150 Quotes by Sheena Iyengar

You know, like, none of us would choose – no matter where we are in the world – would choose to you know become a member of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” world, but how much choice is really the question.

People will make worse financial decisions for them if they’re choosing from a lot of options than if they’re choosing from a few options. If they have more options they’re more likely to avoid stocks and put all their money in money market accounts, which doesn’t even grow at the rate of inflation.

Well certainly not having any choice – having your entire life dictated by others...

I mean it wasn’t that they sat around thinking oh gosh I needed more choices in my grocery stores the way I had come to think about it as an American growing up.

Choice is more than picking ‘x’ over ‘y.’ It is a responsibility to separate the meaningful and the uplifting from the trivial and the disheartening. It is the only tool we have that enables us to go from who we are today to who we want to be tomorrow.

You know give me choices that are truly different from one another, otherwise they don’t regard them as meaningful choices.

So on the one hand in school you’re teachers are constantly telling you that you can be whatever it is you want to be as long as you put your mind and heart to it, and yet at the same time I was also getting the clear message of, well, what can you do really?

We measure our lives using different markers: years, major events, achievements. We can also measure them by the choices we make, the sum total of which has brought us to wherever and whoever we are today.

What affected people’s health most in these studies wasn’t the actual level of control that people had in their jobs, but the amount of control they perceived themselves as having.