying to hide the struggle.
Let's be honest about something uncomfortable. Some maximizing isn't really about finding the best option. It's about avoiding the vulnerability of commitment, since choosing anything means closing off every alternative, and closing off alternatives can feel like a small, repeated loss each time.
A Different Way to Measure Success
Consider redefining what a "good decision" actually means for you. Instead of measuring success by whether you found the objectively best option, measure it by how quickly you decided and how much energy you had left over afterward for things that actually mattered more. That reframe alone changes the entire emotional experience of choosing.
Building Tolerance for "Good Enough"
This tolerance builds slowly, the same way any new habit does. Expect some genuine discomfort the first several times you deliberately choose something less than perfect. That discomfort fades with repetition, not with more research or more willpower applied to the same old pattern.
The Information Age Made This So Much Worse
Twenty years ago, choosing a blender meant walking into a store and picking from whatever six models sat on the shelf. Now you have infinite reviews, comparison sites, forum debates from strangers passionately defending their preferred brand. The maximizing impulse always existed, but it never had this much fuel available to it before, which partly explains why decision fatigue feels so much more exhausting now than it seemed to for previous generations.
Let's be honest about what this means practically. You're not weaker than people who managed decisions more easily in simpler times. You're navigating a genuinely harder informational environment, one engineered, often deliberately, to keep you comparing and scrolling rather than deciding and moving on.
What Happens When You Finally Choose
I think about a client who described the moment right after finally committing to a decision, any decision, as physically lighter, a tension release she hadn't fully registered was even there until it was gone. That relief is available to you every single time you choose to stop searching, and it's worth remembering during the exact moment your mind wants to keep going just a little longer.
It's not your fault that thoroughness got rewarded so consistently throughout your education and career that stopping early started to feel like carelessness. That association took years to build. It can be gently unbuilt too, one deliberately imperfect decision at a time, proving to yourself repeatedly that good enough really is good enough for most of what life actually asks of you.
Watch, too, for the specific moments when maximizing genuinely matters versus when it's simply become an automatic reflex applied everywhere without discrimination. Learning that difference is arguably the entire skill here, more than any single decision-making trick could ever offer on its own.
