The key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing.

You know, you take a little infant and you turn on the music mobile on their crib and you find that if you give them a music mobile which turns on automatically versus a music mobile in which - if by chance their little legs or their little hands accidentally touches it - turns on they're so much more excited if by chance it turns on because they touched it, so that desire for control over their environment is... really appears from very early on and if you look at children's first words, "no, yes."

A clear right answer and the opportunity to change the options? This is the chooser’s dream.

So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.

We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam?

I put out a good 10 different types of drinks for them and they just said, "Oh, okay, so it's just one choice." One choice? I gave you Coke, Pepsi, Ginger Ale, Sprite. They saw that as one choice. Now why was that one choice? Because they felt, well, it was just all soda.

You get to decide how you're going to look and what you're going to be when you grow up and when people learned that my parents actually had an arranged marriage people thought that was the most horrific thing on earth. I mean how could anybody allow their marriage of all things to be prescribed by somebody else?