# Chapter 315

Life is simply a long series of choices and tradeoffs. We make choices constantly as we debate the tradeoffs. We want parts of each tradeoff, without the negatives of each tradeoff, and that is simply not going to happen, even though that is what we want. At the very least that is what I want and what my clients want, you may be some kind of superhuman exception, but I don’t think so. We all pretty much want the paycheck but don’t want to do the work. This is the normative experience that I hear from everyone, with one consistently different voice - the entrepreneurial startup guy - he just gets off on making something big and making something work. His appetite for work exceeds most of us though, and granted he makes some pretty cool stuff in Africa. But I am falling into the wrong hole here, I want to talk about those tradeoffs.

The message I want to communicate this morning is that the positives are better than you think and the negatives are less than you feel on these tradeoffs. The reason that we are even chatting about this is because of the awesome luxury that we have of choice. The majority of the world has less choice than do we, far less. It took me years living in a third world country before I could even SEE the colors that they were referring to, the subtle design differences from one concrete building to the next, the barely-there differences between one car and the next - these constituted their choices, their tradeoffs. I could not even see the difference with my Western eyes, so subtle and barely there were these differences. Your choices are better than you think.