OPTIONS

"Rich or poor, it is good to have money." -- Helen Avchin (you may not find much Googling for past writings - she is my grandmother)

We generally prefer to have money than to not have money, yet the money does not do anything for us directly. The value of money is really having OPTIONS. There are many other ways to have OPTIONS but having money provides us more OPTIONS when choosing what to eat, where to live, what to do for entertainment, how to build, etc.

Even without money (or for relatively small amounts of money) we have a tremendous array of OPTIONS throughout our day and throughout our lives. It is one of the great benefits of being human and having free will.

Even when you think you have "no choice" you often have the OPTION of not participating -- you may just choose to participate because the consequences of the alternative choice are too undesirable so you have "no good alternative choice" but you still have a choice.

So how many OPTIONS are we considering? "According to multiple sources on the Internet, the average amount of remotely conscious decisions an adult makes each day equals about 35,000." As each decision has between two and infinite OPTIONS that is somewhere between 70,000 and infinity.

MEETING information needs provides tremendous value -- it often comes down to helping people understand their OPTIONS and focusing on the OPTIONS that are most important to consider and the factors that are most important when making choices.

If you feel stuck perhaps it is time to reflect on your OPTIONS. Perhaps not anything grandiose, maybe a small difference in one of those 35,000 choices today will be just enough to resume the flow.

If I jumped around a bit with this one maybe I just had too many OPTIONS for what to say.