Offer three options
The paradox of choice is the very recent (2002!) finding that if you give people too many options, not only is it more difficult for them to pick one, they are also no happier with their selection. This was very counterintuitive before the internet era. For example, Baskin Robbins proudly advertised 31 flavors, and Heinz 57 varieties, in their brand identities. Today, most things have only 3 to 6 varieties, typically aligned with major preference clusters or user personas.
In particular, you’ll often see consumer services advertised with 3 different SKUs, with the middle one emphasized and highlighted as “Best value!” Some people will pick the cheap one and feel good they’re saving money, some people will pick the expensive one and feel good they’re getting the best product, and most people will pick the middle one and feel good they’re getting the best deal by not being too extreme (compared to the other two presented options!)
One way I apply this is whenever I offer options, for example when a friend’s in town and we’re picking a place to eat, I come up with two or three (leaving “and there are other places if none of these sound good” implicit) and only present those. It’s helpful to do the same thing when letting someone choose between possible times to meet up: pick three specific times instead of “I’m free any time this weekend or next weekend, except for Saturday night”.
There's more than you can possibly imagine
The world is impossibly large, and there are so many people in it, making so much amazing stuff. It’s easy to vastly underestimate how much stuff there is, because you can only base your estimate on things you’ve heard of. But the things you’ve heard of are probably either relevant to lots of different people, or things their creators are very good at promoting. I bet broad relevance and creator promotion ability are actually negatively correlated with amazingness.
Seriously! There is so much awesome stuff out there that you never hear about because the people behind them are just quietly making and sharing them in their small, supportive, loving communities that you have to make an effort to learn about.
Specific combinations of values
It might feel like your values broadly align with everyone around you, particularly your close friends. But your specific combination of values is really quite unique. For each of those close friends, you can probably come up with something that you deeply value but they don’t, or vice versa. That’s not just okay; that’s actually fantastic! If you keep trying to act in better alignment with your values, over time, you will become the best person in the world at embodying your unique set of values.
Your self-worth shouldn’t be based on your usefulness. But if it is, even just a little bit, it can help to imagine “you in 10 years” being the one person in the world most closely aligned with your specific combination of values.
Unlearning is more important than learning
Something I think is both more difficult and more important than learning new things is unlearning things that used to be true but aren’t any more, or things we believed were true in the past but now believe are not true. Part of what makes this so difficult is that a lot of our beliefs are “cached”: you determine what you believe about a thing based on your best current knowledge, but don’t automatically re-examine all of those beliefs when your best current knowledge changes.
I’ve met some older folks who have felt really vibrant and different from most people their age. All of them have that quality of actively re-evaluating long-held beliefs based on new evidence. It’s inspired me to highly value and practice this ability.
Make as many pots as possible
When you learn how to make a thing, there’s this false dichotomy between making a lot of things and making really good things. In practice, people learning how to make pottery who were advised to make as many posts pots as possible ended up with a better “best” pot than students who were advised to make the best pot they can imagine. The world is really complicated. There’s so many aspects of any skill that you can only learn through repeatedly doing and gaining intuition about the craft and the possibility space.
I love the idea that everyone has ten bad books in them. If you ever want to get to the good books, first you have to write all the bad ones out of you.