choices

Here’s a bit of a fascinating blog post by Tony Morgan on offering choices.

“In one experiment, they set up a tasting booth at a grocery store. They offered 24 different exotic flavors of jams for people to taste in one instance. In a separate instance, they only offered 6 varieties. Customers who stopped by the booth received a coupon for a dollar off the purchase of a jar. In this experiment:
More people stopped at the booth that offered more choices; however, folks tasted the same number of jams in both locations.
More importantly, 30% of the people with a choice of 6 jams actually purchased a jar. Only 3% of the people with a choice of 24 jams made a purchase. Fewer choices generated more purchases.”

He is offering this as a lesson in church programming but as I began to think about it over the last couple of days, it occurs to me that the implications of having so many options affects our personal lives as well. I think that as we lead ourselves well, we have to ask the question, “Are we spreading ourselves too thin.” I’m not really talking about work, although that certainly plays a big part of our lives. I was talking to a good friend about church the other day and he said that they were going to focus on Sunday experience, groups, and kids and that was it. That’s the hyper-focus we should all desire in our personal lives. Saying, “I’m going to focus on God, family, and work,” would keep a lot of us from over committing our lives and being ineffective. I talk to people all the time who say, “I’m going to volunteer at church when everything slows down.” When will that be? Learning to say “no” to good things in favor of the best things is a very hard thing. When we say “no” to those things, we have room to say “yes” to the right things.