Better Decisions Don't Start With More Options. They Start With Noticing Which Option You Always Pick By Default.
Decision-making advice defaults, reliably, toward expanding the option set — consider more alternatives, brainstorm wider, don't settle too quickly. This assumes the bottleneck is a lack of visible options, when for a recurring decision, the actual bottleneck is usually that the same option keeps getting selected regardless of how many others are on the table.
A person facing a familiar type of decision typically has more options available than they end up seriously considering — the default option gets picked quickly, often before the others are meaningfully evaluated, because the default is running on the same pattern each time rather than on a fresh weighing of the actual alternatives present.
Adding more options to a decision already being made by default doesn't change the outcome; it just adds more alternatives that don't get seriously considered. The leverage point isn't the size of the option set — it's noticing that a default is running the selection before the other options are ever really in play.
Better decisions, for this specific and common failure mode, start not with more choices but with seeing which choice keeps winning by default — because once that's visible, it becomes an actual option to override, rather than an invisible force quietly deciding before the visible decision-making even begins.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai