Many people have heard of the Fear of Missing Out (FoMO) which is a social anxiety that we are missing out on a rewarding social experience by not attending a get-together or event. FoMO has become a common term in our society and is characterized by a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing. Most famously, this leads to what we might be calling an addiction to social media except that it’s become such a socially acceptable addiction in the last decade.
Entrepreneurs, though, are at risk of a particularly virulent and deadly strain of FoMO which, fearing to miss the right moment, an important trend, or opportunity, can drive us to take on too many initiatives and ‘run in too many directions.’ Pivoting, growing and experimenting might be good for business, but having a misaligned or inconsistent strategy is not. For example, adding products and services too quickly, spreading business to several new markets at once, marketing to multiple different audiences at once – these are some of the common FOMO-fused business mistakes.
Patrick McGinnis coined FoMO in 2003 while a student of Harvard Business School, about the same time that he coined Fear of Better Options (FoBO), which we will discuss here as it is similar to information addiction. FoBO is fueled by endless opportunities and choices but drives us in the other direction from FoMO.
You may have experienced FoBO when faced with making a tough decision and you want to maximize the reward. You feel compelled to continue researching the various options until you find yourself in a state of “paralysis by analysis”, unable to make a choice because the decisions seem too complicated to commit. My husband deals with FoBO, which makes him endlessly hesitate instead of taking action. He constantly delays or ditches a choice, because there could be something better out there or kick off a series of decisions that he’s not prepared to make.
We live in a time of big data, easily accessible information, and constantly upgraded versions of everything, so entrepreneurs can likewise get paralyzed. In such a scenario, FOBO makes business people over-analyze and keeps them stuck in a process of finding yet a better option. This inability to make a decision is sometimes coupled with a Fear of Doing Anything (FoDA), an acronym also coined by McGinnis. This fear can delay you from making important changes in your business, which can be detrimental to your success. Others refer to this phenomenon as a Fear of Change.
Completely eliminating these fears is unlikely, as our environment implies competition and choices, and it is in our nature to strive for better resources and anticipate dangers.
So what does all of this have to do with recovery? Well, information can be just as appealing to your brain as snacks, money or drugs, according to a 2019 study by researchers at UC Berkley’s Haas School of Business. They found that information acts on the brain’s dopamine-producing reward system in the same way as other addictive behaviors and substances. This suggests that information can have a very close and potentially harmful relationship with our brain, which has evolved to gather information.
The researchers found that information carries the same value to our brains as money and that decisions with a monetary reward prompt us to seek more information than we would for decisions with no monetary reward. When placed on the same scale as money, we can see comparisons between the way people consume and over-consume information just as they would money. In other words, just as we can convert such disparate things as a painting, a dinner at a gourmet restaurant, and a vacation into a dollar value, the brain converts curiosity about information into the same common code.
While economists have tended to view curiosity as a means to an end, valuable when it can help us get information to gain an edge in making decisions, we now see curiosity as an innate motivation that can spur actions by itself. For example, sports fans might check the odds on a game even if they have no intention of ever betting. This type of compulsive behavior set on a larger scale, such as compulsively researching, can have damaging effects to a person’s behavioral health just as any other addiction would.
I recently dealt with information addiction while considering doctoral work for addiction counseling. It started as a curiosity of what such a program would look like and turned into hours a day of researching options and getting calls from universities around the world. I felt highs from the reward of finding a new program and lows when I was forced to eliminate an option, and I knew this behavior wasn’t serving me but I continued to compulsively gather information.
People acquire information based not only on its actual benefit, but also on the anticipation of its benefit, so higher staked decisions increase our curiosity for information, even when the information may not affect their decisions, such as immediately after the decision was made. Our perception of how good or bad something seems can lead to the anticipation of a more pleasurable reward, which makes the information appear even more valuable.
When researchers at University of California at Berkeley carried out fMRI brain scans they found that consuming information activated the regions of the brain specifically known to be involved in valuation (the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex), which are the same dopamine-producing reward areas of the brain that are activated by food, money, and drugs. This was the case no matter if the information was actually useful, or powerful enough to change a person’s viewpoint.
Entrepreneurs must therefore stay on full guard when they have to gather information and make decisions because these activities can trigger addictive behavior. Information is just information, it is not knowledge. Knowledge comes from testing something and experiencing the results. You can’t know something for sure if you haven’t tried it.
Here are ways to manage information addiction:
- Create a system for preserving the information you know so that you can witness how much useful information that you already possess. I use Google Docs and Trello.
- Write down a goal for collecting information and then list and rank the things you wish to learn that are directly related to that goal
- Set a timer for research and then take a break
- Set a date to make a decision
- Schedule implementation and set a rule for yourself that you won’t collect any more information until you have implemented what you’ve already learned.
- For everyday decisions, work down to two options and then flip a coin. Both options are likely viable and this takes the pressure off of making the final decision.
- For larger decisions, write a list of all the variables, Pros, Cons, etc, and then evaluate them as if you were a venture capitalist, where your time, money, and effort are the investment.
