Many of life’s choices fall into two categories:

■ Option A: Exciting and complex and quick, but the action rarely works.

■ Option B: Boring and simple and slow, but it works nearly all the time.

I have been thinking a lot lately about why we are so intrigued by Option A.

The list is endless. Trying to sell at the top of the stock market or buy at the bottom, day trading, raising venture capital and seven-day diets. If you can find a way to make some things exciting and complex and superfast, you can sell it to people even when the evidence is clear that it works only rarely.

Compare these options with things like benefiting from compound interest slowly over time, buying and holding low-cost diversified investments, building a business using the business’s own profits, eating healthy and exercising. They work — every time. But few people choose them over the exciting option.

There are plenty of reasons we pick Option A over Option B. It’s got me thinking about the quiet power of incremental change. Incremental change is about taking small, gradual steps instead of making big sweeping changes.