“A bit of this and a bit of that – a recipe for a full-flavoured life”. We run round with this ‘truism’ in our heads without realising how misleading it can be. I was told that to live life to the full, I had to experience as many things as possible. And with such a huge world containing endless arrays of activities, I could do a different thing every day and still not make much head way in a life time.

You can watch a cow all day and all it will do is eat grass – every single day of its life. Many more examples in nature reveal the same thing. So why is that human beings are supposed to do the exact opposite and vie for a life of variety?

When most people are told to choose things – they tend to go for a variety. That is why supermarkets are stocked with so many varieties of choices. But ultimately, a shopper will narrow their consumption to a small range of items only. There will be many that they try and don’t like.

We all know that when we are young (older ones do it too), we like to ‘play the field’ with the opposite sex. The aim is to get as much variety as possible. Then marriage happens and the field is narrowed down to one.

Lots of restaurants do it with their menus. They think that they must offer variety to get the most business. But if they watch their best customers – they will see that diners tend to eat from a very small range of their favourites. The smarter restaurateurs know this and have a small specialised menu to attract a certain type of clientele.

In business (and in life) the profit is in going deep – not in going wide. Hugh Hefner (Playboy fame) says that he has had a huge variety of women. He can’t say that he has any deep relationships.

If variety is the spice of life, why is there only salt and pepper on the dining table?