Monday, May 30, 2011

Escalation of Expectations from "It Is Not About How, It Is About Now!"

Here is another glimpse of my book. Now I am talking about "Choice". What does it mean to us, how important it is to have choices and what these choices have done to us. Just this one issue here. In the book you will find a much more detailed aproach to this matter.

Hope you have fun.

Escalation of Expectations. 
"A perfect example for this is when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans all the time and there was a time when jeans came just in one flavor and you bought them and they fit like crap. If you wore them long enough and if you washed them enough times they started to fit and to feel ok. So after wearing my old jeans for years I went to replace them. In the shop I said “I’d like a pair of jeans, here is my size” and the shopkeeper said “Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit, you want button fly or zipper fly? You want stone washed or acid washed, you want … bla bla bla.” My jaw dropped and after I recovered I said, “I want the kind that used to be the only kind!” He had no idea what that was. So I spent one hour trying on all these kind of jeans and I walked out of the store with the best fitting jeans I have ever had. I did better. All these choices made it possible for me to do better. But I felt worse!
Why? The reason I felt worse is, that with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be, went up. I had no expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in one hundred flavors, damn it, one of them should have been perfect. What I got was good, but it wasn’t perfect. So I compared what I got to what I expected, what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. And if we go from the premise that there is no perfection, than I will be thinking that I could have chosen that other pair that fitted me as good as this one and all my satisfaction with my actually great pair of jeans is   g o n e !
Adding options to people’s life’s, can’t help but increase the expectations that people have about how good those options would or should be. What that is going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they are good results."

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