How to Overcome the Maximizer Tendency
Steven told me he couldn’t remember a time when he’d just known instinctively what to do. Extensive research preceded every major—or minor—decision. Every few months, he interviewed at a different company (“to keep my options open,” he told me) only to stay in his current job. He pored over Scotch reviews for two hours before buying his dad a bottle for Father’s Day. He saw every decision as a problem to dissect, analyze, and fret over. Pro/con lists filled the Notes app on his phone. Why risk making a merely okay decision when a perfect one was only a few hours of research away?
While his behavior was occasionally annoying to his friends—and job recruiters—no one but Steven really suffered from his indecision. No one except his girlfriend Gabby.
Gabby loved Steven. Steven loved Gabby. They had dated for four years and lived together for three of them. But Steven often wondered: Who else is out there? He knew Gabby’s good qualities. She worked as a nurse and fostered cats from the local animal shelter. She was loyal, warm, caring, attractive, kind, and intelligent. Yet that wasn’t enough. He wished she were more social. He wanted dinner parties and deep conversations about abstract ideas.
Gabby felt ready to get married and start a family. True to form, Steven wasn’t so sure.
After a year of waiting for Steven to make up his mind, Gabby had had enough. She was tired of going to the weddings of friends who had met after she and Steven started dating. Late one night, she told Steven, through tears, “I can’t wait around anymore. I want to get engaged or break up.”
For the next few months, Steven had no idea what to do. He wanted to want to get engaged, but he could never actually get himself to propose. He debated with his friends. He went on long swims to meditate on the question. But he never felt any closer to knowing what he really wanted.
He couldn’t stop himself from asking, Could I be 5 percent happier with someone else?
Steven is a Maximizer. Maximizers obsess over making the best possible decision. American economist, political scientist, and cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon first described this personality profile in a 1956 paper. According to Simon, Maximizers are a special type of perfectionist. They’re compelled to explore every possible option before they feel like they can choose. Yet this compulsion becomes daunting, and ultimately unfeasible, when they face a vast number of possibilities.
On the other end of the spectrum are Satisficers (a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice”). They have standards, but they aren’t overly concerned that there might be something better out there. They know their criteria, and they hunt until they find the “good enough” option. It’s not that they settle; they’re simply fine making a decision once they’ve gathered some evidence and identified a satisfactory option.
Imagine you’re on a two-hour flight. The plane takes off and you begin scrolling through the movie options. Do you A) select the first movie that appeals to you? Within five minutes, you’re reclining in your seat, eyes glued to Good Will Hunting. Or do you B) spend twenty-five minutes scrolling through every single new release, comedy, drama, documentary, and foreign film, as well as all the TV shows, before committing to the absolute best option?
If you chose A, you’re likely a Satisficer. If you selected B, you’re clearly a Maximizer. (You can fall on the spectrum between these extremes, or you may be a Maximizer in some parts of your life and a Satisficer in others.)
Maximizers obsess over their decision-making. They trust that careful analysis will ultimately make their life better. But that’s not true. Not only are Satisficers able to make good decisions, they tend to wind up happier about them. That’s because—and it’s worth repeating—satisficing is not about settling. Satisficers may have very high standards and stop only after those standards have been met. The difference is, once they stop, they don’t worry about what else is out there. Maximizers, on the other hand, may find an option that meets their standards, but they feel compelled to explore all possibilities.
When it comes to relationships, Maximizers—like Steven—mistakenly believe that with the right amount of exploration, they can find the perfect person and have absolute confidence in their decision. But this perfect person (and complete certainty) doesn’t exist. That’s why maximizing leads to anguish, delays in decision-making, and missed opportunities. In other words, it’s better to be a Satisficer.
Anxiety plagues Maximizers. It’s not just FOMO (fear of missing out). They also suffer from the less catchy FOMTWD (fear of making the wrong decision). They think maximizing will help them make the perfect choice and alleviate their anxiety. But FOMTWD creates an immense amount of pressure. Anything less than perfection feels like failure.
This happens to me when I travel. Even if a trip unfolds almost perfectly, when I make a mistake—like booking a hotel far away from the center of town—I can’t help but feel like I failed. I think, If only I’d done just a little more research. I have to fight to prevent this feeling from ruining the trip.
Hardly anything exacerbates the Maximizer tendency more than choosing a long-term partner. Maximizers fear making a mistake. What if I get divorced and have to raise my children on my own? What if I dread coming home after work because I have nothing to say to my wife? What if I’m so bored that I have an affair?
For most of human history (and to this day, in many societies), our families, communities, or religious leaders told people what to do—what to wear, what to eat, how to act, what to believe, and, yes, whom to marry. Now, in our increasingly individualistic and secular culture, we each define our own identity. Do I eat meat? Do I work on Shabbat? Do I baptize my child? Do I get married in a synagogue? Do I identify as a man or woman or neither?
Our life, once scripted by culture, religion, and family, is now a blank page. This grants us the freedom to express ourselves more fully. But we’re also burdened by the pressure to get it right. When we are the authors of our own story and that story sucks, we have no one to blame but ourselves. No wonder we can get trapped in analysis paralysis.
When everything is up in the air—and up to us—we yearn to stand on solid ground. “I want to feel a hundred percent certain before I walk down the aisle,” Steven told me.
But that’s exactly the problem. Steven believes it’s possible to “pro/con list” his way to the correct answer, no different from purchasing the optimal vacuum (Dyson V11 Animal, 160 five-star reviews) or planning the optimal day (five a.m. surfing, coffee from the little stand that people love but no one knows about, sprint triathlon, meeting up with two different friends, beach meditation, home-cooked meal, and board games). But this assumes there is a right answer for whom to marry. And there’s not.
Do Maximizers obtain better outcomes?
We can think about this question in two ways—the objective result and the subjective experience. In other words, the quality of your choice and how you feel about it.
Imagine you’re a Maximizer who’s sick of spending money on your morning coffee. You spend hours conducting research into home espresso makers. You read Amazon reviews and study product comparison websites like Wirecutter. You select Wirecutter’s number one pick: the elegant Breville Bambino Plus. As soon as it arrives, you notice it doesn’t fit as easily into your kitchen as you thought it would. You wonder if you should’ve gotten a smaller one. Just as the review warns, it doesn’t capture the brightness of your coffee bean. As your cup brews, you stew, and regret not going with a different option.
Meanwhile, your Satisficer friend is also on the market for an espresso maker. She goes to the mall, pops into a Nespresso store, tells an employee what she’s looking for, and walks out with a reasonably priced machine. She tells you how much she adores the process of making her daily latte, from selecting the fun-colored pods to steaming her milk.
In this scenario, you selected the best espresso machine available. Several websites compared your machine to hers, and yours won. But who feels better about the decision?
Satisficers report feeling happier with their choices, even when they select an objectively worse option. (I mean, come on. Your friend’s Nespresso machine didn’t even make Wirecutter’s top picks!) That’s because Maximizers constantly second-guess themselves. They suffer doubly: first in the agony leading up to the decision, and again every time they worry they’ve made the wrong one.
Psychologist and The Paradox of Choice author Barry Schwartz explains that what separates Maximizers and Satisficers is not the quality of their decisions, it’s how these decisions make them feel: “Maximizers make good decisions and end up feeling bad about them. Satisficers make good decisions and end up feeling good.”
What’s your goal? To have the world’s best coffee machine or to be happy? If it’s happiness you’re after, it’s the subjective experience, not the objective result, that really matters. While the quality of coffee is important, how we feel about that coffee is paramount.
Maximizers want to turn over every stone before they make a decision. That presents a particularly tough challenge when it comes to dating. You can’t go out with every eligible single in your city, let alone the whole world. If you hope to get married or commit to a long-term relationship, eventually, you’ll need to make a decision with the information you have.
If you’re a Maximizer, that idea might make you nervous. What if you aren’t happy with what you pick? Here’s the good news: We have an incredible tool working on our behalf to make us happy—our brain! Once we commit to something, our brain helps us rationalize why it was the right choice.
Rationalization is our ability to convince ourselves we did the right thing. Imagine you buy an expensive winter coat that you can return within thirty days. You take it home and weigh its pros and cons. Even if you keep the coat, you can’t shake that list of cons in your head. But when you buy a coat on final sale, you immediately commit to liking it. You can’t return it, so why worry about its drawbacks? That’s the power of rationalization. Embrace it.
This works for dating, too. When you commit to someone, your brain will do its best to convince you it was a good decision. Satisficers inherently understand this idea—and benefit from it.
Now, perhaps you’re thinking: I’m not looking to make a merely “good” decision. I refuse to settle. But this is a common misunderstanding about satisficing. Remember, Satisficers can have very high standards. They may look around for a while until they find an option that meets their expectations. The difference is, once they find something that meets their standards, they are happy with it. They don’t wonder what else is out there.
And that’s why I want you to work toward becoming a Satisficer. The best choice of all is choosing to be happy.
You can learn to date like a Satisficer by studying the decision-making riddle known as the Secretary Problem. Imagine you are hiring a secretary. And let’s be sure to make him a male secretary, because I know you were envisioning a woman and #fuckthepatriarchy. There are a hundred possible candidates whom you must interview one by one. After each interview, you decide whether to hire that person or keep looking. If you reject a person, he’s gone. You can’t change your mind later and hire him.
How should you maximize your chances of picking the best candidate? You don’t want to decide too early in the process, because you might miss out on a strong candidate at the end of the line. But you don’t want to make it too far without choosing, because what if the final options aren’t very good? It turns out there’s a mathematically correct answer to this problem. You should interview 37 percent of the candidates and then pause. Identify the best person from this first group. Now you have a meaningful benchmark. After evaluating the first 37 percent, you should be prepared to hire the first candidate who is better than the standout from the first group.
This logic applies to dating, too. In the Secretary Problem, you know there are a hundred possible candidates. In dating, you have no idea how many possible matches are out there. Even if you did, you couldn’t meet all of them. Life, logistics, and geography all get in the way.
Instead of thinking about the total number of people you might date, consider how long you’re likely to actively look for a partner. Apply the rule of 37 percent to that time period. In the book Algorithms to Live By, authors Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths discuss a single man who wants to get married. “Assuming that his search would run from ages eighteen to forty, the 37% rule gave age 26.1 as the point at which to switch from looking to leaping.”
That means that by the age of 26.1, he should set a meaningful benchmark from his first 8.1 years of dating—that is, the single best person he’s dated thus far. He should then marry the next person he meets whom he likes more than that benchmark.
I explained the Secretary Problem to Doug, a software engineer who’d recently sold his business to a major tech company. Doug had been in several three- to six-month relationships. He always found something lacking with the women he dated. This one laughed at his jokes, but she wasn’t funny. That one worked too hard. The next one didn’t work hard enough.
When I began to describe the idea of the benchmark, he nodded and interrupted me. “I get it. I get it,” he said. “I’m thirty-one, and I’ve probably already dated someone who would make a great wife.” It clicked.
I followed up with a homework assignment. “Put together a spreadsheet of all the women you’ve gone out with in the last year. Make a column for their name, how you met them, how you felt when you were with them, and what values you shared. You can include other details, too, but I don’t want a laundry list of their flaws or a ranking of their hotness.”
“I’ll do it.”
During our next session, Doug pulled up his laptop and showed me his work. “Brielle,” he said as the page loaded. “She’s the one.”
“The one? You mean like the one the one?” I asked. (I know: I temporarily suspended my distaste for that term.)
“Not the one I’m going to marry, but the benchmark. She was smart, funny, fun to be with, ambitious, and pretty. Ugh, why did I break up with her? Anyway, it’s too late for that. Brielle is my benchmark. I’m going to commit to the next girl who I like as much or more than Brielle.”
Now it’s your turn. To determine your dating window, count the number of years from when you started dating to when you’d like to enter a long-term relationship. Now, what’s 37 percent of that number? Add that to the age when you started dating. That’s your 37 percent mark. If you’re in your thirties, you’ve probably already passed it. Complete the assignment I gave Doug to determine your benchmark partner.
Don’t worry. I’m not telling you to marry the next person you go out with, nor am I implying that it’s too late if you’re past the 37 percent mark. I’m merely suggesting that you likely already have enough data to generate a reasonable, well-informed benchmark. You do not need more research. The next time you meet someone whom you like as much or more than that benchmark, commit to them.
GENDER INEQUALITY AND RELATIONSHIP TIMELINES
I am a feminist. I believe men and women are and should be equal. However, that does not mean we are the same. We’re separated by real biological differences in our reproductive systems. (I recognize these categories don’t contain everyone and that trans and genderqueer folks face unique challenges while dating.)
Women’s fertility declines in our thirties. Men can have kids until their late sixties and beyond. (Robert De Niro was sixty-eight years old when his youngest child was born—though I’d encourage any man who thinks he has infinite time to imagine playing catch when he’s seventy, with arthritic hands.)
To my beloved female readers: If you want to have kids, and you hope to carry them yourself, it’s important to incorporate that goal when you consider your dating window. While you don’t need a partner to have a kid, this may affect the age by which you’d like to find someone.
Although it’s expensive, you may want to consider egg freezing. While it’s certainly not a guarantee that you can have kids later, it may buy you some time. I froze embryos, fertilized by my partner’s sperm, the month I turned thirty-one because we weren’t ready to have kids and wanted to put the decision on ice. Pun intended.
As unfair as it is, you will likely hit that 37 percent mark before men your own age. I really wish it weren’t this way. But I’d rather you recognize the situation and plan for it, rather than being caught off guard later in life and wishing you’d made different choices.
This brings me back to Steven, who was still asking himself: Could I be 5 percent happier with someone else? A few months after Gabby gave Steven her ultimatum, she confronted him once more. He admitted he’d made no steps toward buying a ring.
She told him it was over. Enter moving boxes, breakup sex, new profile pictures on social media.
Steven sat alone in his half-empty apartment. No couch, no TV, no dresser. Just a bed, some chairs, and his painstakingly researched ultralight camping gear.
At that point, I didn’t expect to hear from Steven again. Based on my experience with other Stevens, I figured he’d meet new women—people he’d get excited about and then leave when he didn’t feel 100 percent certain about them.
Then, about a year later, he called me.
“I met someone,” he told me. “Someone I want to spend the rest of my life with.”
I was surprised but thrilled. “Tell me more.”
“The other weekend we went away together. We rode bikes, we cooked, we had sex. And I just felt like this was the person I was going to marry.”
I was so happy to hear that he was happy. But I had to ask: “What about those Steven voices in your head, wondering, Could I be five percent happier?”
He laughed. “Look, it hasn’t been easy. But I worked on that. I’m grateful for what I have with her. I’m not wondering what I could have with someone else. All I know is that I could build a life with this person. An amazing life.”
Steven had learned to satisfice. To feel uncomfortable with uncertainty. To make a decision based on a less than exhaustive search. Through this work, he’d changed the punctuation of his life: from the anxious question mark of a Maximizer to the confident period of a Satisficer.
At first I thought Steven’s story would serve as a warning: Don’t let perfect be the enemy of great. But now I can share it as a tale of victory. Maximizers, give yourself the gift of happiness. Give yourself the gift of satisficing.