Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Only buy the good bagels

Posted by Tyler King

Have you ever paid attention to the types of bagels people always go for first when someone is nice enough to bring an assorted bakers dozen in to work? There are 13 bagels ranging from plain to asiago cheese to cinnamon-raisin. I bet you that with any normal group of people, the asiago cheese and everything bagels are gone before anyone even considers eating one of the other types.

Some people have different tastes obviously, but most people more or less agree on what the "good" flavors are. The same thing is true with other types of food. Try buying a bag of dum dums and watch as everyone you know digs through the butterscotch and cotton candy to find a blue raspberry.

So the question is, why does anyone buy the bad flavors of bagels? Nobody really likes cranberry bagels, so why is there always one of those sitting at the bottom of the box like the last kid to be picked for a kickball team?

We used to get bagels every week at work and I eat slow so I always had trouble getting my fair share of the good ones. When it was my turn to buy, I went and got 13 asiago cheese bagels. No one complained. When we all realized that you can have an entire box of good bagels, asiago cheese became just about the only thing anyone bought.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm not actually writing this to convince you to change your bagel purchasing habits. There are all kinds of situations where very simple and predictable decisions will always lead to positive results, but people try to over-complicate things. I specifically notice this in the business world. People only seem to feel like they deserve their jobs if they're doing something complicated, so they end up over thinking even the basic decisions.

If every decision you make is simple and obvious, that's a good sign that you're doing things right. If you need to make complicated decisions, that often means that you already made a mistake, and you're just going to make things worse by digging yourself even deeper. Obviously some problems actually are complicated by nature, but it's at least worth considering whenever you find yourself thinking too hard about something.

Here's what I suggest we all try for the next few weeks. Anytime you find yourself struggling to come up with a solution to a problem, back up a few steps and try to identify the actual source of the problem itself. There's a good chance you just made it up in your head.

When you're trying to figure out what bagels to get, thinking really hard isn't the solution. In fact, there wasn't really a problem to begin with, because we all know what the good flavors are.

Tags: Bad Decisions

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