Ever since I visited my friend in New York, I have been itching to do my own version of the vision board party. I sent out emails to some of my family members to see if it was possible. I was hoping to do it this past weekend, but things just didn’t work out. So, my sister asked if we could do a mini vision board party with me, her and my six-year-old niece.
I loaded a reusable bag with all of the necessities: magazines, scissors, old resumes that I planned on using for the paper, a whole puncher, glue sticks and phrases and images that I had already cut out, but yet to paste.
As soon as my sister opened the first magazine, she found a gorgeous engagement ring set. It took me a little longer to kick things off, but luckily I had already flipped through the magazines so I marked some pages.
About three hours later, my sister began haphazardly pasting images on her board over other images, which I didn’t quite understand. She said as long as she can see most of the picture, she knew what it represented.
Me on the other hand, I was strategically organizing pictures and phrases on a page (I’m doing a vision book) to make sure everything fit. I wanted to make sure my pages made sense and had a certain flow to them. My sister finished her board in like 10 minutes so she began texting. How rude!
I called her out on the fact that I came to visit her, but she was texting somebody non-stop. She picked on me about being so careful with each image, phrase and page and that’s why it was taking me so long.
Right at that moment, I learned that less is more. I had all of these images and phrases that I wanted for specific pages like love, health, and travel, but I almost didn’t want to paste anything out of fear that I had overlooked something that fit better on the page. I realized that cutting out all that stuff didn’t help the situation. It just made the task more daunting than it needed to be.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I am the same way in other areas of my life. For some reason, I think the more options I have will help me come to a better decision. It never does. I often times just get too overwhelmed and just pick whatever.
A book I read recently entitled “Twenty Something: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck” described this type of decision maker as a maximer. The mother and daughter duo wrote that a maximizer is someone that wants to explore every possible option before making a decision. The other decision maker is a satisficer (satisfactory and suffice together).
It made me think. Reviewing all the possible options for my vision book didn’t get me anywhere. I just wasted more time trying to prepare everything. Had my sister not said anything, I don’t know if I would have completed the two pages that I did at her house.
Could my obsession of exploring every option be a waste a time and the reason I have such a hard time making decisions?
