Here’s what I mean.

A century ago, America didn’t have much of a weight loss industry. Why?  Lack of demand. Back then, calories were generally scarce and expensive. As a result, few people had the luxury to overindulge — which meant that waistlines didn’t expand and the Dieting Industrial Complex couldn’t exist.

But then, over the next few decades, a funny thing happened: The economics flipped. Calories became abundant and cheap. In this new environment, people, driven by genes programmed to accumulate those calories, did overindulge — which delivered lots of new customers to a once-tiny industry and presented our society with clutch of unexpected problems (obesity, diabetes, etc.)

Personal productivity has followed the same path.

A century ago, middle class Americans didn’t have many options or much information. That enabled a simpler, though not necessarily better, life. So notwithstanding a few Ben Franklins and Napoleon Hills, we didn’t need a ginormous industry devoted to helping us sort through our choices and refine our priorities.

But then, once again, things flipped. We now inhabit an environment (at least in much of the developed world) of abundant options and boundless, inexpensive information. That has triggered our dopamine-seeking instincts to pile too much onto our professional plates — which in turn has produced an entire infrastructure to help us avoid gorging ourselves.

The result is that the question that has bedeviled dieters now bedevils many of us in the option-rich, information-saturated Conceptual Age: How do we say “No?”

But as the wise Elizabeth Gilbert points out in the short video clip below, it’s not just saying no in general or declining what we don’t find interesting. It’s saying no to things we actually want to do.

Here the dieting analogy clarifies the problem. It’s easy for most of us to say no to a kelp and wheat germ smoothie. But saying no to the andouille cheese fries at Louisiana Kitchen? That’s tougher.

And so the more I think about it, the more I realize that one of our big challenges (again, for those of us who lucked out, live in the developed world, and earn our living through something besides grinding physical labor) is this: How do we say no to things we want to do?

I don’t have a good answer — but I have explored a few options:

• I’m a devotee of Getting Things Done and that’s helped a lot.
• I believe in Tom Peters’s idea of creating a “To-Don’t” list.
• Some folks use the equivalent of barricading the refrigerator with software like Freedom.

But I wonder if we could go further and help each other out — much as peer groups assist dieters. For instance, when someone who seems pretty interesting asks to meet for coffee or to talk on the phone for “only fifteen minutes,” maybe the options aren’t only to say Yes and feel like you’ve compromised your priorities — or No and feel guilty.

Instead, maybe there’s something we could say that indicates that their request falls into the “I’d love to, but my health depends on saying no to things I want to do” category. Maybe a phrase (“cheese fries”)? A new coinage (“R-No” — for “reluctant no”)? A link to this blog post?

I wouldn’t want to return to a world of limited options and pricey information any more than I’d like to return to a world of scarce, expensive calories. But I think we all need a little help dealing with our new circumstances and saying no to things that we want to do.

If you’ve got ideas on how to do that, leave them in the Comments section and I’ll repost the best advice.

In a moment of Excel fervor, I took data from the College Board’s 2011 Total Group Profile Report of college-bound high school seniors and plotted the mean combined (Reading, Math, and Writing) SAT scores for various income cohorts.

Take a look at the chart below. On the horizontal axis is family income. On the vertical axis is the combined average SAT score for students from families in each group. The general story is pretty simple: The higher the parents’ income, the higher their kids’ SAT scores.

(And this, sadly, is but one example. For a fuller account of the link between income and education, see the work of Duke’s Helen Ladd.)

UPDATE (2/21, 5:15PM EST):  

Thanks for the mega-response to this post. A few things:

1. Let’s all say it together: “Correlation is not necessarily causation.” Just ask XKCD.

2. Several readers have suggested that the real driver here is the parents’ education level rather than their income. Maybe. But without acquiring the underlying data and subjecting it to a more sophisticated analysis, we can’t say for sure. One thing we do know, from Table 11 of the report, is that among households where at least one parent has a graduate degree, the average combined score is 1687 — which is higher than for most income levels but lower than the average score for the highest income households. What’s more, there are three times as many households with graduate degrees as there are households with incomes over $200K, so something else might be afoot.

3. My hypothesis about that something — a guess rather than an assertion — is that the households in the top tier often have two parents with graduate degrees. That is, they’re rich and they’re well-educated and that’s a hard combo to beat. If that turns out to be true, it suggests that one of the most influential, but least remarked upon, social forces in America is assortative mating by education level.

For those new to the issue, or coming to the Pink Blog from Tweets about the article, let me summarize my views as succinctly as I can:

1. Some rewards backfire. Fifty years of social science tells us that “if-then” rewards – that is, “If you do this, then you get that” – are great for simple, routine tasks and not so great for complicated, creative tasks. Since teaching is creative and complex rather than simple and algorithmic, tying teacher pay to student performance (especially on standardized tests) flies in the face of the broad evidence.

2. Contingent pay for teachers just isn’t effective. What’s more, the specific evidence – a cluster of recent studies that have examined “if-then” pay schemes in schools – has shown them to be failures. See, for instance, this piece of research by Vanderbilt University or this one by Harvard’s Roland Fryer or this study by Rand that prompted the New York City public schools to abandon its pay-for-performance plan.

3. Money is still important. The fact that “if-then” motivators often go awry doesn’t mean that rewards in general or money in particular are bad. Not at all. The research shows that money matters. It just matters in a slightly different way than we suspect. Paying people unfairly — say, when Jane makes less than June for the same work — is extremely demotivating. And, of course, low salaries can deter some people from pursuing certain professions. Therefore, the best use of money as a motivator, at least for complex work, is to compensate people fairly and to try to take the issue of money off the table.  That means paying healthy base salaries – and in the private sector, offering some non-gameable variable pay such as profit-sharing.

4. There’s a simpler solution. My own solution for the teacher pay issue, which I’ve voiced many times both in writing and in speeches, is to strike a bargain: Raise the base pay of teachers – and make it easier to get rid of underperforming teachers. Not only is this approach more consistent with the evidence, it’s easier to implement and doesn’t require a new bureaucracy to administer. (To her credit, Michelle Rhee launched some efforts to move in this direction.)

5. We’ve got the wrong diagnosis. The notion that the central problem in American education is lack of teacher motivation is ludicrous. The vast majority of teachers in this country are some of the most hard-working, dedicated people you’ll ever meet – folks who work their butts off in difficult conditions for little recognition. Pay for performance is a weak prescription in part because it’s based on a faulty diagnosis.

6. What really ails us. The real problems, at least in my opinion, are twofold. First, the American education system itself, which is based on 19th century principles and structures, is woefully antiquated. Second, we’re ignoring the issue of poverty and the overwhelming evidence that, absent comprehensive and expensive interventions, socioeconomic status is what drives much of educational attainment and performance. (This is one thing I actually liked about No Child Left Behind. It held someone’s feet to the fire for schools that were criminally negligent in serving low-income kids.)

7. Teaching isn’t investment banking. I find it peculiar that we single out teachers for “if-then” pay when we wouldn’t consider it for other public servants. Should we pay police officers based on how many tickets they write or whether the crime rate in their district drops? How about compensating soldiers based on whether our borders have been attacked or how many of their colleagues have been injured or killed? Would legislators, who are behind much of the bonuses-for-test-scores push, ever agree to hinge their own pay on whether budget deficits rose or fell?

8. Turn down the heat, turn up the light. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the people on both sides of this issue are men and women with good intentions. Nearly everyone I’ve encountered is trying to do the right thing. Reasonable people can disagree about weighty matters. And most people are reasonable. The trouble is that much of our education policy — from how we finance it down to how we schedule buses — seems designed more for the convenience of adults than for the education of children. If we reckon with that unpleasant truth and have an honest conversation that places our kids at the center of our efforts, we can make a lot of progress.

Stuart Ciske sends this example, which he saw at a Burger King in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Okay, maybe this time I won’t have it my way.

Meanwhile, Jami Goldberg visited a Fuddruckers restaurant in Greensboro, North Carolina and spotted this — a nice touch for all those little, er, fuddruckers.

Fishman learned that we’ve been living through what he calls “the golden age of water” — when, at least in the developed world, water has been unlimited, safe, and free. But that era is ending, he says. And throughout the world, we’ll need new ways to source water, to price it properly, and use it less wastefully.

His book, The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, comes out in paperback today. (Buy it at Amazon, BN.com, or IndieBound). So I asked the man whom many call “Fish” to answer a few questions for PinkBlog readers.

Here’s Fish . . . on water:

Bottled water seems to be the water issue people love to debate. You’ve been to Fiji, to San Pellegrino, to Poland Spring. So school us: Bottled water, okay or not?

If you pour a glass of Pellegrino from its beautiful green-glass bottle, two things are amazing: The water has traveled from the Italian Alps, across the Atlantic, to your café table. And the bottle it’s shipped in weighs more than the water. If you buy a half-liter of Poland Spring at 7-Eleven for $1.29, you get four good swallows of water. You can then refill the empty bottle from your kitchen tap every day for 3,000 days — every day for 8 years and 3 months, long enough to go to college and medical school — before the tap water costs $1.29.

Bottled water is silly. Except after a natural disaster, no one needs a bottle of Evian or Fiji Water. It’s an indulgence. But lots of things we enjoy are indulgences — Oreo cookies, French Merlot, Colombian coffee, “The Good Wife” on your iPad.

In the U.S., we spend $21 billion a year on bottled water. We spend $29 billion a year maintaining our entire water infrastructure — pipes, pumps, treatment plants. And bottled water can’t rescue us in a crisis. When your house is on fire, you can’t call Dasani.

So enjoy bottled water, if that’s how you want to spend your money. But don’t grump when the water bill goes up. That system needs attention and modernization, and compared to a bottle of Evian, it’s a bargain.

A related question: You say in the book that water — the non-bottled kind — is too cheap and that its low cost hurts us. How can inexpensive water possibly be bad?

In the U.S., the average home water bill is $1 a day — $34 a month. In most of the country — and most of the developed world — that $34 doesn’t even cover the cost of delivering the water, let alone maintaining and modernizing the system.

In the developing world, the poorest people pay an almost unimaginable price for water — women and girls have to walk to fetch it, often sacrificing all other activity. No schooling for the girls, no real jobs for the women. If they can walk to fetch that water, why can’t a pipe be laid to bring it to them?

We’ve grown up expecting water to be cheap. Yet both cable TV bills and cell phone bills are typically twice what water bills are. A resource that is as cheap as water ends up used badly — misallocated, wasted, taken for granted, poorly taken care of.

If we all paid a little more for water, two things would happen: We’d all use it more smartly; and there would be enough money to keep the water system healthy, sustainable, and smart.

So if PinkBlog readers could take one action to move in that direction — to keep the water system, healthy, sustainable, and smart — what would it be?

Start simply. Dig out a couple recent water bills, and figure out how much water you are using each month and each day. When I started writing The Big Thirst, the Fishman family was using 350 gallons of water a day for four people. When I finished, we were using 250 gallons a day for four people — way under the US average of 100 gallons per person.

So figure out how much water you’re using, and then get everyone together over dinner and see if you can cut your use just 10 percent — shower instead of taking a bath; water the lawn more carefully; don’t flush the toilet when you pee; don’t turn the faucet on full force if you’re just rinsing dishes, washing vegetables, or washing your hands, times when volume doesn’t matter. You’ll be amazed how very small changes add up.

And one more thing: Turn off the lights, the TV, the computer monitor. Making electricity uses more water than anything in the US. When you turn off the lights, you’re saving as much water as when you turn off the faucet.

She writes:

“I’d just finished your book, Drive, when I was approached out of the blue about taking on a new and exciting job working with a cutting edge athletic performance and rehabilitation centre.

“The role entails strategic thinking, visioning, marketing, promoting, branding, building a sense of community within the training facility and ‘managing’ a team of health care providers and trainers.

“They have in the past had two horrible managers and the team is really quite demoralized. . . . But I am looking forward to taking on this role and helping the team develop their sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose.

“The owner is calling the position the Clinic and Gym Manager. Blah!!! I’m not certain that term will endear me too much to my new team.

“Any suggestions around alternative titles?”

So, folks, what do you recommend for Kathryn’s job title?

Put your suggestions in the Comments section. Then — seriously — Kathryn will choose the one she likes best.

Our guest will be Gary Hamel. He’s the originator (with CK Prahalad) of the idea of core competencies, a visiting professor at the London Business School, the most reprinted writer in the history of the Harvard Business Review, founder of the Management Innovation eXchange, and pioneer in the quest for “moonshots for management.” He’s also the author of What Matters Now, a terrific book that came out last week. (Buy it on IndieBound, BN.com, or Amazon.)

To listen in and ask Gary a question, just call (703) 344-2171 at the appointed hour and used this passcode: 203373.

The program is free of charge and free of advertising. For more information — including previous guests, audio downloads, and listening to it on iTunes — just visit the Office Hours page.

Less well known is that the funny man (if you haven’t seen this bit, you need to) used emotionally intelligent signage to discourage fans from ripping off his intellectual property and distributing it for free.

It seems to have worked.

(HT: The great Kevin Kelly, who pointed this out to me.)

Not usually. But R. Luke Dubois is doing his best. As part of the “Mulitplicity” exhibit now showing at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which I had a chance to see last weekend, Dubois reconfigured all the State of the Union addresses in an interesting way.

In a series of prints called “Hindsight is always 20/20,” he’s taken the words of each speech, noted their frequency, and rendered them as a Snellen eye exam chart – with a President’s most-used words in large type near the top and his less-used words in progressively smaller type toward the bottom.

It’s a mashup – one part word cloud, another part optometry. And it works. You get a good sense of how much the times dictate the words. It also offers a sly commentary on each President’s – wait for it – vision.

Check out two samples (Theodore Roosevelt and Gerald Ford) below and more pieces here.

The madness begins this Friday, January 27, at 11am, EST, when our guest will be Susan Cain, author of the hot new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. (That’s her on the right.)

For those of you who’ve missed the biggest cultural phenomenon since Cop Rock, Office Hours is our radio-ish program, now available around the world on iTunes, in which I and a special guest open up the phone lines for an hour to take your questions about work, life, business, education, and anything that’s on your mind. Think of it like this: It’s Car Talk . . . for the human engine.

You can listen in live, and ask a question, by calling (703) 344-2171 at the appointed day and time — and entering this passcode: 203373.

Don’t forget: Sign up on the Office Hours web page to be reminded of this and future episodes. We’ve got some amazing guests over the next few months:

February
Gary Hamel, one of the world most influential management thinkers and author of What Matters Now. (Feb 6 at 2pm, EST)

March
Harvey Mackay, the sales and networking legend and author of The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World. (March 8 at 1pm, EST)

April
Jonah Lehrer, the prolific Wired and New Yorker contributor and author of Imagine, a cool new book about the science of creativity. (April 6 at 1pm, EDT)

May
Tom Peters, the man the LA Times called “the father of the post-modern corporation” and the recent purveyor of the mother of all presentations. (May 18 at 2pm, EDT)

Remember:

• Join us on January 27 to talk introversion with Susan Cain.
• Sign up here to be notified of future episodes.
• Listen to previous shows on iTunes.