There are no wrong choices

If you want to feel at peace with your life choices, picture a heinous shade of Godzilla green from floor to ceiling, and remember: this was the work of an interior design master.

Interior Design Masters was a standard format reality competition show: contestants, challenges, winners, and one loser who was sent home at the end of each episode. The contestant were varying degrees of amateur interior designer (from retirees to ambiguously named "interior stylists") seeking recognition of their talents and the chance to go pro. 

In one early challenge, the contestants were each assigned a room in a hotel to redesign. As an added twist - especially given the pitfalls of brown in contemporary design - the hotel's theme was "chocolate." One  contestant was a middle-aged woman who was test driving a lifetime of design hobbyism against the demands of a professional commission, amplified by the artificial constraints of reality tv. Halfway through the hotel design challenge, she began to pace and fret. Having rolled on the first few stripes of paint, she was regretting her choice of color. Now, she was racing to repaint, and then literally watching the new paint dry before she could furnish the entire room. Unsurprisingly, the final design was less polished than the others, and the contestant was eliminated.

Obviously, backtracking in a timed competition is a recipe for failure. So why did she feel so strongly about making the change? Based on her statements during the episode, she simply could not adapt her original design vision to work with this color.

As a line of reasoning, it seems sensible enough. Until you watch the following challenges, where, time and again, "bad" choices are transformed into good ones. Whether it's a hacked together upholstery job or a handmade mosaic that took triple the allotted time, the designers who succeeded and ultimately won - including the creator of that awesomely untimely mosaic and the architect of Godzilla chic - never went backwards. They committed to their choices, compromising in other areas to make up for lost time. They adjusted their plans to make their choice look intentional. They made it work.

Reality tv is a great format for sparking revelations, because unlike in actual reality, you're privy to the characters' internal monologues. Undoubtedly, there were times when bold commitment came easily to the visionary designers. Just as often, there were pangs of regret, the urge to turn back and undo it all. Regardless, the final designs that emerged from these near-failures were generally just as good as their other work, if not even better, for daring and originality.

Watching this unfold, I felt a tremor in a secret (even to myself), yet somehow ironclad precept: the belief that every decision has a "right" answer that I need to uncover. And the converse, that if I've made the wrong choice, then it must be corrected. I have an entire nuclear family who can attest that I'm not alone in this. What subject to study in college, what glasses best suit my features, and yes, what color to paint my living room. I feel it most strongly in matters of taste, which, ironically, are the most trivial and least consequential questions. Perhaps it's the looming judgment of others, or the lifelong chip on my shoulder from being an unfashionable kid (more on that later, I'm sure).

I have one solution that I keep trying. The only problem is that it doesn't totally work. It's being very, assertively, decidedly decisive. Anyone who knows me - except my husband, who knows me TOO well - would describe me as a decisive person. I try to right size research time and energy to the magnitude of the question. I'm impatient to make choices so I can check things off my to do list and move on. And I fear getting sucked into the morass of information, and finding myself more confused than ever. So I choose.

 

I can't say it hasn't helped. Many times, after living with my choices, I find that I am happy with them. In those cases, if I ever wonder if my choice was best, I try to be a satisficer rather than an optimizer. I remember that it doesn't have to be the best. It just has to meet my criteria. However, if I'm at all discontented, I start to feel a rumble, which grows into an irrepressible urge, to hit "undo." Often, I give in, because return policies and customer service are the antithesis of reality tv stakes.

The solution I'd like to embrace is to replace my flawed belief with a new one: there are no perfect choices. There are no perfect glasses, no perfect paint colors, no perfect outfits for the kids on picture day. There's only what's good enough to meet criteria, and then how you - to put a positive spin on a womp womp phrase - "make the best of it."

Where perfectionism reigns, the only antidote is creativity, with a dash of adaptation and a glamorous swipe of Godzilla green.