862: How to Create and Choose Better Solutions with Sheena Iyengar

Pete Mockaitis

Sheena, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Sheena Iyengar

Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to dig into your book Think Bigger: How to Innovate but, first, I want to get your take. So, you’re regarded as one of the leading experts on choosing. I’d love to hear about one of the trickiest decisions you’ve ever made and how you thought through it.

Sheena Iyengar

Wow, the trickiest decision I ever made. Well, I would say there were two really big choices I made in my life. The first was what was going to be my career. And I would say the best choice I ever made was to study choice. It wasn’t an easy choice, and it was a long path and, in many ways, I used…at that time, I didn’t know I was doing it, but I, essentially, created Think Bigger as I created that choice for myself. The second tricky choice I made was that I ended up getting divorced after 18 years of marriage, and that was not an easy choice to make.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, I bet. Wow. And thank you for sharing. And to the extent that you feel comfortable digging into that, how does one make such a choice?

Sheena Iyengar

Well, I, actually, in many ways, used my learnings in my own research to help me make that choice. I kept asking myself the question in lots of different ways. I kept looking at my own data, as in “What would be the worst-case scenario for me if I did X versus Y? What would be the best-case scenario? How would I handle it?” And I looked at what had happened to other people. And so, what did the science show about the consequences for other people?

And then I would ask myself, “If those consequences were to happen to me, what would I do about it?” And I found that no matter how I asked the question and how I framed it, I kept coming back to the same desire. And so, then I realized that I didn’t really know how it was all going to work out but that was enough to tell me, after about two years of going back and forth on it, I realized that I had made the choice.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, thank you for sharing that, and that’s certainly thought-provoking.

Sheena Iyengar

But you don’t want to make a decision like what career are you going to do for the rest of your life, or whether you’re going to get a divorce in a second.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. Well, so now let’s hear about your book Think Bigger. Any particularly striking discoveries here that have really stuck with you?

Sheena Iyengar

I would say that the most important thing about Think Bigger for people to understand is that, up until now, everything we’ve been taught about how to innovate, how to come up with your best ideas, is old, it’s outdated. What Think Bigger does is takes advantage of recent research in neuroscience for the last 20 years that, literally, tells us how the mind works when it forms thoughts that we haven’t been leveraging it to help us actually become better ideators.

And Think Bigger is the first book that does this. It brings together neuroscience and cognitive science to give you a new way of ideating. And so, for most people, the go-to method, when they need to solve a problem, or when they want an idea, is they engage in some form of mind wandering, or they say, “Look, I’m stuck. Let’s get a bunch of people together, and let’s do a brainstorm.” And Think Bigger says, “You know what, you can do better.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so I’m intrigued. Fundamentally, is there a key factor, or factors, that distinguish those who come up with amazing ideas from those who don’t? Is it just about the practices they’re engaged in?

Sheena Iyengar

You mean what distinguishes the people like the Einsteins and the Bezos and the Bill Gates, so to speak?

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah.

Sheena Iyengar

I would say, yes, we tend to think that the great innovators were special people that happened to be in special places or in special moments. And while you can often tell a lot of people’s stories that way because those are really good narratives to tell, I think, in truth, when you look at all the great innovations throughout history, there is actually a common denominator as to what the method is.

Until now, the great innovators did it subconsciously but we actually know how they did it, and having that knowledge enables anybody to do it. And that’s, essentially, what Think Bigger is. It shows you the framework and it gives you the toolkit so that whatever problem you have, you can actually just, in a very disciplined way, go about and come up with an idea. So, think of Think Bigger is offering the alternative to brainstorming, or sort of uninhibited or uncensored mind wandering.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so I’m eager to go into each of the six steps here for a bit of time. First, maybe could you kick us off with a cool story of someone who did just that, they walked through the process and saw some great stuff at the other end?

Sheena Iyengar

So, one of my favorite examples is Nancy Johnson mainly because we don’t really talk about her very much and, yet, she actually produced one of those rare products that is universally liked. It’s very hard to find somebody who doesn’t like what she put together. It’s accessible whether you’re rich or poor. And it’s hard to find anybody that hates it.

So, Nancy Johnson was the one who made it possible for every single person, no matter where you are in the world, to have ice cream. In the early 1800s, ice cream was very expensive. In fact, George Washington paid $200 for ice cream. That’s expensive today. Just think how expensive it was back then.

Pete Mockaitis

And it rotted his teeth so he had to have wood ones.

Sheena Iyengar

Exactly. And so, Nancy Johnson lived in Philadelphia. She was a woman in her 50s. She was the wife of a chemistry professor. She was also an abolitionist, so she was part of the underground railroad. And so, she’s noticing how ice cream is being made, and why it’s so expensive. And so, back then, they would have a big bowl, they would fill it with ice, and then they would put a smaller bowl in there, fill it with cream, and they would stir, stir, stir, stir, stir.

And while they were stirring, the ice cream would start to melt, and it would also form lumps, and it was also backbreaking labor. And so, here’s what she did. And, in fact, I’ll describe to you the story in a way that also essentially gives you the method. So, she said, “Okay, how do I make the process of making ice cream easier and, essentially, cheaper? Well, what’s getting in my way?”

“First, it’s backbreaking labor. Second, how do I keep it cold as we’re stirring it? And third, how do I prevent lumps?” So, those are the subparts of her problem that she needs to solve for in order to solve for the bigger problem. Well, how do we keep it cold? You take a large water pail that had already been around for 400 years, you fill that up with ice, and then you find something that you put in it that knows how to keep things cold.

Well, what was something that people regularly used to keep liquid cold? In the taverns where she was, as a woman, not really allowed to go, they would serve beer in pewter mugs. Well, what about putting the cream in pewter? So, now you have a pail filled with ice, and the inner bowl made of pewter. You put the cream in there.

Now, how do I make the labor of stirring it not as arduous? What if we take a grinder, a hand grinder that was used for making coffee, for grinding coffee or spices? Now, how do we prevent the lumps? I’m going to attach to that grinder spatulas that have holes in them. So, one of the things that she learned from the runaway slaves that often came from the sugar plantations was that when making molasses, they would have to stir really hot liquid that could easily form crystals.

And what they found was that if you put holes in the spatula, the liquid would go through and it would be less likely to form crystals. Why not do the same thing with a cold cream? You put these elements together – the pail, the pewter, bowl, the hand grinder, the spatula with the holes – and you have a new technology that was deemed a disruptive technology in 1843 by the Library of Congress.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. There you have it.

Sheena Iyengar

I happen to love ice cream and I love the example of Nancy Johnson.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s a cool one, for sure. And so, I did see that outline, we got six steps. Step one, choose the problem. Step two, break down the problem. Step three, compare wants. Step four, search in and out of the box. Step five, choice map. And step six, the third eye. So, I’d love for you to elaborate on each of these a bit. But, first, I’m just going to say, I noticed none of the steps, nor in the story, is there a, “Oh, have a eureka moment in which a thunderbolt of insight arrives out of nowhere.” Where does that fall into the things?

Sheena Iyengar

We love eureka moments, and I certainly want you to continue to have eureka moments because they’re powerful in terms of helping us keep motivated. But when you actually look at people and you follow them over the course of weeks, whether they’re a scientist or an artist, it turns out that about 20% of your ideas happen as eurekas, about 80% happen not as eurekas, they’re just happening during your work.

We tend to initially love those eureka ideas because they feel special somehow and it happens in your dream or when you’re doing a jog. Over time though, most of those eureka moments are less likely to actually be adapted. So, we do tend to overweigh the aha moments. That doesn’t mean that they’re irrelevant because those aha moments can help us in reframing the question, and they just remind us why we care.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Okay. Well, so if it’s not a eureka moment, then is the moment in which the new idea appears more like, “Oh, let me try this. That didn’t quite work out. Maybe if it were a little bit longer or maybe if it had holes in it”? Is it more like that, “So, let’s make a modest adjustment to this thing I just tried”?

Sheena Iyengar

So, that’s when you’re talking about being purely experimental. You can actually be more strategic and more deliberative about that. A great idea is “I’m having a problem with X.” So, let’s say in my case, I am blind. I remember when I first started to teach, nobody knew how you could have a blind person get up and start teaching. Nobody had the answer to that, like, “Well, I don’t know, you can’t engage in eye contact,” or, “You’re not going to see people raise their hands,” or a gazillion things came up as to what a blind person could or could not do.

And so, the way you frame the problem is you say, “Okay, how would one engage an audience if you can’t see them? What would you do?” Well, what does an audience want? And what other kinds of people can help you with that? So, for example, you couldn’t give them eye contact, but what are other things, that other kinds of entertainers, different from teachers, use? And so, I actually learned quite a few tactics from actresses, from personal trainers, from comedians, and that’s how I pull together a teaching style.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, now I want to know. What do they do? And what do you do?

Sheena Iyengar

What do I do?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Sheena Iyengar

Oh, well, lots of things. For example, I had an actress that taught me things like body language and hand gestures. Rather than having people raise their hands, I’ll often have them clap their hands, “If you agree with me, clap your hands. If you disagree, now clap your hands.” And then I’ll let them tell me which side was louder. It’s actually, in some ways, better than having them raise their hands.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, cool.

Sheena Iyengar

Those are just two examples.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so, yeah, let’s hear about each of these steps here. Step one, choose the problem. That sounds pretty direct and straightforward. But is there some nuance here, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar

So, most companies end up, about 72% of companies end up failing in their solution because they end up discovering, after they’ve created the solution, that it’s actually the solution to the wrong problem. We’re terrible at actually defining our problem right. As Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to save the planet, I would spend the first 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution.”

And there’s a lot of wisdom in that statement because a lot of your solution really depends on defining that problem well. We either define our problem as too vague, or too big such that it’s unsolvable, or so trivial or irrelevant that nobody cares. It’s really defining it in a way that’s both concrete and meaningful. And you want to define it in a way that’s a question rather than embedding a solution in it because it’s only when you define it as a question that you’re going to be open-minded.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you give us some examples of well-defined problems versus their poorly defined counterparts?

Sheena Iyengar

Oh, that’s a great question. Okay. Well, “How do I solve the problem of climate change?” Terrible question.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Sheena Iyengar

“How do I create a car that’s affordable?” That’s a doable question.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, the first one is just so huge.

Sheena Iyengar
It’s just too big.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s not getting us anywhere helpful from an innovation perspective.

Sheena Iyengar
“How do I know if somebody is passionate?” Not a good question. Too vague.

Pete Mockaitis

And then what would be the better version of that?

Sheena Iyengar

“How do I find something that I want to spend many hours doing?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And can you give us some better versions that are climate-adjacent to sharpen the contrast?

Sheena Iyengar

Sure. “How do I create a substitute for meat that people want to eat?” And we already see companies doing that.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, let me get your take on this one. “How do I create market incentives for automakers to reduce their emissions?” How’s that feel? Pros, cons.

Sheena Iyengar

So, for that one, you have to first know, “Is the problem emanating from the car companies or from the buyers?”

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, got you. Yes, so there’s a solution or assumption embedded in it.

Sheena Iyengar
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, it sounds like choosing the problem, we’ve got to do some homework before we can even hope to make a statement that is a good choice. Is that fair to say?

Sheena Iyengar

You’re going to do a lot of work, and you’re going to probably keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking the problem you’re trying to solve till the very end.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Sheena Iyengar

It’s just like writing a paper. You often write your first sentence at the very end.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood.

Sheena Iyengar

Although you knew what it was, generally speaking, at the very beginning, and you keep writing towards it, but you’re still tweaking.

Pete Mockaitis

Okey-dokey.

Sheena Iyengar

So, then just like Nancy Johnson, after you’ve defined the problem, you then break it down into its most important subparts. Now, every problem has many, many layers, so you’ve got to be able to identify the most important ones. And I say somewhere between three and five, sometimes I let you go up to six, but beyond that it’s cognitively paralyzing so you’re not going to do a good job. You’ve got to make this doable.

Actually, the way to think about Think Bigger is that there are, essentially, two tools. The first is a choice map, and the second is what we call the big picture, it’s where you compare wants. And so, the choice map is where you define your problem, you break it down. And then for every subproblem that you have, you then go search. You search first in industry, and then you search across to many other industries that have nothing to do with your industry, but you’re searching for the way in which they have solved for an analogous problem.

“What other objects do people use to keep liquid cold?” for example. “What other sorts of backbreaking labor is there that has the problem of things getting lumpy?” Another example. So, you look in totally different industries that have to deal with an analogous problem, and you see what they’re doing, and then you obviously have to, in some ways, adapt or edit their tactic but you’re importing it in.

And so, you do that for every subproblem. You’re searching. So, we often think that the part of ideation is just sitting there and reflecting. I’m not doing that. I’m saying the actual ideation process itself is its own exercise, a mental exercise. And so, you create a choice map where you have your problem, you break it down, and for each subproblem, you find ways of solving it that has worked in the past. And now you combine those tactics, just like Nancy Johnson did to create a machine. That’s how you have your greatest innovations.

That’s true whether you’re looking at Nancy Johnson’s ice cream machine, or Henry Ford’s car, or Netflix, or Amazon, or Paul McCartney’s great song “Yesterday.”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s intriguing. So, songwriting, you follow the same process.

Sheena Iyengar

It’s the same thing, yes. Most innovators though are not being as deliberative as I’m saying. Most innovators are doing what I’m talking about subconsciously. What Think Bigger is about is making you more conscious so that you can do it whenever you want. You can do it on command, and you can practice it and get better and better and better at it.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m really intrigued with the example of a song. Can you walk us through how those steps apply when the innovation doesn’t feel so much like a patent or invention but a work of words put together?

Sheena Iyengar

Let’s take something that’s a little more visual that might be easier to explain. So, let’s take, say you want an example from, say, Picasso or Lady Liberty, let’s take Lady Liberty since that’s a piece of art that everybody, no matter where in the globe, would have seen. So, everybody knows the Statue of Liberty.

And we love the Statue of Liberty for all that she stands for and what she means, etc. Now, we assume that the person who made her was a genius, and certainly what he did and what he created, ultimately, is a masterpiece. But how did Frederic Bartholdi get the idea? So, I’m going to strip away, I’m not going to tell his life story, I’m not going to tell you all the hardships and struggles he had. I’m just going to answer the question, “How did he get his idea?”

So, he loved the massive sculptures that were guarding the Egyptian tombs so much so that we have seen earlier drawings of a big lady dressed in robes, carrying a light that he wanted to be made for the Suez Canal entrance. So, Lady Liberty kind of has that feeling to her. There was, at the time, when he was building Lady Liberty, a very famous painting in Paris by a painter by the name of Lefebvre called “La Verite,” “The Lady of Truth.”

There was also Libertas, the Roman goddess who was on every five Franc coin at the time when Frederic Bartholdi was making Lady Liberty. And so, you now have Lady Liberty, the posture which we get from “La Verite,” Libertas, which was how he get the crown. Now what about the face? The face of Lady Liberty, there’s many poems written about those eyes that are inscrutable yet kind. That face was that of his mother.

So, what does every person do when they generate a solution, whether they’re an artist, whether they’re a scientist, whether they’re someone who’s making a new patent or product, whether they’re just trying to come up with an idea? They are combining elements that they have come to become aware of, and they’re combining them in a new way, and that’s what makes them creative and unique.

Now, of course, it’s not mere combination because many combinations are clunky. And so, there is an artfulness to the combination where the whole has to feel greater than the sum of the individual parts.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, that’s cool. Understood. So, combination, that’s what makes it creative. And then the steps are means by which that unfolds.

Sheena Iyengar

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yeah, could we keep cruising here about step three, compare wants.

Sheena Iyengar

So, compare wants is where you get away from the choice map or you get away from the gathering of information that’s both in your industry and out of your industry. Compare wants says, “You know what, let me also ask, what is it that I want the feeling to be like if I were to come up with a solution? What do I, the creator, want? What would my customers, or whatever, my target audience want? And who might be my gatekeepers and allies? And what would they want?”

And so, think of these as those emotions. So, emotions don’t go into your choice map, which is where you’ve got your problem, your subproblems, and your strategies. The big picture, the compare wants, is where you are really highlighting, “Okay, I, as the ideator, I want to be famous. I want it to be used by everybody. My customers, well, they want it to be affordable. They want it to make their life feel more luxurious. Gatekeepers, might be, ‘Well, how do you deal with competitors that might try to thwart you?’ Allies. Well, who else would care about this and want to help me make this happen? So, what do they want.”

And so, once you collect up the desires of all these different entities, what you do is you now look at your various solutions that you’ve created, and you ask yourself, “Which one fits the most number of these desires?” and that’s how you pick.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then, I’m curious, within the choice map, do we have a specific picture, diagram, document that that looks like?

Sheena Iyengar

Yes. So, I know we’re doing a chat here on audio but, yes, we do have. I think of the prototypic choice map as a five by five where you have, let’s say, on average, five subproblems, and, let’s say, on average, per subproblem, I really try to get people to at least get five different ways to solve that subproblem because you need choice, and only one or two of them can be within an industry. The bulk of them should be out of industry because that’s how you get out-of-the-box ideas.

And so, what you then do is you now, let’s say, have a five-by-five matrix filled out, and now what you do is you take one tactic per row, and you line them up in your head, and you ask yourself, “What could I imagine doing? How would I combine these?” That’s how choice mapping works. I have different strategies by which I teach people how to imagine and how to take strategies that you wouldn’t ordinarily combine together.

So, there’s also like a random component to really get you to come up with some really unusual solutions. But in a five by five, you can generate about 3,125 unique solutions. That’s actually far more than your typical brainstorming session.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, could you give us an example there in terms of what might be five columns and then five rows, and then a couple combinations?

Sheena Iyengar

Okay. Well, that’s going to be quite a bit to keep track of. So, let’s imagine Netflix. So, when Reed Hastings, so what was the problem he was trying to solve when he initially got started, “How do I make movie-watching more pleasant at home?” That was his irritation. And so, he had the first was, “Well, how do I make it so that I don’t have to lift my butt and go down the block to return a movie every day, otherwise I get a late fee?”

“How do I reduce the cost of, say, the inventory of actually having a store at every block, that actually cost money in terms of rent? And I also want to, while I’m at it, increase the number of options that people have.” So, let’s just take those two. So, let’s say the first, like, “How do I reduce the inconvenience of having to raise my butt, move my butt?” Well, he could have it in every building, maybe have it as a soda pop machine, but now you’re going to give people movies. That could be one solution.

Or, he could do what Bezos was starting to do, which was, well, he was sending books to people, vis-à-vis, online. So, any one of those tactics could be used. In fact, there is a company that sells videos, or you can go rent videos using a soda pop machine. “How do I create a fee structure that isn’t annoying because I really find it annoying to have late fees?” Well, there are other options that you could use other than late fees to make sure you get enough revenue.

“Well, it could be that I use the gym membership model where you can use it as much as you want, and you just have a flat monthly fee. Or, I could say, ‘Look, I’m only going to give you a certain number of movies per week.’” The list goes on in terms of how many different ways in which you could create your fee structure but you had to go out of industry. At that time, it was unheard of to do anything other than what Blockbuster was doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’ve got some specific tactics that can meet the no travel or no late fees.

Sheena Iyengar
Yeah. And so, ultimately, what did Reed Hastings do? He takes the fee structure of gym membership, plus the no inventory cost, and yet a lot of movie selections, or not no inventory, less inventory costs and yet a lot of variety through going online. And then he takes advantage of a brand-new technology that had just come into the market called the DVD, and that creates your first mail-order movie. People often forget that it actually started with mail-order movies.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, the Netflix as a whole is the combination of several tactics that each are solving a key subproblem.

Sheena Iyengar

Yes. And so, Netflix, when it first got started was just a combination of Planet Fitness plus Amazon, plus the DVD.

Pete Mockaitis

And I’ve heard that, is it called the high-level pitch or the concept pitch, which is often how a lot of things are explained? Like, “It’s like Airbnb, but for your car.” It’s like, “Oh, okay. I understand what you’re saying.” And then, in a way, that concept of pitching or summarizing an idea is just sharing the combinations that are popping for the choice map.

Sheena Iyengar
Yeah, you’re extracting the most relevant tactic but you’re not, like, stealing all of Amazon, you’re not stealing all of Planet Fitness, but you’re extracting the most relevant tactic that applies to your subproblem. And so, yes, analogical thinking is relevant. You’re absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then step six, the third eye. What’s this about?

Sheena Iyengar

So, the third eye, a lot of times people spend a lot of money once they have an idea, and they decide they’re going to either pretotype or prototype, and they end up prototyping a lot of mediocre ideas. And I don’t think you need to rush to do that. There’s actually very inexpensive and fun way to actually learn how your idea will be perceived because we all have that feeling where you’ve got an idea, and you think it’s great, and yet you go describe it to your spouse, and they’re like, “Huh?”

And so, what the third eye is it’s a unique way of learning how others will perceive your idea. I call it the good way of getting feedback but it’s not getting feedback by asking people, “Hey, I’m going to describe this to you. Tell me what you think.” No, I never ask you what you think because that’s actually not helpful to me to know if you like or hate it. How is that useful to me?

What I really need to know is, when I describe my idea to you, what questions do you ask me? If I were to ask you how you would describe my idea back to me, how would you describe it? Because that’s how I learn what you heard and what you’re seeing, and what stuck out at you and what didn’t, and what were the gaps. And that then helps me to further flesh it out.

And so, to give you an example, if that would be helpful here, let’s take Paul McCartney’s legendary song “Yesterday.” If you read the folk stories about it, it’ll say that he just woke up one morning with the tune in his head, and the rest is history. It’s true that he woke up with some tune in his head, and he immediately got up and he wrote it down, but he didn’t actually know whether it was a good tune or not.

He had that insight to understand that he just had no idea if he had just reinvented the wheel or what. By the way, most of the times when we have a new idea, it is often redundant with whatever is already out there. So, that was actually a very useful insight on his part and a useful worry on his part. But what he did was he created some nonsensical phrases to just hold the tune in his head. And he started to just hum the tune to different people, and say, “Hey, have you heard this before?” He didn’t ask them, “Do you like this?” “Have you heard this before?”

“No, no, it sounds familiar but, no, I don’t think I’ve actually heard it.” And every time he plays it and he hums it, he starts fleshing it out a little more, “Hey, have you heard this before?” “No, no.” Eventually, after he’s built it out enough, he realizes, “Hmm, let me start putting some real words to this.” And he put some words, and then he takes a guitar.

And he was lefthanded but he was given a righthanded guitar, and he just played it with the wrong hand because, in part, he just wanted to hear how it was sounding, and let other people hear so that he could see whether they were hearing what he was hearing. Was it a song? And so, that’s how, little by little, he’s forming the song.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, Sheena, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention about innovation, key steps, best practices before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Sheena Iyengar

I think, too often, we think that creativity is like magic, and that it’ll just happen. Like, when you least expect it, it’ll happen in this flash of a second, and that it’s kind of out of your control, it happens to special people or in special moments. And I guess what I most want people to take away is the idea that it actually is not magic. You can train yourself to do it, and you actually do get better and better with practice, and it is something you can practice doing.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sheena Iyengar

Well, my favorite quote is by Bob Dylan, “Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s not about finding anything. It’s about creating yourself.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Sheena Iyengar

I still really am surprised at how good the jam study was that I did so many years ago. I didn’t realize how important a study it was even when I did it. But if you show people six jams versus 24 jams, when they see 24, they’re more likely to get curious and stop and sample it than when they see six, but they were 10 times more likely to buy a jar of jam when they encountered six than when they encountered 24.

And that, I did in the year 2000, and I didn’t know that it was actually a moment, it was a tipping point that we were actually entering a world where we really were having exited the amount of choice we had in the ‘90s was high but that it was really going to get even higher. And so, yeah, I think that ever since, if anything our world has become more complex, more information, more choices, and that understanding that we do have cognitive limitations, so that the best way for any of us to get the most from choice, to get the most from life, is to actually be very mindful about what kind of choices we want and for what.

In fact, the choice map that I was describing to you, it’s a tool you can use for ideation but it’s, ultimately, a decision-making tool. You can use the choice map to help you discern which choices are better and worse, to help you figure out what are the most important criteria you need for any choice that you’re looking at to fulfill. So, it’s not just a choice-creation tool, it’s also a picking tool, choice-selection tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Sheena Iyengar

I suppose whenever I need inspiration, and I’m feeling down or anything, I always love, one of my go-to books is The Prophet. I also really love Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Sheena Iyengar

My favorite tool then probably is my Apple Watch. It keeps me on time. It has actually made my life a lot easier. And actually, this might surprise you, it’s now old fashion to use paper and pen. The equivalent of that for a blind person is Braille paper and a stylus, like slate and stylus. It’s like handwriting Braille, almost no blind people will handwrite Braille anymore because your Braille, just like give a laptop for normal typewriter, you have that for Braille. But I still find being able to hand-Braille to be really, really useful. It just helps me think better.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Sheena Iyengar

Every single day, the first thing I do when I wake up is I ask myself, “What are the three most important things I need to do today?” And that helps me reduce the clutter because there’s so much coming at you every single day.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Sheena Iyengar

To get the most from choice, you have to be choosy about choosing.

Pete Mockaitis

And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Sheena Iyengar

Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. You can come find me at the Columbia Business School where I’m a faculty member. You can email me.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Sheena Iyengar

Never feel that you can’t make your life better. There’s a lot of times we have dreams, and not all our dreams get fulfilled, but the great thing about dreams is they come in in endless supply pack. And if you’re able to pick other dreams and figure out which dreams you can make come real, do it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Sheena, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and many big thoughts.

Sheena Iyengar

Thank you.