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"The man who chases two rabbits catches neither." — Confucius
I wrote this because I needed to read it too.
You cannot commit.
Not to a business idea, not to a partner, not even to how you want to spend your weekend.
A new option shows up. A better idea appears.
You start from scratch again.
And somewhere along the way you begin to wonder why you cannot simply stick to anything.
This is not a character flaw. It is a trap.
Four weeks for one hotel
In September I am spending a month in Bali. Two weeks working, two weeks on holiday. I started planning early because I love having everything organized before I arrive. When the groundwork is done, I can simply show up and enjoy the experience without making too many decisions on the ground.
Usually it runs smoothly.
This time I ran into a problem I recognized immediately but could not find my way out of.
I already knew I wanted three different locations on the island.
Two working weeks somewhere I could keep my habits intact.
One week near the rice fields in Ubud.
One final week somewhere beautiful for a proper holiday.
The first two came together without much difficulty.
For the working location I had precise criteria: gym, pool, yoga studio, supermarket nearby, beach access, strong wifi, excellent reviews. A bit of research around Denpasar and I found the right place in Kuta quickly.
Ubud followed the same pattern. I knew exactly what I needed, and the search reflected that clarity.
Then came the last week.
I spent four weeks searching for that final accommodation.
Four weeks. For one week of holiday.
Bali has an almost overwhelming number of beautiful, affordable options. I scrolled Booking.com, switched to Airbnb, went back to Booking. Beautiful. Beautiful. Another beautiful one. I felt stuck and increasingly frustrated with myself. I knew exactly what Barry Schwartz described in The Paradox of Choice. But understanding the name of the problem did not help me escape it.
My criteria for the final week?
Nice. Paradise. Meaningless words that guaranteed failure from the very beginning.
And every time I found something promising, I immediately went digging for negative reviews. One complaint about the breakfast and the property was eliminated. Noise from a nearby road. Rejected. I was searching for the perfect option, which meant I was effectively searching forever.
After four weeks I finally stepped back and looked at what I was actually doing.
I chose one area of the island where I could run, which already eliminated the vast majority of options. On Bali, running is genuinely difficult because of how the roads and traffic are structured, so Sanur became the obvious starting point. I committed to Booking.com only and closed Airbnb entirely. I filtered for breakfast included, gym access, a beachfront location, and a review score above 9. That left me with three properties.
I made my decision in about ten minutes.
Restriction was the only thing that could solve it. But I want to be honest here. Even after that very deliberate process, my brain continued whispering that I might have missed a better villa or a more interesting property somewhere.
I stayed with my decision, but those voices were there for at least another two days.
The optionality trap does not let go immediately. It has to be outlasted.
The people who understood this
Mark Manson had a book deadline but found himself completely unable to sit down and write with any consistency. Too many distractions, too many alternative ways to spend his time. So he rented a cabin in the woods with a friend who also had a demanding project to complete. No internet. No entertainment. Just boredom or the work in front of him. The first two days were genuinely painful. By day three, something shifted. With no other options available, his mind settled and he simply wrote. He accomplished more in that one week than he had managed in months.
Steve Jobs applied the same principle deliberately. When he returned to Apple in 1997, the company had over 350 products and was weeks away from bankruptcy. Jobs eliminated all but ten. He told his team that deciding what not to do was just as important as deciding what to do. The focus that followed produced the iMac, the iPod, and eventually the iPhone. The restriction was not a compromise. It was the strategy.
Henry David Thoreau chose restriction on his own terms. In 1845 he moved into a small cabin on Walden Pond, stripped his life to its essentials, and spent two years there deliberately. No excess, no unnecessary obligations, no noise. He wanted to experience what life actually felt like when everything inessential was removed. The result was Walden, one of the most influential works in American literature.
Buddha left his wealth, his comfort, and every material option he had ever known, and walked into the forest. He understood that if he wanted to learn something true about life, he would need to remove everything competing for his attention first.
The pattern across all of them is identical.
Remove the alternatives. Find the focus. Do the work.
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It goes much further than accommodation
Think about the gym. You could go. You could also watch something, scroll through your phone, meet someone for dinner, or do any number of things that feel easier and more immediately rewarding. With that range of alternatives available, the gym loses almost every time unless you have already made going a firm, non-negotiable decision.
The same applies to building anything meaningful on the side. An online project, a creative practice, a new skill. The sheer volume of things competing for your attention today is extraordinary. The alternatives do not even need to be related to what you are trying to do. They simply need to exist.
Dating apps are perhaps the most transparent example of this trap in action. Endless profiles, always the possibility of someone more interesting further down the list, and almost zero tolerance for anything imperfect. I once dismissed someone because she mentioned she did not enjoy going to the cinema. How irrational is that, honestly?
Recently I matched with a woman who lived ninety minutes away. My first thought was to skip her. Too far, too complicated. Then I caught myself, I was doing exactly what I had done with the hotels.
I have spoken to people who refuse to match with anyone who lives more than four miles from them. We are searching for the perfect partner in exactly the same way I searched for that hotel. Applying a zero-tolerance policy to anything that looks like a negative review.
When did we become so reluctant to make anything work?
I notice this in professional environments as well. The company I work at is constantly searching for new tools. The tool everyone is looking for is one you purchase and it immediately resolves all your problems. But nobody wants to invest the time in making the tool genuinely useful once it is purchased. Nobody reads the documentation, contacts customer support, or thinks seriously about how to adapt it to their specific situation. They simply move on to the next one.
It is the same mindset people bring to relationships, to careers, to anything that requires patience.
We want to find the thing that already works perfectly.
We have little interest in doing the work of making something good.
Why this is happening
There are two underlying reasons worth examining.
The first is instant gratification.
A decade of food delivery, streaming services, social media, and frictionless online shopping has conditioned our brains to expect immediate returns on almost everything.
Commitment rarely offers that.
It brings boredom, setbacks, doubt, and the persistent feeling that perhaps you made the wrong choice. Most people today interpret that friction as a clear signal they should keep searching.
That friction is not a warning signal.
It is simply what commitment feels like in the early stages, before it becomes part of who you are.
The second is a lack of self-knowledge.
My first two Bali accommodations came together quickly because I had a precise understanding of what I actually needed.
The third consumed four weeks because I abandoned that clarity and chased a vague, external image of what a perfect holiday should look like.
Even though I consider myself someone with good self-awareness, I stepped directly into the trap without noticing.
When you search without knowing what you actually need, no number of options will lead you anywhere useful. You will either never commit, or commit to something wrong and blame the decision rather than the search itself.
Knowing yourself is where the commitment process actually begins.
How to escape the trap
If you recognize this pattern in your own life, here are the things that genuinely help.
Define your criteria before you start searching, not during it. Vague intentions like “nice” or “the right person” are not criteria. Know what you actually need, based on who you actually are, before you open a single tab or swipe in any direction.
Limit your sources deliberately. One platform, not five. One channel of information, not all of them. The moment you start cross-referencing endlessly, you are no longer searching. You are postponing the decision.
Set a hard deadline and honor it. Give yourself until a specific date to decide. When that date arrives, you decide with the best option available to you. The search closes. This single rule eliminates weeks of unnecessary paralysis.
Accept that every real option has a negative review. No hotel, no relationship, no job is flawless. The negative reviews are not information that will save you from making a mistake. They are noise. You are not looking for perfect. You are looking for right enough.
Learn to distinguish friction from wrongness. The discomfort you feel after committing is almost always the discomfort of commitment itself, not evidence that you chose wrong. Give it time before you conclude anything. My brain was still whispering for two days after I booked that hotel.
The irony of too much freedom
We spend enormous energy pursuing freedom and then struggle to understand why we feel so disoriented inside it.
Freedom without self-knowledge is not really freedom. It is paralysis dressed in more attractive clothing. The people who thrive when surrounded by many options are the ones who understand themselves clearly enough to filter decisively.
They restrict their own options deliberately. Everyone else gets lost in the scroll.
I removed Instagram from my life two years ago. Almost immediately I began executing my own plans with far greater consistency. There was no comparison pulling my attention sideways, no fear of missing out, no endless alternative competing with whatever I was actually doing.
The restriction produced the focus.
Most people are not equipped to navigate total freedom. They function better within structure, clear constraints, and deliberate limitations. Not because they lack strength of character, but because the human brain was never designed to process infinite choice.
The perfect option does not exist before you choose it.
It is made, through commitment, through investment, through the decision to work something out rather than start the search again.
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Hehe perfect timing. I’m in the middle of procrastinating continuing to work on my side business. I open Substack and this is the first thing I see. God is speaking to me today through you David. Fantastic article!
Time to get to work 😆👍