Here's a stat I came across in this book that shocked me (and that's rare):

"Research has found that the average person makes 35,000 remotely conscious decisions every single day."

35,000.

Thirty-five thousand.

Yes, actual decisions, "such as what to wear, when to look at your phone, which route to take to work, and where you set down your coffee cup."

Spread out over 16 waking hours, you're making about 2,187 decisions per hour. That’s roughly 36 decisions per minute.

Let's visualize this.

If every decision was a single step, you'd walk nearly 27 km daily. It's about four times as long as The Las Vegas Strip:

​

If every decision was a page in a book, and the average book is around 300 pages, you'd read through about 116 books a day. That's what the average reader will go through in 10 years.

If every decision was a piece of a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, you'd complete 35 puzzles every day:

​

If every decision was one light-year, you'd reach the globular cluster NGC 6380, which lies around 35,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Scorpio:

​

If every decision was one rubber duck, you’d fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool with yellow, every single day:

​

If every decision was a step to climb, you'd hike the longest stairway in the world—The Nielsen Railway in Switzerland—three times. Every day.

​

So, what's my point?

The vast majority of our decisions are subconscious—and not logical, deliberate choices—or we would die of mental exhaustion before 9 AM (if we were to wake up at 8 AM).

And since we find it very hard to explain what our subconscious has decided, we cannot expect our customers to do it for us.

Which is why we must do the emotional labor of filling in the blanks ourselves.