Sheena Iyengar: Fate, chance, or choice #INKtalks

http://inktalks.com For the last 20 years, Sheena Iyengar has been studying choice. At INK2011 she demonstrates how choice is one of the most powerful tools we have for shaping ourselves, our lives, and our futures.

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ABOUT SHEENA IYENGAR:
Sheena Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous "jam study," done while she was a grad student, quantified a counterintuitive truth about decisionmaking -- that when we're presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. (This and subsequent, equally ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.)

Iyengar's research has been informing business and consumer-goods marketing since the 1990s. But she and her team at the Columbia Business School throw a much broader net. Her analysis touches, for example, on the medical decisionmaking that might lead up to choosing physician-assisted suicide, on the drawbacks of providing too many choices and options in social-welfare programs, and on the cultural and geographical underpinning of choice. Her book The Art of Choosing shares her research in an accessible and charming story that draws examples from her own life.
for more info:http://www.inktalks.com/people/sheena-iyengar

(Applause)

Joseph Campbell once said,

"Everything begins with a story"

So I thought I would start by telling you the story of my life.

I was born, one month early

in the midst of a terrible winter snow storm

in Toronta, Canada, in November of 1969.

My mother was all alone that night.

She had just made her way from India to Toronto

and my father still hadn't made it over there.

And I still think about

what it must have been like for her that night

all alone in this far off country

with this new baby in her arms.

Maybe she was staring outside the window

and looking at snow flakes whirling around

for the very first time in her life.

Unbeknownst to her, the low visibility of that night

and the absence of my father

would prove important of things to come.

So that is one story of my life.

Now let me tell you another story of my life.

Its a 'Jack in the box' world.

You open it up carefully,

one parcel at a time.

But sometimes, things just spring up and out.

So I did, sprang out one month early

and my father wasn't even there to receive me.

My mother, who had never intended to leave India,

suddenly found that she was married

and shipped off to Toronto,

and from Toronto to New York,

and then from there to New Jersey.

My parents, who were Sikhs,

lived among the Sikhs wherever they went.

So I lived within a country, in a country

and they had every intention

to raise me as a good Sikh child.

I was gonna grow up and come back to India

and a whole bunch of Sikh men were gonna line up

and they were gonna choose the right Sikh husband.

So when i was a kid,

at one point my parents started to wonder

why they had to constantly shout "Watch Out!".

Surely even a a klutz would notice a parking meter on occasion.

Well, the mystery was solved by a vision specialist

at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital

who told my parents that I had been born

with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa

and would be blind before I finish school.

When I was 13, my father woke up one morning

complaining of a leg pain.

My mother told him to go to the doctor

and even set up an appointment for him.

He never went to see the doctor.

Eventually, he was found collapsed outside a bar,

and by the time he made it to the hospital,

he had already suffered three heart attacks and was no more.

This is not to say

that our lives are made up of solely unpleasant and random events.

How well can any of us plan for our future

if we can only see so far?

How well can you direct your future

if the weather changes faster than you can say "Surprise!"

But wait, I have another story for you.

My parents left India.

They chose to leave India.

They chose to go to Canada.

They chose to go to the United States.

And they chose this because they were in pursuit of a better life

for themselves, for their children.

Like my father would always talk about

how he landed up in the United States with exactly one dollar in his pocket,

but he had a lot of dreams.

I was born into that dream

and I grew up with that dream.

And you might say that I understood that what shines so bright in that dream

that you could see it even if you were blind like me, was choice.

Anyone of you could tell the story of your life

in terms of fate, chance or choice.

Its worth doing the mental exercise sometimes.

"What are the circumstances of your birth that affected where you are today?"

"what were those random events that happened to happen one day

that affected who you are and where you got to?"

"What were the choices that you made?"

No matter how you tell the story of your life

you will discover some interesting truths about yourself.

But I think that there is something very special

when you tell the story of your life in terms of choice.

Choice in the end is the only one of these forces

that puts control in your hands.

Its the only thing that enables you to go from who you are today

to who you want to be tomorrow.

So its the most powerful tool we have for shaping ourselves, our lives, our futures.

And ultimately, regardless of what fate or chance may have in store for us,

we are evaluated by the choices that we make.

"Ok, but for God's sake, how do I make choices?"

Its is a particularly perplexing question to an Indian-American.

They have a name for us you know.

They call us ABCD - American Born Confused Desi.

As an Indian-American. its not just that you learn two different languages.

Sure, as a Sikh girl with a heritage from Delhi,

I learned some mix of Hindi and Punjabi, much like what they speak in the Hindi movie, versus English.

But its not just that you learn two different languages,

[instead] you learn two different ways of life,

two different ways of thinking

two different ways of choosing.

I understood growing up that as a Sikh child

you had to be a good Sikh child, listen to what your parents said

respect your elders, respect the wishes of God

Sure, career choices were very much decided by your parents.

Doctor/Engineers [is] obviously good.

And your marriage choice was, of course, influenced heavily by your parents.

Choice was something that had consequences.

And, so when you made a choice, you made it carefully,

because, ultimately, choice had its limitations.

That's what I learned from my Sikh culture.

Well, what about the American point of view?

You get to choose,

you get to decide who your are, what you want,

what you will be when you grow up, what your will wear,

what you will eat, what you will do with your hair,

what kind of career you will pursue, whom you will marry,

how you will marry, what sort of a life you will lead.

Choice was all about possibilities.

So here I am, an Indian American and I've got to make

some pretty big choices in my life.

Who's gonna decide my career?

Who's gonna decide my marriage?

How is this gonna be decided?

By the dictates of Indian culture?

By the dictates of American culture.

As a blind person, everyone is always asking,

"What will become of her when she grows up?"

That was asked by both Americans and Indians.

At least they were in consensus on that one.

(Laughter)

So in school, I remember our teachers used to say,

"You can grow up and do whatever it is you want to be

as long as you put your mind and heart to it.

One day my teacher said and asked all of us in class,

"What do you guys wanna be when you grow up?"

Well, I very confidently raised my hand and said,

"I wanna be a pilot."

(Laughter)

That was exactly everybody's reaction.

The poor teacher was so speechless she said,

"Oh, that's interesting child."

(Laughter)

But I wasn't very good at that.

So, then they decided that I could go to college.

At which point, the choice of what I was gonna be when I grew up

was so obvious, it just wasn't obvious to me.

I was gonna become a lawyer!

Because justice was blind.

(Laughter)

So, everywhere I went, people just gave me roles to play

trying to stick me in a niche

and it became imperative for me to learn how to separate

my true limitations from my perceived ones.

I started to develop this keen awareness at some point,

when I was growing up,

that so many of our hopes, dreams and expectations

struggle constantly against our limitations.

One of the big challenges that we all have in our lives

is in figuring out how to overcome those challenges.

Which ones can we overcome and which ones we can't.

I guess, I wanna convince you today

that I was blessed.

What I learned from my Indian heritage was that

the question that you ask is not 'What do you want?'

The question that you ask is 'What can you be good at?'

'What can you be excellent at?'

Pursue it with great discipline.

That is the life of someone who has integrity.

What I learned from the American culture

was that you don't have to settle for those

meager options put before you

People can say no to you, and they will.

People can take choices away from you, and they will.

But you can create choices for yourself.

Choices that those other people may not have even imagined.

I didn't have all the choices that the sighted have

but in a way that was easier.

Any time I wanted to pursure a choice,

it had to be something that I was willing to dedicate myself to

And, because I had to push past doorkeepers and nay-sayers, I could never afford to choose on a whim.

And that meant that you had to be choosy about choosing.

So now let's take up these three criteria:

The Indian View.

The American View.

The Blindness View.

How am I gonna choose?

What am I gonna choose?

Well, it was obvious wasn't it?

You choose the thing that you've been thinking about your whole life,

The thing that you have thought about in ways that other people haven't thought about,

the thing with which you can contribute something new to

it became the most natural choice in the world to study

Choice.

So, that's what I've been studying for the past 20 years.

People ask me,

"Why did you title your book: The Art of Choosing? What is the art of choosing anyway?"

It's a great question.

And I think, the answer to the question,

you above all else will understand what I mean when I say it.

Indians taught me the value of choice and it's limitations,

and I have studied that in many ways in my research.

Americans taught me the value of choice in terms of the

possibilities that it all offers.

You might say that these are antithetical to one another

But they're not.

They are two sides of the same coin.

It is when we are able to balance our hopes,

our dreams and appreciation for the possibilities

with a clear-eyed assessment of the limitations,

that we are best prepared to practice

The Art of Choosing.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)