David Epstein
speaker
469 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 29 Jun
David Epstein’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so maximizers will have this tendency to...
really fixate on the flaws of a job or another person or something like that.
And so, you know, become fixated on this idea that they're perfect is out there somewhere, but perfect isn't out there somewhere.
That doesn't mean you can't get better or you shouldn't improve, but, um, but there is no perfect.
And so I think some of the kind of wise advice, I think it was Ellen Langer who put it this way that don't make the right decision, make the decision and then make it right.
And that's not true for everything, but to recognize that you're going to have to work to make the thing right.
Like, you have good enough criteria.
If those are met, then you have to do some of that work.
And I think it's worthwhile.
Like, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who coined the term flow, you know, to describe the feeling of immersion in an activity –
said that one of the great things about committing to something, he was actually talking about marriage in this case, but he wrote about it for all sorts of things, is that you can stop spending energy wondering how to live and start spending that energy living.
And I think that's kind of applicable to many walks of life.
And I think it's okay to get in and out of things, but being always half in, I think, is a recipe for dissatisfaction.
Yeah, I mean, I should have said, by the way, that satisfices is a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice.
And I think we can take a lesson from the guy who coined it, Herbert Simon, who was trained as a political scientist, but he won the highest award in computer science, is a founder of AI at the Turing Award.
He won the highest award in psychology, was a founder of cognitive psychology, and then for good measure, he won the Nobel Prize in economics.
And he called himself an incorrigible satisficer.
So he would – he wore one beret from the same store that he only owned one at a time.
He ate the same breakfast every day.
He lived in the same house for 46 years.
Showing 81–100 of 469 · page 5 of 24
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