I sat at a kitchen table in Kingfisher last August across from a woman with four binders.

Four. Not one. Four. Each binder had tabs. Each tab had printouts. One was system reviews. One was quotes, five of them from four different companies. One was financing options, APR and term and monthly and total-of-payments. One was handwritten notes with arrows connecting things.

Her system had been out for nine days. It was ninety-six degrees in the house. She had a window unit in the bedroom and two fans running.

I said: how long have you been working on this?

She said: three weeks.

I said: the system's been out for nine days. What were the first twelve days about?

She said: I was getting ready.

She was not confused. She understood fourteen SEER2 versus seventeen SEER2. She understood two-stage versus variable speed. She had a spreadsheet with the ten-year cost of ownership for three different tonnages. She'd done more homework than most contractors do. She was not undecided because she didn't know. She was undecided because she was terrified of being the person who picked wrong.

She was preemptively grieving a choice she hadn't made yet.

Barry Schwartz published a book in 2004 called The Paradox of Choice. More options correlates with less satisfaction, not more. Sheena Iyengar's 2000 jam study found that a table with twenty-four jams pulled more browsers than a table with six, but the six-jam table produced ten times the purchases. Schwartz called the people who want to make the best possible choice maximizers. They report lower satisfaction, higher regret, and more second-guessing than satisficers. The maximizer pays a tax for the breadth of the search.

Marcel Zeelenberg spent his career on the thing that makes it worse: anticipated regret. The fear of future regret drives more behavior than actual regret does. People avoid choices not because they've been burned before but because they can vividly picture being burned.

I closed the binders. I said: I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it clean. You cannot pick wrong here. There is no version of this decision that ruins your life. The band of good enough is wider than the marketing makes it sound.

I told her a fourteen SEER2 three-ton Amana would have her comfortable this afternoon, her bill would be fine, and the system would last ten to fifteen years. A seventeen SEER2 variable speed Trane would also have her comfortable, with a slightly better bill and fifteen to twenty years of life. Both cool the house.

She said: but what if I pick the wrong one.

I said: there is no wrong one.

Something in her shoulders dropped about an inch. She exhaled. It was relief. About being given permission to pick something that's eighty percent optimal instead of hunting for a hundred.

She picked the middle option. She signed. We installed three days later. She called a week after to say the house was cold and she was sleeping again. She didn't say thank you for the install. She said thank you for the kitchen table.

Some people need a quote. Some people need a repair. Some people need permission. Part of the job is knowing which.

Core line: "The band of good enough on this is wider than the marketing makes it sound. You cannot pick wrong here."

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