Too much choice

Bob Moesta is a guy I fol­low because he real­ly under­stands con­sumers and how they make deci­sions about the prod­ucts they use (or don’t).

1/2 Too much choice dri­ves non-con­sump­tion. Anxiety of being wrong or too much to learn to make a deci­sion.

— Bob Moesta (@bmoesta) October 20, 2016

As I was doing research for my book, I often dis­cussed the ideas with friends; friends who had a lot of expe­ri­ence invest­ing, but per­haps not enough empa­thy for those who don’t.

The con­ver­sa­tion would always turn to oth­er ways to invest besides div­i­dend rein­vest­ing. One time, a friend even brought up invest­ing in gold!

The challenge of choice

This presents one of the chal­lenges for peo­ple who want to start invest­ing. There are too many choic­es. Bonds. Stocks. Mutual funds. Real estate. ETFs. (Gold!) And so on.

And so peo­ple don’t start.

This is what I’ve done with the book. I don’t try to teach every­thing about invest­ing, or even every­thing about invest­ing in stocks. In fact, I nar­row the con­ver­sa­tion down to just 50 or so com­pa­nies (if you’re in the US, the num­ber varies in oth­er coun­tries). I nar­row it fur­ther by help­ing peo­ple who are start­ing mod­est­ly, or want a way to learn about invest­ing while they’re invest­ing so they can grow their invest­ing exper­tise.

Getting focused as a creator is experienced as simplification by your customer

So, if you restate the ques­tion from “what should I invest in?” or “how should I invest?” to “I have $250 and want to start invest­ing so that I can learn more about invest­ing as I progress, how should I start? And, what can I do to stay moti­vat­ed?”… well, now you’re onto some­thing.

The com­plex­i­ty makes it hard to get start­ed. That does­n’t mean a sim­ple solu­tion has all the answers. Or, even is always exact­ly cor­rect. But, sim­pli­fi­ca­tion is pow­er­ful in its own right. Narrowing down choic­es to help peo­ple get moti­vat­ed to start. And, then pro­vid­ing a path for growth to empow­er peo­ple to live a more wealthy life. That’s the mag­ic for­mu­la for any prod­uct.

My book is avail­able for pre-order on Amazon & iTunes. I expect to release the dig­i­tal ver­sions in late November or ear­ly December, with paper copies avail­able slight­ly after­ward. Sign up to be noti­fied when they’re released.