The Disciplined Power of Making a Single Choice

Supplying one link vs. two links is life-changing.

Imagine you have a social media profile and you only offer one link in your bio. Or imagine you email 100,000 people and you only give them one link to your work. Or contemplate writing your career history for a potential employer and only giving them one link.

This is something I’ve been terrible at for most of my life. Every time I get the chance to do something I end up offering multiple choices. Here are a few examples:

My website contained links to every publication I’ve ever written for.

My social media profiles had links to multiple websites.

The messages I send my email list would contain 3–4 links to different stories.

I would try to consume multiple podcasts every week.

Going with multiple options always led to nightmare results. Why?

When You Choose One Option You Make a Decision

Offering multiple options happens because you can’t make a decision. Choosing a single option requires an incredible amount of discipline.

To go with one link vs. giving multiple links is a superpower.

When I meet a writer and they email me a link to their Linktree full of links, I want to go to the bathroom and throw up everywhere. By sending a link full of links you’re asking someone to use their precious energy to make a decision.

You know what happens when you offer too many options? People switch off. They don’t do the thing you want them to do.

I am grappling with this issue right now as I attempt to build a new website. There are so many things a user could do on a website. What if when someone visits your website they could only do one thing? Well, that would take an insane amount of discipline.

What If You Treated Your Life like a Landing Page?

A landing page for non-tech folk is a single website page where there is only one button you can click.

There are no other links, pages, options, products, services, distractions or alternate paths. You either click the button on the landing page or you don’t.

This idea got me thinking. What if you treated your life like a landing page? What if you only offered up one option when given the chance to offer endless options? What would happen?

Here’s what happened to me:

The results became hyper-focused with one option.

When I designed a website where all you could do was leave your email address and get a free eBook, people took the action. When I deleted all podcasts and only listened to The Tim Ferriss Show, I stopped wasting hours of my life listening to half-baked podcasts designed to sell products, not help me with the complexities of life.

When I stopped trying to impress everybody around me and spent time focusing on my girlfriend, our relationship improved. When I stopped trying to do multiple forms of work and chose writing, I wrote more words and reached more people.

You can take parts of your life and choose one option.

Single Option Thinking

When you give a tactic a name it makes it easier to understand. Whenever I have the chance to gain momentum in one area of my life, I think to myself “How do I apply single option thinking to this task?’

That one question switches on my ability to focus and cut through the noise of making strangers with busy lives even more exhausted.

Single option thinking helps people. When you help people, you create value.

If You Only Have so Much Energy, Why Waste It?

Too many options lead to a circus life.

You bleed energy and enthusiasm out through all the options you throw into the world and pollute it with. Every option you want to offer takes energy.

The best way to use your energy is to redirect it into one place rather than multiple areas. This choice compounds all your energy and increases the impact you get from your results.

How to apply it:

Discipline yourself in more areas of your life to provide one option. Take the time to think through what links you can send people and then only send one. Look through all of the places you appear online and choose one place you want people to go and learn about you and what you have to offer the world.

Find places in your life where there is way too much going on. How many podcasts do you listen to? How many books are you simultaneously trying to read? How many bloggers do you follow? How many side-hustles do you have? How many startups are you trying to start?

Maybe you’re trying to offer the world too much.

Final Thought

Take the time to offer single choices. When you do, it shows discipline and gives you laser focus towards outcomes that matter to you.

You don’t need to offer lots of options. You need to offer fewer options.

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Disclaimer

The original version of this story was published on another platform.

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