The Real Cost of Infinite Choice

It’s Jon here, from Tomorrow’s World. Today I want to tell you about a new Do Radio feature. But first, I want to tell about my dog, Coco.

Every morning, I walk Coco along the River Thames.

It’s 75 minutes of peace. No emails. No meetings. No phone calls.

Just me, the dog and something interesting to listen to.

Or at least, that’s the theory.

The reality usually looks more like this:

I leave the house, put my headphones on and immediately start flicking between apps.

I move backwards and forwards between them. I save things for later. I reject things after reading the description. I wonder whether there’s something better I haven’t found yet.

Ten or fifteen minutes disappear.

I have listened to precisely nothing.

The first quarter of my walk has gone.

And I don’t think I’m the only one.

We’ve solved the wrong problem

For years, the internet had a discovery problem.

Finding good things to listen to was difficult.

Now, there is brilliant content everywhere. We are surrounded by more interesting conversations, music, films, books and ideas than we could ever consume.

Discovery has been solved.

The problem now is choosing between hundreds of perfectly good options.

And every choice carries an opportunity cost.

If I listen to this podcast, what am I missing over there?

The cost isn’t only the wasted time. The flicking between apps, the second-guessing and the low-grade anxiety of wondering whether you chose correctly all leave a trail.

By the end of the walk, I’m often less refreshed than when I started.

I’ve spent my quiet time making a series of completely trivial decisions.

Psychologists call this choice overload.

I call it wasting the first quarter of my dog walk.

It isn’t only about quality

I’ve also realised that I’m not simply searching for good content.

I’m searching for relevant people.

I’m 53.

If I want to hear about building a business, I want to listen to someone who has actually been through it.

Someone who has hired people, fired people, nearly lost everything, started again and come through the other side.

Someone who still wears a few of the scars.

It isn’t necessarily about age. It’s about experience.

The same is true of creativity, leadership, health, family and purpose.

I want to hear from people who have earned their opinions through what they’ve done, rather than through how many followers they’ve accumulated.

Finding those people takes time.

Too much time.

Curators matter more than ever

We have become obsessed with creators.

Everyone is being encouraged to make more content.

Far fewer people are helping us navigate what already exists.

Perhaps one of the most valuable things anyone can offer today is simply to say:

“Don’t worry. I’ve already done the searching. Start here.”

That is what a good curator does.

And that is the thinking behind a new feature we have just added to Do Radio.

Introducing Do Radio Mix

Over the past year, we’ve recorded more than 300 hours of conversations with founders, artists, writers, scientists, campaigners and people who have built genuinely interesting things.

The archive includes people such as Sir Tim Smit, founder of the Eden Project, discussing why storytelling and dreaming are essential leadership skills.

It contains hundreds of moments like that: useful ideas buried inside long conversations, waiting for the right person to find them at the right time.

Until now, finding them meant knowing which guest or episode to choose.

Do Radio Mix changes that.

You begin with what’s on your mind today.

You choose the subject and how much time you have, and Do Radio Mix creates a MixTape for you from across our archive.

It might give you one three-minute audio clip.

Or it might create a half-hour audio mix of several guests exploring the same subject from different angles.

And when somebody you’re listening to particularly resonates, you can go directly to the complete conversation.

You don’t need to know which episode contains the answer.

You don’t even need to know who you’re looking for.

You only need to know what you are thinking about.

The technology isn’t the clever part

The clever part is the conversations themselves.

It’s the fact that Do Radio has already found these people, spoken to them properly and listened closely enough to understand what they’ve learned.

Do Radio Mix simply makes that collective experience easier to explore.

When I leave the house now, I don’t need to spend fifteen minutes deciding what to listen to.

I choose what’s on my mind and let Do Radio Mix make the first decision for me.

I spend more of the walk listening.

I come home with thoughts and ideas sparking in my head, rather than the dull ache of time wasted scrolling through menus.

What are we really looking for?

I don’t think most of us need more content.

I think we need better filters.

We need people and organisations whose judgement we trust enough to narrow the field for us.

Because the scarcest resource today isn’t information.

It’s attention.

Every unnecessary decision we remove gives us a little of that attention back.

Give it a try

Open Do Radio Mix, choose whatever is on your mind and begin listening.

You should be hearing something useful in under a minute.

Then consider where else in your life too many choices might be making things harder rather than better.

Perhaps the answer isn’t finding more.

Perhaps it’s finding someone whose judgement you trust enough to choose for you.

Sometimes, that’s the smartest choice you can make.