I equate an overwhelming number of choices with messiness. Like the supermarket above, excess choice to me feels disorganized, chaotic. I prefer there to be just two or three clear standouts in any category (choice A, B or C) and find myself anxious when forced to choose between 8, 10 (or more) options.
(Something’s got to be the best, right? If so, why is there room for all this other ‘junk’?)
Maybe I’m an organization-freak, maybe I’m OCD. (The organization of my kitchen utensil drawers seems to indicate so.) Yet, as much as I abhor messes, I find myself uncontrollably drawn to the process of organizing messes—imposing order on what was before a chaotic mess of things—and preventing future recurrences of said mess. To me, this is ‘art’ (nerdy as it may be).
Now, to get a bit more academic:
One of the things I dislike about messiness (read: choice overload) is that it limits access—it keeps things closed. By that I mean it takes time, energy and brains to wrap your head around a messy system and understand what’s at play. More time, energy and brains than most people are willing to commit to a situation—and therefore it’s simply easier to ignore the mess.
If you’ve ever been to a poorly organized garage sale you’ll know what I mean. When everything is tossed into a pile in the front yard without rhyme or reason, our minds quickly determine that the effort required to sort through the mess is unlikely to be worth our effort and we keep driving.
Now, what’s the cost of missing out on a good deal at a garage sale because you weren’t willing to dig through a heap of goods? Not significant.
What concerns me is that this same dynamic is at play with dietary supplements, products which have helped millions of people—those willing to sift through the mess—to improve their health and avoid chronic disease, and which could help many tens of millions more.
The dietary supplement industry is very much like a disorganized garage sale—there are more than 85,000 products available and very few tools and resources available to separate and organize that mess of choice. As a result, many people simply ignore supplements and, in doing so, ignore the powerful benefits these products can have on their health.
And so this is where I commit to spending my time: simplifying the mess of available dietary supplements.
Out of those 85,000 products, there are a mere five supplements that I believe you should be taking daily for optimal health and long-term disease prevention. These 5 products together deliver the lion’s share of benefit you can expect from supplements, which is why we’ve packaged them together into a simple kit (the ‘complete kit’)—for simplicity.
I won’t mind if you miss out on a few good deals at garage sales because you didn’t stop, but seeing you miss out on the health benefits of supplements because it looked like too messy a place to stop would just break my heart.
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