Before Session 13 · Choosing Well
Read this before class — 15 minutes. Bring one real choice you're currently facing — it's the material for everything today. Come-ready is at the end.
The big idea: happiness isn't picking right — it's letting go
You've spent this course generating options: three plans, mind maps with forty branches, prototype conversations that opened doors you didn't know existed. Now comes the part nobody warns you about: having good options can feel worse than having none. Burnett and Evans call it the anxiety of choosing — and their research-backed claim is that happiness doesn't come from making the objectively best choice. It comes from choosing well, and then letting go of the options you didn't pick.
They break good choosing into four steps: gather and create your options (done — that's been the whole course), narrow the list down, choose, and then — the step almost everyone skips — let go and move on. It's the last step that makes or breaks the whole thing.
Why your gut counts as evidence
That last paragraph can sound like a nice sentiment. It's actually neuroscience. Burnett and Evans lean on Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence to explain it: the part of your brain doing the heavy lifting on big choices sits in the basal ganglia, an ancient region with no connection to your language centers. It doesn't talk. It communicates through feelings and — literally — through the gut. What it draws on is what Goleman calls the wisdom of the emotions: your whole accumulated record of what has and hasn't worked for you, stored somewhere words can't reach. So when you imagine having chosen an option and your stomach drops, that isn't nerves getting in the way of the decision. That's the decision-making part of you reporting in, in the only language it has.
This is why the default move when you're stuck — "I just need more information" — is usually backward. Once the homework is done, more information doesn't help; the noise of thinking harder is what drowns out the quieter signal. Burnett and Evans call good choosing discernment: using more than one way of knowing at once. The cognitive kind, the sort that gets you A's, is necessary and not sufficient. Add the emotional, the intuitive, the social — what people you trust reflect back — and the bodily. Dave has a therapist friend who learned over years that when her left knee started to ache in a session, she was close to the thing that mattered. She never figured out why the knee. She just learned to listen to it.
One more thing they say that should sound familiar by now: the quiet ways of knowing are shy. They don't show up when you're cramming a decision the night before a deadline. They show up in people who've built practices — journaling, meditation, prayer, breathing — during the ordinary stretches when nothing is at stake. That's what your journal has been for all semester. That's what SETTLE has been for. The best time to get ready for a hard choice is months before you have to make it — which, for the choice you're bringing to class, means you started in Week 1.
Grokking: try each choice on
Burnett and Evans borrow a word from Robert Heinlein's science fiction for their favorite technique: grok. To grok something is to understand it so completely you've become it. To grok a choice, you stop thinking about it and live inside it. Take your narrowed list. Pick one option and, for one to three days, be the person who has already chosen it. Brush your teeth as that person. Walk to class as that person. You don't need to tell anyone — that causes confusion later — you just carry the decision as settled. Then take a day or two off to reset and be your undecided self again. Then do the same with the next option, and the next. When you've lived in all of them, sit down and reflect: which of those people did you most like being?
It isn't magic and it isn't guaranteed. What it does is give your other ways of knowing room to speak, instead of asking your spreadsheet to answer a question it can't. The journal prompt below is a compressed, one-day version. If you have a week before you decide the real thing, run the full one.
Why more options make you miserable
Psychologists have shown this over and over: past a handful of options, every additional one makes people less satisfied with whatever they pick — not more. Too many choices overwhelm the decision instead of improving it, and afterward, every unchosen option becomes a stick to beat yourself with. The practical move is almost embarrassingly simple: if you have more than five real options, cross some off until you're at three to five. You're not losing anything — an option you were never going to choose was decoration, not opportunity.
Deciding with more than a spreadsheet
For big life choices, the pro/con list runs out of power fast — both columns fill up, everything sounds reasonable, and you're exactly where you started. Burnett and Evans' advice is to bring the rest of you into it: after the analysis, sit with each option as if you'd already chosen it. Live inside it for a day. Notice what your gut does — relief, dread, flatness, a low hum of excitement. That felt response is information your spreadsheet can't hold. You practiced reading exactly this signal in Week 10, listening to yourself talk through your Odyssey Plans. Same skill, higher stakes.
The trap of keeping your options open
Here's the study Burnett and Evans use to make the case. Researchers had people rank five art prints, then let them take home one of their middle picks. Half were told they could swap it later; half were told the choice was final. Weeks later, the people who could have swapped — and hadn't — were measurably less happy with the same print than the people who couldn't. Just the invitation to reconsider made them value their choice less. Barry Schwartz's research in The Paradox of Choice adds the uncomfortable part: it isn't only the options you passed on that nag at you. It's the mountain of options you never even saw. In a world with endless possibilities one search away, you can always imagine a better one out there. Burnett and Evans' answer is a callback to Week 2: imagined options aren't actionable, so they aren't real — they're gravity. You're not designing a fantasy life. You're designing a real one, out of the three to five options in front of you.
The most seductive move at your age is not choosing — double major in everything, commit to nothing, keep every door open. It feels responsible. But Burnett and Evans are blunt about it: a decision you refuse to finish making isn't optionality, it's a slow leak. Every kept-open option costs attention, and the refusal to close doors means you never get the compounding returns of walking through one. Choosing well means actually choosing — and trusting that you know how to design your way forward if it turns out wrong. That's what the last twelve weeks built.
This week's belief → reframe
The belief that gets people stuck: “There's one right choice, and if I think hard enough, I can find it — so I can't afford to choose wrong.”
The designer's reframe: There is no right choice — only good choosing. You choose well, let go of the rest, and design forward from wherever you land.
Your journal
One entry before class: name a real choice in front of you right now — a major, a summer, a relationship, a commitment. List your live options. If there are more than five, cross out the decorations. Then write one honest sentence per remaining option: what does your gut do when you imagine having already chosen it? If you have two or three days before class, grok your top option for one of them — live as the person who already chose it — and note what you felt when the day was over.
Come Ready
Bring the choice from your journal entry, narrowed to three to five real options, with your gut-notes. Your triad works with it directly — not to tell you what to pick, but to help you hear what you already said.
ENT 1611 Designing Your Life · FSU Innovation Hub · Choosing well, choice overload, and letting go: Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life (Knopf, 2016) · Emotional intelligence and the wisdom of the emotions: Daniel Goleman, as discussed by Burnett & Evans · Choice overload: Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice · "Grok": Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land · Worksheets and submissions on Canvas