MAYA

Human decision making is an interesting balancing act between the two extremes of neophilia and neophobia. Neo is a Greek root meaning new, young or recent while philia means the love of and phobia means the fear of. How can we both love and fear new things? Like I said, it’s a delicate balancing act.

Neophilia

We are easily bored and are always seeking the next best thing. We crave excitement and novelty. We want bigger, better, faster, sweeter, more, more, more. Our 24/7, on-demand, always on culture largely satisfies this need with increasingly outrageous stimuli designed to engage and entertain us. Our neophilia is on full display in social media outlets, in movie theaters, in theme parks, on television, and in advertising.

Neophobia

We are also comforted by the familiar. Routines and schedules help us to get everything done. Repetition makes us experts and helps us to develop the muscle memory to excel in sports, classes or our jobs. The status quo is easy and takes a lot less energy than constant innovation. When the familiar is threatened or we find ourselves pushed to accept changes we aren’t ready to deal with, neophobia rears its ugly head and we resist. When we give in to those feelings of fear and cling to what we already know, we lose the flexibility to adapt, the curiosity to learn, the ability to adjust and the opportunity to grow. We fail to appreciate the value of diversity and miss opportunities to understand others better.

MAYA

Product development and marketing professionals understand human psychology really well – it is their job to intuit what we as consumer want before we even know we want it and then to develop it and sell it to us. They are well aware of both our neophilia and our neophobia and work within those boundaries of our fears and our desires using MAYA. MAYA is an acronym which stands for Most Advanced, Yet Acceptable. They know that we want new features and functionality – we crave novelty and innovation; we want to have the best gadget on the block. They also know that if they make the new product too different from anything we have ever seen that we won’t be able to wrap our heads around the idea and will fall into neophobia. Yes, we like the idea of virtual assistants like Alexa, but no, we are not ready to hand over our credit card numbers and allow Alexa to make all of our purchases for us based on algorithms predicting what we might want next. There is a limit to how novel the idea can be before it is too outrageous.

While MAYA is interesting from a sales and marketing perspective, it is also highly applicable on a personal level. You are being asked to make a lot of important decisions during these few years of your life.

Where do you want to go to college? State school or private? Large school or small? Local college or a university in another state?

What do you want to major in? Science, math, engineering? Humanities, languages, history? Carpentry, welding, plumbing? Pre-law, pre-med?

What type of career field do you plan to enter? Architecture? Teaching? Sales? Research?

Are you going to study abroad for a semester? Italy? China? Agentina?

Do you want to lead an organization – sports team, sorority or fraternity, other campus group?

What type of person do you want to be? Kind? Generous? Successful? Authentic? Outgoing?

What are your values and how do you plan to live by them?

Where do you want to live when you graduate? In a city? In a small town? In the US or abroad? Near your family or far away?

Who do you want to be your partner, your friends, your co-workers?

\You have probably already used MAYA to make some of these decisions by using your past as a reference for your future. What have you done already? Where have you excelled? What skills do you have and what have you enjoyed? Have you traveled with your family or with a school group or have you always stuck close to home? Did you have an opportunity to take advanced courses in high school and to explore professional careers or was your high school small enough that you were limited to required courses?

The breadth of your past experiences will determine the scope of what you might consider too different – or in MAYA terms, too advanced - to be acceptable. If only a few students from your high school go on to college each year and they all go to local state schools, attending an Ivy league school might be too far outside of your MAYA tolerance levels to seem feasible even if you are smart enough to succeed there. If your high school regularly sends the majority of its graduates to highly respected schools all over the country, attending Harvard or Yale might not seem far fetched at all. Others have normalized leaving the state and competing at the highest academic level so it doesn’t seem too advanced anymore. If your mother and your uncle and your grandfather and your cousin are all doctors, medical school might seem like a logical next step. If you are a first-generation college student, medical school might feel as far away as the moon.

Your personality type and natural tolerance for change will also impact your MAYA. Some of us are thrill seekers – always ready for the next challenge, the more outrageous it is, the better. These people tend toward the neophilic side of the scale. While others are more cautious by nature. We prefer to take it slow, evaluate our options, dip a toe in the water to check the temperature before we jump in. Neophobia is more of a guiding force for these people.

As you are making important decisions about your future, your schooling, your career, and your friends, consider MAYA. What is the most advanced option you would be willing to consider? How novel is that option – how different from anything you or anyone you know have ever known is it? How far are you willing to push the boundaries of the familiar? How comfortable are you with change? Where are the limits of your neophilia?

Are you allowing neophobia to stop you from pursing your dreams? Is there factual evidence which precludes you from following those dreams or are you being held back by your beliefs, emotions and fears? What are you actually afraid of – the lack of familiarity or the situation itself? How much are you willing to risk to follow your passions? How much fear are you willing to face?