“Infinity” overwhelms us. We aren’t wired to understand or cope with it.

When we humans are faced with a seemingly infinite number of choices, most of the time we make no choice at all.

We freeze up, afraid to make the wrong one…

Or we just walk away…

Or, sometimes, we just go with whoever or whatever happens to be #1 that day—the “industry leader”.

And today, we have an infinite number of career choices. We grow up being told we can be anything… and in many cases that’s true. Most of the gatekeepers are gone.

But we’re also pushed to develop competence in many areas, rather than expertise or remarkability in just one or a few. We have to get Bs in everything, rather than an A+ in our favorite area and some Cs in the others.

This need to be good at everything, combined with too many choices, paralyzes us. Because we don’t want to pick the “wrong thing”. We don’t want to dedicate years of our lives and massive amounts of money to something that might not be a good fit.

So we don’t pick at all… Or we just pick the one that has the highest possible salary, the best job prospects, or the most security.

We don’t consider who we are, how we’re wired, what we love, what changes we’d like to see in the world…

We just go with whatever comes our way… but we can do so much better than that. We can contribute so much more.

But we have to choose what we’re going to focus on… and what we’re going to quit.

So what do you do? How do you overcome the paralysis of analysis? The overwhelm we experience when faced with too many choices?

Tell me your thoughts in the comments.

(H/t to Seth Godin for inspiring this post)

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