I feel like a better way to approach this would be to stand on the shoulders of others and search around for product recommendations. Ie. this from America’s Test Kitchen.
I am now incrementally more powerful at grocery shopping.
I apologize if this ruins any subtlety you were going for, but I’m thinking mostly about how these learnings can be applied more generally.
You kinda did what I think most people would do. The product is in bottles. There’s no obvious way to tell how good the product is. So you use price point as a heuristic, and call it a day. But it turned out that with a little bit of thought, there was a reasonable way of judging the quality of the product.
So maybe the lesson is to give things a little bit of thought before assuming that they’re actually difficult? This can be tricky though. “Operating on automatic” has it’s benefits. If we always “took the wheel” in situations like these it’d be excessive, I suppose.
But I think the balsamic vinegar was a good example of a situation that might on first approximation seem “excessive”[1] to “take the wheel” on, but it turned out to be worth it. And I get the sense that there are a lot of similar situations where most people could benefit by “taking the wheel”.
I remember early in our relationship, one of the first times that I went grocery shopping with my girlfriend we had an argument about this. I was “taking the wheel” and approaching everything pretty strategically. She didn’t want to think so hard.
your points about taking the time to think through problems and how you can do this across many contexts is definitely what i was going for subtextually. so, thanks for ruining all of my delicate subtlety, adam :p
standing on others’ shoulders is definitely a reasonable play as well, although this is not something that works great for me as a Canadian—international shipping is expensive and domestic supply of any recommended product isn’t guaranteed.
I feel like a better way to approach this would be to stand on the shoulders of others and search around for product recommendations. Ie. this from America’s Test Kitchen.
I apologize if this ruins any subtlety you were going for, but I’m thinking mostly about how these learnings can be applied more generally.
You kinda did what I think most people would do. The product is in bottles. There’s no obvious way to tell how good the product is. So you use price point as a heuristic, and call it a day. But it turned out that with a little bit of thought, there was a reasonable way of judging the quality of the product.
So maybe the lesson is to give things a little bit of thought before assuming that they’re actually difficult? This can be tricky though. “Operating on automatic” has it’s benefits. If we always “took the wheel” in situations like these it’d be excessive, I suppose.
But I think the balsamic vinegar was a good example of a situation that might on first approximation seem “excessive”[1] to “take the wheel” on, but it turned out to be worth it. And I get the sense that there are a lot of similar situations where most people could benefit by “taking the wheel”.
I remember early in our relationship, one of the first times that I went grocery shopping with my girlfriend we had an argument about this. I was “taking the wheel” and approaching everything pretty strategically. She didn’t want to think so hard.
your points about taking the time to think through problems and how you can do this across many contexts is definitely what i was going for subtextually. so, thanks for ruining all of my delicate subtlety, adam :p
standing on others’ shoulders is definitely a reasonable play as well, although this is not something that works great for me as a Canadian—international shipping is expensive and domestic supply of any recommended product isn’t guaranteed.