Fear of Missing Out
Practical Decision-Making in a World of Overwhelming Choice
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
What are you really missing out on?
You're home on a Friday night, scrolling through Instagram, ready to go to bed.
You see pictures on your timeline of a party you were invited to, but didn't go to. You were confident when you said no, but now you can't stop thinking about it, and you start feeling worse.
You have FOMO, or, Fear of Missing Out.
Coined in a Harvard Business School article, FOMO has become a global term to describe the decimating anxiety when thinking other people are having better, more fulfilling, experiences than you are. It's a natural, biological response, but that doesn't make it feel any better. Amplified by the rise of social media, #FOMO has become a cultural crisis—so what's the cure?
Patrick McGinnis, creator of the term FOMO, has been thinking about it for seventeen years—and he has a solution: decision-making. Learning to weigh the costs and benefits of your choices, prioritizing your decisions, and listening to your gut are central to silencing FOMO and its lesser-known cousin, FOBO: Fear of a Better Option. After all, don't you want to feel comfortable and confident in your decisions?
Written with self-evaluations throughout the book, Fear of Missing Out: Practical Decision Making in a World of Overwhelming Choice helps you ascertain and eliminate the parts of your life that are causing more anxiety than happiness.
So give this a read, and then go to that party, start that new book, create a new goal—or don't. Make that decision, and be confident in it: it's the first of many of its kind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Venture capitalist McGinnis (The 10% Entrepreneur) breaks down the evolutionary responses known as the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and Fear of Better Options (FOBO) in this lucid analysis. FOMO ("Social pressure resulting from the realization that you will miss out on or be excluded from a positive or memorable collective experience") and FOBO ("An anxiety-driven urge to hold out for something better based on the perception that a more favorable alternative or choice might exist") are terms McGinnis coined in articles he wrote while studying at Harvard Business School. These two fears, he argues, have plagued mankind since the beginning of time and have been exacerbated by social media. To overcome both FOMO and FOBO, he writes, one must center personal values and responsibilities and weigh them against outcomes: "When you find the power to choose what you actually want and the courage to miss out on the rest, you are finally liberated from indecision and the compulsion to have it all." To this end, he provides steps for making decisions on social plans, strategies for saying "no" in different situations, and rules for overcoming fear. This is a useful one-stop shop for those looking to take a decisive stand against the fear of what could have been.
