THE ART OF CHOOSING (Unplugged) A conversation between Sheena Iyengar & Moe Abdou

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The Art of Choosing (Unplugged) Sheena Iyengar with Moe Abdou !

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About Sheena Iyengar & Moe Abdou Sheena Iyengar

Sheena Iyengar is the S. T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia University and a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award. She holds an undergraduate degree from Wharton School of Business and a doctorate in social psychology from Stanford University. Her innovative research on choice has been funded by the Institute for Advanced Studies, the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

Moe Abdou Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices — a global conversation about things that matter in business and in life. moe@33voices.com

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The Art of Choosing (Unplugged) Sheena Iyengar with Moe Abdou !

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I want to have a conversation with you on obviously a lot of the stuff in your book. But I want to begin with you. Your book is definitely indispensable. I have recommended it to every single entrepreneur that I know. But, I particularly am drawn to your writing style which is very captivating and very spiritual. I want to know where do you personally draw your inspiration?

guess everything. From the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I go to bed. I don’t actually make a distinction between my work and my personal life. They are so blended in together so that pretty much anything is fair game. That’s part of why I love choice - everything is about choice.

Most people, because they make the separation, can’t think of going shopping as this great synergy. I never feel guilty if I go shopping because I tell people, you know, its like doing work too because you never know what idea you might come with. In fact, going shopping did lead to the section on fashion. I can pick anything I like to do and it could potentially lead to an idea.

Is that because of just how centered you have become, as a person, Sheena or is it something that you constantly work on because your demeanor is definitely very apparent in your writing?

I’m a pretty naturally focused person. Once I made the decision to study choice, I pretty much -- have been the kind of person that seemed to be focused about whatever it is I was interested in. I tend to stick to whatever it is that I’m doing and everything kind of revolves around that.

On the positive side, it means that everything that I look at and do relates to that. On the negative side of course it means that I don’t always have the kind of breadth that one should have because I tend to be a bit more focused. The way I tend to get that breadth because I’m conscious of that, is I tend to surround myself with people who love to be factoid collectors or tend to be the kind of people that aim for more variety in their focus. Almost all of my assistants do different things; even my husband does different things than I do. He actually likes to study and read just about everything. That’s how I manage to deal with that weakness.

I have to tell you, you do it as well or better than most people that I’ve had the privilege to talk to. Let’s talk a little bit about choice. You say that we play three tricks on ourselves. One, we think that we’re unique

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when we really are more alike than we realize. We believe that more choice gives us an opportunity to fully realize our individuality. We also believe that we are most free when we have no constraints. Why do we continually do that as human beings?

I do think that all of these are not universal. All of these tricks are things that we’re taught to think of ourselves. So particularly in American culture where you are raised to both want to be and to pursue a sense of independence, like you are supposed to be your own person. We communicate this to our kids very early on. Very early on, we’ll say, what kind of ice cream would you like to eat? What kind of cereal would you like to have? What would you like to wear? What do you want to be when you grow up? By the time they’re four, we start asking them these questions.

We’re essentially telling them in lots of different ways that you need to know what you want and you need to pursue who you are and establish how what you are is different from everybody else, because you need to somehow be differentiable from all those other people. So because of that, it becomes not so good to want that which everybody else wants because then you’re worried, “Well, I might just become a member of the crowd.” I think that’s what leads to the sort of paradox of uniqueness. Where on the one hand, we actually do secretly like a lot of the same things as everybody else but we still need to find a way to express uniqueness while still doing something similar or related to what everybody else is doing but we can’t look too much like them. I think that’s what leads to the first one.

The second one too is related in that the reason why we want more choice, is because more choice, you know, our minds makes it easier for us to find options that can enable us to express our individuality or uniqueness from other people.

I think again, as part of that quest to be that unique independent person, we believe that the more options we have or the more freedom we have, the more creative we can be which means that I’m even more likely to not only be unique, create that unique individual of myself, produce really unique things. They’re really all one and the same. It’s a mindset. It’s that we’re trained to be -- we’re all trying to be our own version of Warren Buffet or Oprah Winfrey or Bill Gates.

Of course. So when you talk about that, when you talk about uniqueness, one of the first things that pop into my mind is looking at this from a

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business perspective. Most business or most brands try to distinguish themselves and really sell you on why they’re different.

That’s fundamental.

Is that really saying that they’re more of the same? Are we saying as an entity who expresses themselves completely differently and I take Apple as an example since you cited that in your TED talk. They do appear to be very unique. Yet, maybe below the surface, they’re not that different specifically internally.

Apple I think really has established itself as a unique brand. It raises a really interesting question. You could actually answer it at a very different level. I think the first question that you in a sense have to answer for yourself as an entrepreneur whether it be consciously or unconsciously is are you actually going to have a product that is truly different? So truly different meaning it solves some major problem in the world or it’s something that truly has never been seen in the globe before. So in a sense, like the first time we had a laptop that was truly something different. Pretty much any new path breaking invention was usually a solution to a problem that people either understood they had or in some cases, didn’t understand that they have.

Then you have the do I want to take what’s already out there and improve upon it? Make things that are new -- but really is a great improvement over what’s there either because it looks aesthetically better or because in terms of actual application, it functions better. Apple is some sort of a mix between those two.

Then you have the third kind which is that -- I’m actually going to get in to the same market as what’s already there. My product isn’t actually going to be that different from the other products. But I’m now going to make it look different from the other products. So I’m going to create differentiation. That’s really what my entrepreneurial instincts is based on. What is Coke and Pepsi is a prime example of that. They’re not actually different products. I mean they’re 95% the same thing.

So much is the difference between the two really have to do with perceived differences between those two products. Also it has come to be now that you the customer have come to identify with one or the other as being more about who you are and what you stand for. Are you a Coke person, are you a Pepsi person, are you Mountain Dew person?

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Sheena, if we as individuals have the power to invent our own futures, this is one of the most intriguing points in your book -- really captured my attention. We do have the power to invent our own futures. Why do so many people choose not invent better futures for themselves?

I think what happens is that we don’t recognize what our priorities are. I think that’s something that we often by the time we recognize, some of the choices might be gone by then.

Second, when we pursue choices, we don’t always recognize what our inherent limitations really are. So that we may actually make wrong calculations about the likelihood of us being successful because we tend to think more in terms of possibilities than in terms of limitations.

Third, I think that once you make a choice, we tend to think it’s over. You decide you’re going to get married. You decide you’re going to start a business. You’ve put in all the work to start it. But so much of making anything, any really big choice workout -- is actually all the little choices that come after the big choice. So much of that are the little choices that sum up to the eventual outcome. So I would say it’s those three things.

When you put it in that context obviously we are all conditioned by our past thinking. It certainly impacts and has impacts on our decision making. So from that perspective then, what causes most people to continually make similar mistakes? When I was thinking about this particular area in the context of your book; one of the first things that come up to mind is hiring. I look at corporations large or small who continually make similar mistakes in hiring whether it’s high level executives or even just a rank and file employee. When I look at that our past conditions are thinking, what causes us to continually make these same mistakes? Is it our thinking patterns?

It’s a few different things. First off, one of the things we know about -- you take the specific example of hiring. We know that people actually tend to be more likely to hire. They hire the people they like and the people that they like are usually the people that remind them of themselves or what they think themselves to be like.

I actually do a lot of exercises with hiring situations in my class. Particularly in the leadership class where you take three candidates and now you give the information to the various decision makers. You see how they make the choice and you actually illustrate for them the process that they use. Essentially what

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happens is that the candidates that they like they tend to surface more positive information about them during the meeting; the candidates that they don’t like, they surface more negative information. Or, they don’t surface any information about those candidates at all during the important decision making meetings.

What will happen is that even if you have candidates that have objectively better skill sets for the job. Objectively, meaning the skill sets that seem to most line up with what at least are the stated goals or skills that you want this person to fulfill. Even if you have the match to what you say you want, people don’t tend to choose it because of the processes in place.

So what you actually need if you want to actually not engage in those mistakes is you need to -- what people really need more than anything else is good decision making processes that they put in place and then you need to follow those. To think that somebody has the best gut every time, you might get lucky and have a great gut on a particular case. You need to have good decision making processes if you want to increase the probability that making overall good choices consistently.

I want to talk about these decision making processes. I’m sorry to interrupt you, Sheena. I didn’t know that hiring was one of the areas that you talk about. I shared with you briefly that I spent 25 years in the financial service industry. The thing that was most intriguing to me about that industry, Sheena is this; when I came into the industry, I was 21 year old. I’ll never forget my first meeting with my general manager. He looked at the room and he said, “Look around because only one out of 10 of you will be here two years from now.”

Ultimately, my capacity in the company was more of a managing partner capacity and I oversaw a lot of the hiring and development. So when I came into the industry in the late or mid to late 80’s, it was an 8% retention of people who made it in the financial service industry beyond two years. When I left in the end of 2005, it was still between 8 and 10%. So I look at a 25-year period where one of the most important industries in the world has not figured out who were the right people to bring into this industry. That’s why the kind of material that you referenced intrigued me. Any thoughts on that?

I think their model is -- I’m just going to get a bunch of bright people and let their performance tell me who is going to survive and who’s not. It’s often

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been critiqued as to whether that’s what they should be doing in the long run or should they actually first figure out who’s going to make it. To begin with, what are the criteria that actually seem to be associated with the people that will make and also what are the criteria that are associated with the people that will stay. Certainly, there are benefits to having at least some larger percentage of the people stay because with the people who stay, you get knowledge. You don’t want to have so many people leaving that that knowledge basically gets disused.

If I were advising them on what their hiring model should be, I would say that you want to spend more effort in figuring out what’s the process by which you can identify the people that will make it. Second, what are the things that you want to give to those people or environment you want to create within your organization so that those people that are good will want to stay.

You don’t want to make it a hundred percent because you don’t want to have it so that everybody stays and then you never get to meet new blood. You do want to increase the probability that more people will stay because 8% to 10% retention rate is too low. You need at least 33% that are staying because you need to have some number of old guard that can actually help create that very important role of mentorship and knowledge dissemination in your organization.

I’m sure you know the statistic that right now a Fortune 500 CEO is less likely to be in office two years or longer than it was 10 years ago. Is it the same for them?

Yeah, you need CEOs to stay longer.

What impact could they have in 18 months?

Very little if any. It’s all external. In fact, studies show that it’s the CEOs that are promoted from within that tend to do more for the organization also tend to last longer than the one’s they bring in on the outside. (inaudible 20:08) is an expert on that but in general what the science really shows is that you really want to be -- I mean, we think its cool to hire a CEO from the outside and there is certainly a lot of cache to that. We think we’re going to get new blood, new ideas, etc.

Sometimes it is important to have some outsiders depending upon if you really want to make a big change in the organization. But most of the time, you’re actually better off promoting the people from within because they know already what works and what doesn’t work within the organization. That’s

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really important information. Think of organizations as little mini countries. They’re actually very different from each other.

Yeah, and if you remember Jim Collins reference that back in the Good to Great days. I certainly concur with your thinking on that. Yet, it continues to happen.

Yes, and you know, what’s interesting about that is most of us agree that we don’t like the idea of our president becoming some other country’s president or some other country’s president becoming our country’s president. Yet we think that it’s really cool to switch leaders like that from organization to organization.

Yeah, it is very interesting and it happens in sports, it happens all around us. I want to get your perspective on something. I know that we’re faced with small decisions every moment and every day is filled with decisions that we have to make both small and large. Does our mind have the ability to distinguish between minor and major decisions, Sheena?

Not our subconscious mind. It can only happen if you engage in deliberate thought. One of the things that I have my MBA students do is I have them jot down everything that’s important to them. I tell them they can make that list as long as they’d like. And then I say, “Okay, well now you have to take that list and cross off everything except for the three that you absolutely under no conditions can live without.

What that then does, is forces them to think about what are those three things that are most important. Of course, they all try to negotiate so that they would four or five or six. I really hold them to three. It’s a useful exercise to figure out what truly is important because those are the things that you should be investing most of your energies in terms of choosing well on. And then everything else, you should really try to find simplifying rules for how to make the decision. That should really serve as your compass.

I tell people to do that at least once a year, if not, twice a year. You will change your mind every year or a couple of years. You’ll probably come up with a different set of top priorities that will naturally happen over the course of your career, over the course of all the changes that happen in your life. But what that will do for you is it will serve as the compass. So that you can be asking yourself, “Look, is this a decision that I should be spending this much time on?” Or, “Is this something that I should do quickly?”

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You made a decision when these iPhones came out to leave your house at 3 o’clock in the morning to get in line and get a phone for your husband. Everyone is curious, -- what is your thinking process that you personally go through to make important decisions?

Well that one was really easy right? My husband is really important to me. I needed to get him something for his birthday. Might as well get him what he really wants. Okay, you have to make sacrifices.

At 3 o’clock in the morning, that was great. Hey, I got to tell I did it too. We’re more alike than we realize.

When we have to go out for dinner, he chooses because for him, eating at a unique restaurant is so important. It’s not for me, I just want to go out and have a meal and enjoy and hangout with him. That’s all that matters.

Even if its pizza. He doesn’t go to the old stable. He wants something unique?

That’s right; whereas, if it were left up to me, I would probably just go to a few restaurants over and over again.

Let’s talk about this within the context of selling. If I were a salesperson and I read your book and I understand now the thinking that goes behind choosing. It certainly will impact how I approach my sales business in general and certainly, how I approach each client. My question to you is, if you were coaching a high performing salesperson to start implementing your tools to improve his or her sales effectiveness, what would you make sure they never forget?

If you have a set of products in your organization, the first thing you need to ask yourself is can you tell them apart. If you can’ tell them apart, that means you got to start cutting some of those products. I mean, they’re redundant, they’re not differentiable. If your sales people can’t tell them apart, that means they’re redundant, not differentiable. If your sales people can’t tell them apart, the customers certainly aren’t going to be able to tell them apart. The first thing I tell people, retailers is, is there things you should be cutting?

The second is concrete. Can we understand how these products are different from one another? Does it concretize? Do I understand the trade off? Certainly when you’re talking about vanilla versus chocolate ice cream, the differences are more apparent than the difference between small cap versus large cap

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funds. You want to make sure that the difference is in terms of what those differences mean. How will they affect my outcome with that choice are clear and apparent to your sales force, to your customers.

Third thing I told them is you need to categorize, meaning that you need to…if you’re offering your customers a lot of choices, they have to be categorized because they can only really handle about five or six choices maybe seven, maybe 10 if it’s a fun choice. But per category, don’t give me more than 10. Give me more categories. I can handle categories. I can quickly weed out the ones I don’t care about and zero in on the categories that I do care about. But make it easier for me to find what I’m looking for. It’s a simple thing to do. Don’t make it so much work for me to choose. I always think of bestsellers as a great example of a company that really need something fun to do drinking wine, something fun to choose. A hundred one bottles, they’re all really good, eight categories, really easy.

The fourth thing to do is if you have to make a decision really complicated like say you’re offering them custom made suits or some custom made product. You got to walk them to it, ease them in. You know like, McKenzie, one of the things they always do with their clients is they have this thing called the 3 by 3 rule. So I’m going to start you off with three choices, you pick one then I’m going to give you another three choices, you pick one. Then I’m going to give you another three. So you can see how we got where we got and I didn’t make any one stage complicated. So that you’re engaged the whole time so by the time we get to the actual choice, you’re there with me.

Would you do the same thing if you were selling services like McKenzie was doing consulting? Obviously, they thought that--

Oh absolutely. I would do it there. We actually found even with suits what you do, custom made suits with custom-made cars. Now, more and more people can make a lot of different decisions so that they can get the car they really want which is great. But you have to make sure that people aren’t hating that car in the midst of trying to make all those decisions. So ease them in.

Start them off with the easy decisions. We’ve got two different kinds of engines. Now we’re going to pick. What kind of tires? We’ve got four tires. Now we got to pick, eight different kinds of roof. We’re starting you off with small number of choices, decisions. Again, you have to make sure those options you can tell them apart. They’re easy to figure out. You slowly ramp it up and make the decisions more and more complicated. So by the time you get to 56 different exterior car colors, people have already invested in that decision

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making process. They’re invested in that car so now they really care and they care enough to figure out what color they want that car to be.

Sheena, do you see the students you are teaching having a different mentality about decision making and/or choice than perhaps the baby boomers? It seems to me as an observer that this generation is very confident in making any kinds of decisions where the baby boomers and just that world seem to be a little bit less cautious. Is that just observational for me or is it something that you see in what you do?

I think its both. I think the people of today’s generation are more comfortable with the idea of having choice. There is a sense of entitlement and expectation that I should have choice. Yet at the same time, there is that expectation, they’re probably much more confused at least in the career domain about what they want to do with the rest of their life than with the baby boomers.

The baby boomers were more willing to make a choice and run with it and not really question it as much. They are more willing to allow fate to determine what their career would be. They’re more likely to say, “Dad told me this would be a good idea” or, I just happen to run into blankety blank and this happened and so that’s how I got into it. They seem perfectly content with that. Or, they speak of it in terms of chance encounters. Some random fortunate event that led them to do “X”. Today’s generation wants to believe that they chose whatever it is they did and they really want to keep reviewing and revealing whether that really is the thing they should be doing which adds a burden to them.

You know, it kind of gets me to think as you’re commenting on that. I don’t know if you got an opportunity to look or read Deepak Chopra’s latest book. I think it’s called The Shadow Effect. He talks in there about desire versus necessity when it comes to making decisions and suggests what he calls choice-less awareness which is basically saying that shift kind of are legions away from what our ego wants and into more of what the universe wants and kind of let your consciousness decide for you. So for a group of people obviously that may seem passive but for a lot of the more conscious people out there probably seems to be the right way to go. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. I do think that because there is so much choice out there in the world today. It’s not just about big things like career and marriage but it’s about everything. It does become more and more important for every single one of us to know our priorities and to really focus our choosing in those domains of

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priorities because if you don’t, then choice can take over your life such that your whole life is about reacting rather than being proactive. That really wasn’t the role choice was supposed to play in our life. That’s how I interpret what he’s talking about.

In a sense, what’s happening is that people are choosing on those things that really aren’t important because they just keep finding themselves in these situations where they’re supposed to make a choice and they end up spending endless amount of time in choosing what bagel or soda pop or whatever when they really are supposed to be spending more time choosing something at the moment that was more important.

If you look at the diary studies with senior managers of Fortune 1000 companies and CEOs, you find that one of the big complaints they have is that they find that they’re spending 90% of their time on the things that are less important. And they’re only spending 10% of their time on the things that are most important to them. That should really be flipped.

Sheena, is that why you say, “the modern hero is not the chosen one, he’s the one who chooses”?

Absolutely.

Because don’t each one of these CEOs, who make those types of comments -- they certainly had the power to choose whether or not they wanted to deal with the decisions that were asked to make?

I think we very much look up to those people whose choices we respect. I don’t think that we expect them to have made great choices across the board about every little thing. I think the signature of choice comes from me being able to recognize that this individual had this stamp on the kinds of choices they made. There was this one theme that cut across. We don’t look at Warren Buffet’s clothing or his suit choices. We look at the signature across the choices that he made in his specialty. So we are looking for focus to define that person’s choices.

When you think about the power of choice and you think about our ability to imagine a better self for us. It still seems to me that most human beings are often gravitating towards negative. When you turn on the news there is not a lot of positives. When you read the front page of the newspaper there is not a lot of positives. It seems that human beings for some reason

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are drawn to this negative aspect of things. I know that that’s a choice but a lot of us make those choices. Where do you see the trends there?

I think forever we have always been more drawn to the negatives. I mean, to some extent that’s very human and natural. What happens is that negative is what’s more vivid and memorable which is why we’re drawn to it. Kids like to talk about their bodily functions in great detail very early on because it’s gross and that’s what they think is kind of cool and memorable.

I do think though that we can focus our energies more on not just being positive so much as being focused on what are our priorities. Because sometimes what happens is there is such a focus on just making sure that it’s negative and vivid and interesting and entertaining. We lose track of what messages we’re sending and what the priorities are. I would say it’s not so much about being positive but about being focused. I think by extension what would happen is if one’s focused, you will get more of a balance between positive and negative.

Is that the purpose of this exercise by and large that you do with your classes right now?

You mean about identifying your top three priorities?

Yeah.

I do that so that they have focus. I also do that so that they better understand their limitations because you really can’t choose well on everything. I also do that so that they are more aware that there are different tools, the choices and more diverse tools than we think. We think that we should make every single decision in the same way. What I’m forcing them to do is think about alternatives. So there are some decisions that are just not worth making.

So you just flip a coin or you let someone else who cares about it more make it. You want to figure out what are the bottom of the barrel choices. Then you have to figure out, what are those secondary choices. You don’t really want to have a disaster happen. You want to make a decent choice. But again because you’ve made them secondary, what are some ways in which you can locally maximize without putting all energy into it.

That could mean teaming up with experts. It could mean focusing your energies on trying to find the right people to hang out with that will naturally end up giving you enough information so that you can make that choice more easily.

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And then I’m telling them, look once you’ve identified your real priorities, choosing that that you’re going to use is a lot of effort. So that you need to be aware of the fact that when you’re making a choice, it’s not let me just go with my gut, my instinct and it will be quick. It’s not a quick thing. If you’re going to choose well and choose well consistently it is a lot of effort.

When do you personally rely on your intuition or your gut?

Very little actually. I would say it’s usually a combination of gut and reason. If you look at the science when should we rely purely on gut? We should rely purely on gut if we are asking ourselves a question that is purely about my feelings about something. Is that person hot? You can’t use reason to answer that question. Am I feeling happy right now?

Then, the other time in which you can use your gut is if you have spent a lot of time doing it and doing it over it over again and evaluating yourself whether you did good, bad, or indifferent. As Malcolm Gladwell talks about it in Outliers, at least 10,000 hours of practice plus feedback. That’s been well documented. That’s the only time when you really have informed intuition.

There are probably some domains in which out of habit, I still tend to second guess. I can tell pretty quickly now if I think the sentence is bad or a paragraph isn’t working or something like that. But, I’ll still use reason and ask myself, “What is it about that that’s bothering me?” And use some reason to analyze it. But sure, my gut is guiding the reason. But even then, I’ll still test my judgment against somebody else’s.

When I talk about making a good choice, the way I talk about it and teach the students about it which really does draw the science of it is that gut answers the question of how do I feel about something today not how I feel about it tomorrow or 10 years from tomorrow. Reason which is the pros and cons analysis done not in the heat of the moment tells you what you should want tomorrow and 10 years from tomorrow. It usually maximizes on the more quantifiable outcomes like things I can measure. This will give me more money. This will give me more job security. Cap higher performance etcetera.

And then you still can’t solely trust on yourself. You still have to gather information from other sources, whether it be decision models, whether it be other people’s opinions, experts, and you have to get the naysayer as well as the positive sayer. And then use your gut to tell you which one you’re more drawn to. Use reason to analyze the why and the why not. Only after putting yourself through all that information, you finally make a decision.

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It’s very intriguing to me because I am very, very drawn to your work and it just reminded me when you mentioned Gladwell in Blink -- when he talks about just how human beings in general don’t know what they want. So in trying to coach some of the advisors that we had that was one of the issues that we dealt with. I read your stuff and it seems you are really in a very profound way, very strategic and very calculated in your decision making process. I think that’s what makes it easy for you to recommend the people to choose. It’s not that difficult. We, as human being make it difficult. Would you agree?

Yes. If you know your priorities and focus so that means, I’m telling you to essentially be choosy about when you choose. If you recognize that when you are choosing, it’s really an exercise of aligning the odds. So that means there are inherently going to be limitations. There are inherently going to be uncertainties. If you recognize those two things it’s going to be fruitful. We’re only talking about aligning the odds. I think you get more out of choice in your life.

It seems like it will be a little more fulfilling too as opposed to worrisome.

Yes. I think you will also get more out of both experience and you will get better outcomes both objectively and subjectively.

Sheena, I know this is a passion of yours. Maybe we can conclude by just -- I’m curious as to what are some questions that you’re wrestling with now currently after having seen the success of your book and certainly how people have been gravitating to it. What’s weighing on your mind now that’s intriguing you to do further research into this area?

One of the things that I’m still researching and I actually just started this big study that -- I’ve created a choice index where we’re looking at people’s ideas about choice, freedom, democracy. When I say, choice, I mean, all kinds of choices, ranging from soda pop to education, to housing, to political choices, moral choices, ethical choices, all kinds of different choices. What are people’s views about it in the different parts of the world? I began to look at that.

Mainly, so far, I’ve looked at the differences between Asians and Americans, and a little bit between ex-communists and Americans but this study is really looking at it all across the globe about 40 different countries. That’s what I’m really excited about. What are the different views that people have about choice to what extent is it learned? What is it that we learned from our society? What are we all born with? What really is common? Obama and Bush and so

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The Art of Choosing (Unplugged) Sheena Iyengar with Moe Abdou !

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many of our leaders have talked about democracy and freedom and choice as universal principles but what about it is universal? What about it is learned?

I bet that’s going to be a great journey as well. I’m sure there will be some research published on that.

I hope so.

I have to tell you, you’re fabulous. I admire your style. I admire your passion. I’m very grateful that you gave me this time. I hope that we can continue this conversation because not only is it fascinating, I believe its very, very timely for whether you’re an entrepreneur or a stay-at-home mom, to have the comfort of knowing how to choose I think it really equips us with enormous power.

Thank you very much for having me on your show. One of the things that if anyone is interested in learning more about this stuff. One of the things I’m doing now on Twitter is every week. I’m posting different things that I’ve learned on different topics about choice. One of the things I’m doing is I am regularly posting different tips that people have discovered about how to choose better. I’ll pick a different topic every week so that people can see if it interests them.

You said Maria’s show will be on Sunday morning?

Maria Bartiromo?

Yes.

I don’t know when it airs down there. Up here, it will air at 7:30 Eastern time, CNBC.

I think it will here because I’ve seen her and then I’ve had several good friends who are on that show. We will look for it and certainly as soon as we see it, we’ll link to make sure that everyone else sees it. As I mentioned, I hope to continue this conversation with you. You are a very special person. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

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