Quiet Habits

For most of my teen and adult life, I've been almost obsessed with finding the “best” of anything. The best laptop, the best smartphone, the best camera, pen, notebook, blogging site, app, and on and on. It felt like a mission and my life wouldn't be complete until I accomplished it. And I'm not the only one. If you think of a product, app, or service that you've needed recently, do a quick search online for “best [name of thing here]“. There are thousands upon thousands of search results. We've been trained in this age of rapidly improving technology and an abundance of choice to seek out the best of the best, the most highly rated, the 5-star product. Recently, though, I've realized that the best thing isn't always the right thing. And because what's “best” is so subjective, the best thing might end up being the wrong thing.

In some cases the best thing is the right thing. But not always. If the best thing were always the right thing, why are there so many brands, businesses, and apps and services that all advertise similar things but all claim to be the best in some way? Why is there so much variety in the market? Because there is no one best or right thing for any one person or situation.

The right car for one person might be an old beat-up sedan while for another it's a pickup truck and for another it's a minivan. Even within these categories, there are other needs that define what's right for one person or another. One family might decide that a newer minivan is right for them because of certain features. Another family might decide that an older minivan is the right choice for them because of price and availability. You could argue that the newer minivan is the “best” minivan because it has lower miles, a better warranty, and more features. But that's simply one angle, one side of the story. You could also argue that the older minivan is better because it will depreciate less, cost less to purchase and insure, and any recalls or manufacturer issues may have been fixed already.

This is precisely why there are so many millions of articles claiming to have the top 10 best of this product or the top 5 best of that service or why restaurants claim to have the best dish this side of the Mississippi. And some of those claims may be right. Let's use cameras as another example, as there is much debate online about what the best camera is for any given task or situation. And there are many articles written about which camera is the best for filming, vlogging, or landscape photography, or portraits, etc.

If you were to take a point and shoot camera purchased from a big box store and compare the images against a high-end DSLR camera with a professional-level lens, there's no way the point and shoot camera would stand a chance in image quality. Does that mean the DSLR camera is the right camera for everybody? Absolutely not! Go to any major event (graduation, birthday parties, etc.) and the amount of people using a DSLR camera kit on Auto mode will show this to be true. These people have simply purchased the “best” camera only to waste thousands of dollars of imaging potential on a job that is probably better suited for a smartphone camera.

There are a few lessons I've learned over the years of searching for the best thingamajig.

1. If you don't need it in the first place, it doesn't matter how great it is.
2. If you don't know how to use it and don't already have plans to learn, you'll never use all of its “best” features.
3. Always consider personal need, skill level, taste, budget, and any other personal considerations before you simply pursue the “best” of something.

Let me explain number 3 a bit further. Going back to my camera example, the “best” camera for filming probably costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and is only available to huge studio productions. Would it make the home videos of my daughter singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star any cuter? Definitely not! And on top of that, it's tremendously outside any budget I could dream of, I'd have no idea how to use it, and no reason to even use it when my smartphone does a fine job of capturing the moment.

Another great example is food. If a restaurant claims to have the best cherry pie in the state, no amount of “best-ness” is going to make me like that cherry pie. There's nothing wrong with the cherry pie except the fact that I simply don't like cherry pie.

All of this has brought me to my realization that I no longer want the “best” thing for the job. I want the “right” thing for a given job.

I learned this with my blog publishing tool. Most mainstream things you read online about blogging tell you to use Wordpress as your blogging platform. A huge percentage of sites and blogs on the Internet run on Wordpress. This is because Wordpress is a free, powerful tool with lots of customization options. However, after years of using it for this blog and other projects, I realized that although many claimed it to be the “best” platform for blogging, it wasn't right for me. So I searched. I'll admit, I started with “best blogging platforms” and went from there. But after a while, I started thinking about what was right for me and my situation and my needs. What did I really need out of a blogging platform? What were my requirements? And instead of listening to all the “experts” spouting off their list of the top 5 best blogging sites, I conducted a search for all the sites I could use. Then I meticulously compared features and tested platforms until I found the one that was right for me. This is where you're reading this blog right now, a publishing tool called write.as. I'm not going to claim that it's the best platform for blogging, but for the simplicity and ease of use that I was looking for, it's definitely the right fit for me.

And the same goes for many things in my life now. I wear Lem's Primal 2 shoes because after years of looking for the “best” shoe, I finally found the right shoe. They fit so snug on my feet and are a great casual wear almost everywhere shoe. They're right for me right now. I use notion.so to organize a lot of my notes and lists not because it's the best tool out there for doing such things, but because it's the tool that finally fit my style of note-taking, organization, and productivity.

Yes, there are always things that work or look or taste better than others in most cases for most people, but remember the three lessons when considering the next right thing:

1. If you don't need it in the first place, it doesn't matter how great it is.
2. If you don't know how to use it and don't already have plans to learn, you'll never use all of its “best” features.
3. Always consider personal need, skill level, taste, budget, and any other personal considerations before you simply pursue the “best” of something.