Things I hated at first but now like and also things you should just try

I wanted to write a “List of things you should try”. But then I realized this is bad advice. Some things reveal their value instantly; others need weeks of commitment or iteration before you know if they work for you. So instead, here’s a taxonomy based on how quickly you can actually judge whether something is worth it.

1. Things you should try once; and then you know whether you like them or not.

2. Things that take time to pay dividends and you can’t just quickly try; you have to commit, and maybe it will not work for you even if it works for some people.

Things you should definitely just try

For all of these items, it’s cheap to try them once or for a short time, and you immediately get a sense of whether you like it or not.

1. Big timer on your desk

2. Wearing a hat

3. Wearing sunglasses

4. Basically any piece of clothing. The fraction of times I throw out a piece of clothing because I stopped liking it after I wore it 2-3 times is close to zero.

5. Coffee

6. No coffee for a week

7. Any book. I often know whether the author is telling things in a way that resonates with how I learned things in the first few chapters right away.

8. Earplugs

9. Working with noise-cancelling headphones

10. Working in a particular café

11. Watermelon

12. Any ice cream flavor. Trying each once as an adult is a good idea to slightly improve your ice cream enjoyment throughout life.

13. Asking for real feedback on your writing

14. Singing coaching

15. English coaching (if not native speaker)

16. Speech coaching

17. Gym coaching (if already going to the gym)

18. Climbing gym

19. Standing desk

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Every single thing in this list I disliked at first but realized it’s not that bad

Most things on this list are about acquired tastes or skills that take time to develop. So, any thing on this list might actually work for you; or it might not. But very likely you won’t know from trying it for one day. Other people could add different things to this list; there are many many things I just gave up because I didn’t like them.

1. Lifting heavy weights. Most people who start lifting stop lifting because it is painful and doesn’t work for them in the first week of trying. This is just not how it works. You have to commit to go for at least a month or two before you start showing any returns.

2. Nasal spray (corticosteroids). A very common mistake people make when trying to get rid of their stuffy nose is trying to use nasal sprays and expecting them to work right away. This is not how it works; you need to use them consistently for a couple of weeks before you see any results.

3. Meal replacements. Saturo grew on me. The body does not immediately recognize valid combinations of nutrients which are off-distribution from the flavor, smell, and consistency of what the nutrients usually have in human diets.

4. Cold showers

5. Creatine

6. Journaling

7. Sleep masks. Figuring out whether this works involves tracking whether you feel more tired or less tired over a time period. On the first try you can check if a mask is comfortable, but you can’t check whether it works. Sleep interventions are affecting a variable with somewhat high variance and you need to try how a thing works over a couple days at least.

8. Any diet at all

9. Playing an instrument

10. Spaced repetition

11. Learning / studying in general

12. Dating apps

13. Ergonomic keyboards

14. Keyboard layouts

15. New LLM releases. No LLM is better than all prior LLMs at everything; need to adapt and learn how to use any new model.

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A framework for thinking about trying things over time

Various items and activities have different distributions of how much information about the value you get from trying it over time. The toy plot below shows how I imagine it works. The X-axis has time (logarithmic scale), and the Y-axis shows the fraction of information you’ve gathered about whether it works for you.

For “try once” things (green), you get most of the information very quickly. For “takes time” things (red), you need more time to get a clear picture. Do not mistake things in one category for the other!