There isn’t room for everything to be amazing. You wouldn’t want it to be! No matter what experience you’re seeking in the moment, there are multiple versions of it to pursue. Want to watch a movie? Thousands to choose from. Hungry? So many ways to satisfy!
If everything is a “Ten Out of Ten” then there’s no room for the gentle gradient of momentary preferences. And, importantly, that means that less-than-perfect things have plenty of utility.
We’re bad, as humans, at stating that. If we rate something a 7.2/10, that often sounds like we’re insulting it – especially to someone who rates it higher or (gasp) is responsible for creating it. If you write a book and it gets 4.5 stars out of five, your first thought might be “why not 5?”
But faint praise isn’t damning! We don’t want a binary meter for our likes and dislikes, where everything is either perfectly amazing or horrible to the point of disgust, with nothing in between.
Get comfortable knowing what your own personal scale of preferences means, and being confident in your evaluations of things. Let them have their place, and engage with them in their seasons.
This might not be the best advice you’ll ever get… but that’s okay. It has its place.
The Opportunity Machine 