Find What You Like by Trying What You Think You Don’t Like
When our parenting editor Megan Walbert wrote a few weeks ago that she was determined to learn to love running , some of the comments on this article (and its sequel ) contradicted the very idea of trying to love what you hate. I’d like to offer an alternative perspective: trying what you expect to hate is a fantastic way to find what you really like.
In fact, this is how I found many of the things I love now. Here’s one: I used to hate coffee, even avoided coffee desserts. But one day I said, “Okay, let me try a mild coffee, and if I can finish a whole cup, maybe I’ll be less of a kid in terms of bitterness.” My intuition was correct: after a week or two I began to tolerate coffee, and soon after that I began to enjoy it. Now I like it. I drink black.
I asked the Lifehacker staff if they could tell and got a solid yes. Here is personal finance writer Mike Winters:
Cooking! When I was twenty I couldn’t fry an egg properly (the heat was too intense for over ten years), but I also knew I had no idea what I was doing, which resulted in negative feedback of frustration that made cooking look like routine work.
When I was in my thirties, I got more serious and used several healing-grade recipes for things like chili peppers or salmon cooked with leeks, but it wasn’t until I got into subscription boxes that cooking became less intimidating. I’m still not cordon blue, but at least I can improvise a decent meal if need be.
As Mike’s story shows, sometimes we don’t like something because we’re not very good at it yet. Get better at the job, and it suddenly becomes more enjoyable.
Here are some more words from Editor-in-Chief Jordan Calhoun, to whom I remembered three things:
I hated exercising in the morning; At first it was very difficult for me. And it would have been easy to quit smoking and just work out in the afternoon, but I’m glad I lasted a little longer. Now I love it, which basically opens up my busy schedule for more flexibility: depending on how busy my week is, I can move the workout to any schedule that suits me, and still have the motivation to do so.
Also reading. Children, especially boys, have a noticeable decline in reading when reading becomes less interesting compared to other activities, and I definitely fell victim to this. I hated reading. Fiction seemed to me too slow compared to cartoons that I could watch, and non-fiction was a school. Obviously, however, reading can be a great pastime if you learn to sit quietly with a book, and I’m glad I did.
In addition, learning to appreciate alternative sports – the “alternative” for me was something other than the two sports I was raised to, namely basketball and football. Other sports seemed boring to me because I didn’t know how to watch them … I didn’t know when to worry, or how the game was going, or if the event was spectacular or ordinary. Learning to appreciate a new game meant that I was bored and stupid at first, but I’m glad I endured it because over time, sports like soccer and volleyball became the ones that I understood better and learned to enjoy watching. Even games like poker or chess ( especially games like poker and chess) seemed completely boring to me when I didn’t know what I was looking at, but overcoming this obstacle turned them into good fun with a set of skills that I admire. … I’m glad I pulled them out and sustained the learning curve, rather than writing them off as too “boring” to take.
Sometimes it’s only after you try something that you understand what it’s like . Is it fair to say that you don’t like chess if you never knew how it works? Can you really say that you don’t like to practice in the morning if you never gave it a chance?
I asked on Twitter too and the trend continued. Sushi, roller coasters, hot yoga, ice swimming, zip lines, reality TV, opera, Brussels sprouts, mezcal and more. Here’s a story from a die-hard fan of K-pop icons BTS :
I’ve always been a bit snobbish about pop music and thought BTS would be new to laugh at. But I was immediately struck by their sincerity and hard work, which reminded me more of opera singers and ballerinas than “pop singers”. After a few music videos and interviews, I walked in.
Reflecting on my own experience, it turns out that I have found almost everything that I love, at the risk of doing what I did not expect to enjoy. This is why I am so open to new experiences: I have succeeded in many of them. As a child, I hated sports and physical education; I now train every day and participate in several strength sports. My mission to teach myself to love coffee was so successful that I did it for other bitter tastes too, and now I am a huge fan of beer, seltzer water and even black licorice, which at first I absolutely hated.
Sometimes hate takes time to turn into love; in other cases it happens instantly. The first time I bent a nail (one of those old strongman tricks), I did it just out of spite. It seemed such a pointless exercise, but I have met several people who are addicted to nail bending. I remember exactly the moment when the switch in my brain flipped: I wrapped a thin steel strip in a cloth and pushed it with all my might. He didn’t bend, and I thought, “Oh, this is not just stupid, it is stupid and impossible.” Suddenly the steel gave in, which was immensely pleasant, and my next thought was: “What else can I bend?”
In truth, you can’t know if you like something until you know why people like it and give yourself a chance to experience it. Sometimes the fun part is not available for beginners – like Lindy Hop, the dance that is the hardest to learn basic movement – so you need to put in the time and energy before figuring out if it’s right for you.
This is easier to understand in some contexts than in others. We all know that you have to taste a food to find out if you like it, and that if you have had a bad experience with, say, spinach, you might still like a spinach dish if cooked differently. We’ve all seen memes about a dad who doesn’t want a dog and then orders a T-shirt with a dog’s face .
So do yourself a favor and try what you’ve always thought you would hate. Find a piece of the experience that people like and give yourself a chance to like it too. You just might fall in love.