(Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

Maximizers, people who always search for the best in whatever they pursue in life, usually achieve superior outcomes to satisficers — people who are content with moderate achievements. But they aren’t happy people.

“Nice as this sounds, in social psychology parlance, maximizers often wind up being unhappier than satisficers” writes Sarah Estes in Psychology Today. “Maximizers seek out the absolute best, while satisficers accept that which passes a certain satisfaction threshold. Maximizers may have objectively superior outcomes, but they’re so busy obsessing about all the things that they could have had, they tend to be less happy with the outcomes they do get.”

This is evident when it comes to searching for the first job. Maximizers are more likely to spend a longer time searching for a job than satisficers, and earn a higher pay.  A study of the job search of 548 members of the Class of 2002 by Sheena Iyengar, Rachael Wells, and Barry Schwartz confirms that maximizers spend a great deal of time searching for a job, which in the end pays off: Maximizers earned 20 percent more than satisficers.

But a higher pay didn’t make maximizers a happier group than satisficers. In fact, Maximizers were “significantly more likely than satisficers to be unhappy with the offers they accepted.”

Evidently,being a maximizer may help you earn more income, but that income doesn’t buy more happiness, as the maximizer’s likely to agonize over the prospect of a better job offer out there he or she missed.

The problem is that maximizers are worry freaks.“Maximizers want to make the best possible decision—or avoid making a bad decision—but in doing so they spend too much time and, research shows, incur hefty psychological costs as well: regret, self-blame, reduced commitment to any choice they do make (including a partner!), and less well-being overall,“ writes Marina Krakovsky in Psychology Today.

Simply put, what makes mazimizers unhappy isn’t the pursuit of the best outcomes in every decision they make, but the worry about things that are beyond of control.

The solution?  Worry only about the things that are in your control, the things that can be influenced and changed by your actions, not about the things that are beyond your capacity to direct or alter.

As Epictetus put it long time ago: “Remove utterly your desire; for if you desire some one of the things that are not under your control you are bound to be unfortunate. . . . Whoever, therefore, wants to be free, let him neither wish anything, nor avoid anything, that is under the control of others; or else he is necessarily a slave. . . . Never say about anything, ‘I have lost it,’ but only ‘I have given it back. . .’. It is not things themselves that disturb men, but their judgments about these things.”