Sheena Iyengar Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Sheena Iyengar quote about:
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“When we speak of choice, what we mean is the ability to exercise control over ourselves and our environment. In order to choose, we must first perceive that control is possible.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“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.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“In order to 'hold fast' to something, one must allow oneself to be held to something. That commitment may be one of the hardest things to practice in a world of so much choice.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“First-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“[Americans] think that choice, as seen through the American lens, best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“The less control people had over their work, the higher their blood pressure during work hours. Moreover, blood pressure at home was unrelated to the level of job control, indicating that the spike during work hours was specifically caused by lack of choice on the job. People with little control over their work also experienced more back pain, missed more days of work due to illness in general, and had higher rates of mental illness-the human equivalent of stereotypies, resulting in the decreased quality of life common to animals reared in captivity.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“As we get older, we get better at choosing in ways that will make us happy. We do a better job at picking activities that make us happy, and at spending time with people who make us happy. We're also better at letting things go.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“The expansion of choice has become an explosion of choice.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“When people are given a moderate number of options (4 to 6) rather than a large number (20 to 30), they are more likely to make a choice, are more confident in their decisions, and are happier with what they choose.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“Balancing hopes, desires and an appreciating of the possibilities with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations: that is the art of choosing.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“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.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“Knowledge should be a public good, and I want my ideas to have as much exposure as possible.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“Being a Sikh meant having to do what Mom and Dad said, and going to temple, and Mom and Dad choosing who I would marry. But going to an American school taught me that I was the one who's supposed to make those choices.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“Life hands us a lot of hard choices, and other people can help us more than we might realize. We often think we should make important decisions using just our own internal resources. What are the pros and cons? What does my gut tell me? But often we have friends and family who know us in ways we don't know ourselves.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“The saying goes that history repeats itself; personal histories do the same. We can gather the lessons of others' lives through observation, conversation, and by seeking advice. We can use the automatic system to find out who the happy people are, and the reflective system to evaluate how they got to be that way. Pursuing happiness need not be a lonely endeavor. In fact, throwing in our lot with others may be a very good way of coping with the disappointments of choice.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. —Archibald MacLeish”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“What you see determines how you interpret the world, which in turn influences what you expect of the world and how you expect the story of your life to unfold.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“A person of “good character†was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“We are sculptors finding ourselves in the evolution of choosing, not in the results of choice.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“We have the ability to create choice by altering our interpretations of the world.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“It's easy to assume people are conforming when we witness them all choosing the same option, but when we choose that very option ourselves, we have no shortage of perfectly good reasons for why we just happen to be doing the same thing as those other people; they mindlessly conform, but we mindfully choose. This doesn't mean that we're all conformists in denial. It means that we regularly fail to recognize that others' thoughts and behaviors are just as complex and varied as our own. Rather than being alone in a crowd of sheep, we're all individuals in sheep's clothing.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“The great artist Michelangelo claimed that his sculptures were already present in the stone, and all he had to do was carve away everything else. Our understanding of identity is often similar: Beneath the many layers of shoulds and shouldn’ts that cover us, there lies a constant, single, true self that is just waiting to be discovered.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“A clear right answer and the opportunity to change the options? This is the chooser’s dream.”
-- Sheena Iyengar -
“We do the same thing in our own lives, embracing information that supports what we already prefer or vindicates choices we previously made.After all, it feels better to justify our opinions rather than challenge them, to contemplate only the pros and relegate the cons to the back of our minds. However, if we want to make the most of choice, we have to be willing to make ourselves uncomfortable. The question is, if we are willing, how exactly do we go about fortifying ourselves against these biases?”
-- Sheena Iyengar
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