150 Quotes by Sheena Iyengar

If you truly have expertise – and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician...

We also don’t always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it’s actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.

We are often in society told to make decisions in one of two ways. We’re either told “Use your gut, just go with how you feel about it and let that guide you,” or we’re told to use reason – some very deliberative methodical process of pros and cons and really thinking it through.

I put out a good 10 different types of drinks for them and they just said, “Oh, okay, so it’s just one choice.” One choice? I gave you Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, Sprite. They saw that as one choice. Now why was that one choice? Because they felt, well, it was just all soda.

In a conversation with the master jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Wynton Marsalis, he told me, “You need to have some restrictions in jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that’s not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise.” The ability to improvise, he said, comes from fundamental knowledge, and this knowledge “limits the choices you can make and will make.

We’re born with the desire, but we don’t really know how to choose. We don’t know what our taste is, and we don’t know what we are seeing.

I could wear makeup today, and one person would say it looks bland, another would say it looks fake, and another might tell me I look really natural. Everyone is convinced their opinion is the truth, and that’s what I struggle against.

My child’s first word was “more,” but and it’s all about, “I want.” “I’m going to tell you what I want and what I don’t want.” It’s about my desire to express my preferences. And that is really innate.

Unlike captive animals, people’s perceptions of control or helplessness aren’t entirely dictated by outside forces. We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.