As a business owner myself and a person who’s really plugged into that entrepreneur world, I am continually amazed at the seriously interesting lives that people are creating for themselves. There are just so many options now for what you can do with your life — as the rise of so many varied Internet businesses shows, you can choose to do pretty much anything.

And while it’s so incredible that we have so many choices in our lives, there is a downside that I think we’ve all experienced at least once:

The curse of the “wrong choice”.

You know how it goes. You’re in a situation where you know that you need to make a choice, and you just can’t seem to decide because you’re so worried that you’ll make the wrong choice. When we’re in those situations, it’s not only incredibly easy to overthink our options — it’s incredibly human.

As humans, we naturally have a hard time when we’re confronted with choices, especially when there are more than a few options. I know this sounds really counterintuitive — after all, isn’t having more choices better? But studies show that in situations where we have more choices, we’re actually less likely to make any choice at all and we’re more likely to be unhappy with any choice that we do make.

And this applies so broadly throughout our lives, from really trivial decisions, like buying laundry detergent or choosing a sandwich filling, to the really important decisions. There’s always that thought in the back of your mind; that worry of…

“Wait, did I really make the best choice? Would I have been happier choosing something else?”

OK, let’s get real here. There’s pretty much no choice you can make about laundry detergent that will seriously impact your life. Even deciding not to make a choice about whether to get the floral scent or the sea breeze scent isn’t going to dramatically impact you.

But when you let the curse of the wrong choice get to you when you’re making big decisions, that’s where things can get serious, especially if you let it paralyse you to the point of not making a decision at all.

3 top tips to get you moving

1. Deliberately limit your choices.

Instead of trying to choose the best possible business to start out of all of the possibilities, limit your choices to three options.

2. Instead of trying to decide the very best thing that you can do with your life, narrow it down to an either-or.

You’ll find it so much easier to follow through on choosing and actually taking some kind of action, which ultimately, is much more important than making “the best” choice to begin with.

3. Focus on what you’re really good at and love doing.

You might as well make your life easier and do what you’re good at. But with that I add a caveat, you also have to love it. It’s no good doing something that bores you to tears even though you may be good at it because all this does is deplete you of energy. And as an entrepreneur you will meet obstacles and challenges, loving what you do gives you an extra boost of energy at these times and the resilience to keep going.

And remember, no one is nailing you down to this decision for the rest of your life — if you try it and end up not liking the choice you made or not getting the results you want, then you can always ditch it and try something else.

All right, your turn: do you ever get into a state of analysis paralysis? What do you do to break through it? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

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