Satisficing: Why Good Enough Beats Maximizing

I had a whiteboard in my home office with seven goals written on it.

Not vague goals — specific, measurable ones. Grow the newsletter to 10,000 subscribers. Hit the gym four times a week. Read two books a month. Publish three articles a week. Earn 20% more than last year. Sleep eight hours. Spend more time with the people I actually care about.

Every goal was legitimate. Every goal mattered. And somehow I was failing all of them.

It took a psychologist named Barry Schwartz — and a concept called satisficing — to explain what was actually happening: not because I wasn't trying hard enough, but because trying too hard at too many things at once is a category error, not a discipline problem.

What Barry Schwartz Found That Nobody Talks About

In 2002, Schwartz — a psychologist at Swarthmore College — published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology developing what he called a "maximizing scale." The goal was to measure how strongly a person felt compelled to consider every available option before committing to a decision. Maximizers, he found, couldn't let a decision rest until they were as confident as possible that no better option had been missed. Satisficers set a clear standard upfront — this is what good enough looks like — found something that met it, and stopped searching.

Here's the part that matters: maximizers frequently made objectively better decisions by external measures. They found cheaper flights. They negotiated slightly higher salaries. They picked technically superior options.

And they were less happy.

Significantly less happy. Schwartz's research found maximizers reported lower life satisfaction, more regret, more social comparison, and more depression than satisficers — despite often winning by objective metrics. The very act of trying to find the best possible option, across every domain, at every decision point, was costing them more in well-being than the marginally better outcome was ever worth.

This wasn't a small effect. And it wasn't about decision fatigue in the ordinary sense — the exhaustion of too many choices. It was about something structural: what happens to a person who applies a maximizing strategy not just to shopping or salary negotiation, but to all of their goals at once.

Herbert Simon's Nobel Prize and a Word You Should Use More

The idea Schwartz was building on wasn't new. In 1956, Herbert Simon — an economist and cognitive scientist who would later win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences — published a paper arguing that the classical economic model of human decision-making was simply wrong. The model assumed people would always search exhaustively for the objectively best option. Simon pointed out that real humans, operating under limits of time, information, and cognitive capacity, don't do that and can't do that.

What they actually do — what he argued they should do — is satisfice. A portmanteau of "satisfy" and "suffice." You identify a threshold that's genuinely good enough for the current context, you find an option that clears that threshold, and you commit.

Not because you're lazy. Because exhaustive optimization is computationally impossible in a life with more moving parts than a spreadsheet can hold.

Here's what satisficing actually means: set a clear threshold for what "good enough" looks like, find the first option that meets it, and commit. Unlike maximizing, the search is complete once the criterion is satisfied — not when every possible alternative has been exhausted.

The interesting thing is that Simon's idea was largely welcomed as a model of human limitation — a description of the imperfect shortcuts our brains use when we can't think straight. Schwartz flipped that framing. Satisficing, his research suggested, isn't a cognitive limitation. It might be the psychologically superior strategy, even when you have the time and information to keep searching.

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The Competing Goals Trap — Why Seven Things on a Whiteboard Is Actually One Problem

Here's the structural problem that Schwartz's later work — particularly his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice — made explicit.

When you try to maximize reach, sales, reputation, and your personal relationships simultaneously, you're not just juggling four goals. You're creating four competing optimization targets that can't all be pulled toward their maximum at the same time without each one pulling against the others.

Time you spend on reach takes from depth. Resources you spend on revenue take from the relationship-building that could eventually generate more sustainable revenue. Energy you put into looking impressive online takes from the quiet, invisible work that actually builds skill. It's not a discipline problem. It's a category error.

The whiteboard with seven goals isn't ambitious. It's a guarantee that you'll underperform on all of them while feeling vaguely guilty about each one — because maximizing logic tells you that anything less than full optimization on any single target means you haven't tried hard enough.

Seth Godin made a version of this point more recently in a piece about the "Hawking index" — the idea that you can't simultaneously win on reach, sales, cultural impact, and critical reception, because the actual audience for each outcome overlaps less than it looks like it should. Optimizing for one pulls against the others. The most cited books aren't the bestsellers. The bestsellers aren't the most critically praised. Trying to be all of them at once is the surest way to be none of them.

Why Satisficers End Up Ahead in the Long Run

There's a counterintuitive logic at work here that's worth sitting with.

If maximizers make objectively better individual decisions, why do satisficers end up more satisfied with their lives? The research points to a few mechanisms working together.

First, commitment. When a satisficer finds an option that meets their threshold, they stop looking and start investing. All the energy that would have gone into continued searching now goes into making the chosen option work. Maximizers, even after deciding, keep running silent background searches — noticing better options they missed, comparing their choice to alternatives, regretting the gap between what they chose and what they imagine the best possible option would have been. Satisficers skip that entire cognitive loop.

Second, the asymmetry of regret. Schwartz found maximizers experienced significantly more counterfactual thinking — imagining how things would have gone if they'd chosen differently. Because they searched broadly before deciding, they remember all the options they passed on. Every one of those rejected options becomes a potential source of regret. Satisficers, having defined "good enough" upfront, simply have fewer candidates for post-decision regret.

Third — and this is the one that took me longest to believe — the quality gap usually closes. The objectively worse choice made by a satisficer, executed with full commitment and no second-guessing, tends to perform better over time than the objectively better choice made by a maximizer who keeps one eye on whether something even better might appear. Execution with clarity tends to beat optimal choice made with divided attention.

Jim Rohn used to say that you can't hire someone else to do your push-ups. The point was about personal responsibility. But there's a parallel insight here: you can't outsource the commitment that comes from having one clear standard and meeting it. That commitment is what makes the choice pay off.

The Satisficing Standard: What "Good Enough" Actually Means

There's a version of this idea that collapses into mediocrity, and it's important to name it so we don't go there.

Satisficing doesn't mean aiming low. It means defining, in advance, what genuinely good enough looks like for this specific goal in this specific context — and then committing to that standard as the goal, rather than using it as a floor and then continuing to search anyway.

The distinction is in the sequence. A maximizer sets a high standard and then can't stop optimizing even after meeting it. A satisficer sets a high standard, meets it, and stops searching so they can redirect energy toward the next thing.

Schwartz's broader research is consistent with this idea: satisficers, who set a clear criterion and stop searching once it's met, consistently report higher decision satisfaction than maximizers — even in cases where the maximizer's option was objectively better by external measures. The clarity of the criterion, and the willingness to stop searching once it's met, appears to matter more for well-being than the objective quality of the outcome.

So "good enough" isn't a low bar. It's a decided bar. The difference is whether you've genuinely committed to what counts as success before you start, or whether you're using a moving target to justify perpetual optimization.

Here's a test: can you write down, right now, the one metric that would tell you this particular goal is achieved? Not seven metrics. One. If you can't, you're not satisficing — you're maximizing without admitting it, which is the worst of both worlds.

How to Start Today: The Single Metric Commitment

You don't need to restructure your entire life to test whether this works. You need one goal and one threshold.

Step 1: Pick the goal that matters most right now. Not the one that feels most urgent. The one that, if it went well over the next 90 days, would meaningfully change what comes after. One goal.

how to set SMART goals that actually work

Step 2: Write the threshold, not the maximum. What does genuinely good enough look like? The answer should be specific enough to recognize it when you see it. "Growing" is not a threshold. "Reaching 5,000 subscribers" is a threshold. Pick a number, a date, or a clear condition. Write it down.

Step 3: Treat everything else as secondary — explicitly. Every other goal goes on a secondary list. You're not abandoning them. You're deferring optimization. The psychological difference between "I'm not working on this right now" and "I've failed to optimize this" is enormous, and it's worth being explicit with yourself about which one is true.

Step 4: When you hit the threshold, stop. This is the hardest step. When you reach what you said was good enough, the maximizer instinct is to immediately reset the target upward and keep going. Schwartz's research suggests pausing here — genuinely acknowledging the threshold was met — produces meaningfully better outcomes than immediately moving the goal post. Acknowledge the win. Redirect energy. Then raise the bar if you want to. Just not before.

Step 5: Notice the counterfactual thoughts when they come. They'll come. The sense that you could have aimed higher, that the option you picked wasn't quite the best possible one, that someone else did it better. Schwartz's research found these thoughts are the primary driver of maximizer unhappiness. Naming them as a predictable feature of the maximizing instinct — not as real information about a real failure — takes most of their power away.

The Whiteboard Looks Different Now

There are still goals in my office. There are always goals. But there's only one on the wall at a time.

Not because the others don't matter — they do. But because the research is clear that having all of them on the wall simultaneously isn't ambition. It's a slow leak in every one of them.

Schwartz's maximizers were winning by objective measures and suffering for it. Simon's satisficers were leaving marginal value on the table and living better for it. The gap isn't about effort. It's about what you're optimizing for in the first place.

whether your goals are actually yours

You can keep the whiteboard. But ask yourself honestly: are those seven goals a vision, or are they seven simultaneous maximization targets quietly fighting each other?

Schwartz's research says you already know the answer. The question is what you're going to do with it.

What's the one thing on your list that, if it actually went right, would change what everything else is even about? Put that one on the wall. Move the rest to a drawer. That's not settling for less. That's how you design your evolution.