These great quotes have flown by on my tweetstream recently:

”If you don’t like where you are, change it! You’re not a tree.”

“When looking at Switching Costs . . . don’t forget to consider Switching Gains (emotional, social, psychological, etc.)”

On a related note, I finished my second blog post for Seattle 2.0 this morning.  It should go live tomorrow morning at 6 AM.  The topic is the Endowment Effect and whether or not we can use this hypothesis to explain any resistance to making the leap and starting your own business.  On this blog, however, my interests for the moment lean more in a personal direction, and I wonder if the EE can explain resistance to change in general.  I think it can.  I think the EE makes sense and that we overvalue what we currently have and undervalue that which we might potentially have were we to make changes.

I was interested, but not surprised, to find that one of the primary experimental evidence sets in favor of the EE was developed by Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational.  I’m familiar with Dan from his writings on happiness and I think I’ve even blogged about him a couple times in these pages.

Speaking of change, I was talking to a friend this morning who has an interest in astrology and was told that “transformation” is a key concept for Scorpios and that we tend to seek out cycles of change, rebirth, reinvention…I’m not a believer in astrology as such, but since I’ve lately been thinking a lot about change and transformation, I was interested to hear her out.

Thought-experiment: If I had to pick ONE THING today to change about myself or my circumstances, what would it be, and why?  As I ponder this question, I will get back to work… Hope you all are having a great day today.

Following up on yesterday’s post “Making Difficult Product Development Choices”, I ran across this article in the New York Times that reviews experiments done by Dr. Dan Ariely. Dan is a professor of behavioral economics at MIT. He has found, unsurprisingly, that people can’t bear to limit their options.

The Times article talks about some funny experiments to get subjects to give up options and in return get actual cash, hard dollars — but it’s SOOO hard for them, even when they should be able to predict the output and thus get more money. You can play the (non-cash) simulation yourself here.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities.

David Allen, the creator of GTD, has a favorite phrase: “Know what you’re NOT doing.” The idea is that the more conscious and intentional you are about not exploring every option for the use of your time, the less psychic stress you’ll feel. Makes sense, and it works!