Choose for the experience you want

Before comparing two things you could use, describe what you want to do with one of them. Playing familiar songs after dinner, exploring a new sound and enjoying a beautiful instrument are different purposes. One guitar need not win them all.

The Camaro in the opening of Infinite Upside gives personal enjoyment a place apart from the expanding choice of cars around it. Vijay Sheth still wants that particular car. The build is deliberately excessive; the passage offers no lesson about always preferring the inexpensive or modest option. Its value comes from his relationship with it.

Two instruments ready to play

Consider an invented musician, Jules. He has an acoustic guitar he knows well. A friend lends him an electric guitar and amplifier for a month. Both instruments are ready to use at home. No purchase is being considered in this example.

Jules enjoys singing familiar songs with friends after dinner. With the acoustic guitar, he likes the feel of playing and the way it accompanies their voices. He can pick it up and begin. Those are features of the experience he already enjoys, rather than reasons somebody else should prefer the same instrument.

The borrowed guitar has a striking finish and a range of amplified sounds Jules has wanted to try. His friends admire it. He enjoys showing it to them, and he enjoys some of the sounds he can make with it.

For the evening of familiar songs, though, he still prefers the acoustic guitar. The arrival of another desirable instrument has not supplied a reason to change that choice. He can admire the borrowed one without assigning it every occasion.

Now change what Jules wants from the evening. He is working on an amplified piece, and the particular sounds of the electric guitar are part of the idea. In that session, the borrowed instrument gives him something he wants to explore. Choosing it serves the activity, rather than merely replacing the less impressive object.

Keep the purpose with the comparison

The choice becomes confused if Jules begins with an overall ranking and then tries to make every use fit the winner. The qualities that matter to one evening may matter much less to another. A feature can be a real improvement without making the whole experience better for every purpose.

Ask what the available choice changes. Does it let you do something you already wanted to do? Does it introduce a new activity you want to try? Or do you mainly enjoy having it and sharing it with people who appreciate it? Those answers can all matter. Keeping them distinct makes the preference easier to understand.

The same distinction stops a personal favorite from becoming a rule against change. Suppose Jules finds that he keeps returning to the electric guitar, and enjoys making music with it more than he expected. The old instrument's history does not oblige him to keep preferring it. An earlier attachment and a present preference can point in different directions.

Notice the pleasure that is actually there

In the book, access to more cars changed Sheth's enjoyment of choosing one. The Camaro remains important because it still gives him pleasure after the surrounding circumstances have changed.

A reader can return to an available interest without requiring it to feel exactly as it once did. The activity may have become less interesting. A new aspect may have become more appealing. Or a familiar thing may still be precisely what they want. Begin with what the actual occasion is like, rather than the enjoyment you think you ought to report.

Jules could ask what he liked about the evening after playing. The answer might concern a sound, a song he finished, his friends' company or simply the feel of the instrument. It need not establish which guitar is universally better. It can tell him what he wants to repeat.

The closing of the book gives ordinary enjoyment a similar independence. Something can be worth doing without demonstrating that ambition is over or earning its place through another achievement. Enough without stopping follows that question into the day with family.

Choose one occasion

Take two options already available to you and one occasion on which you might use them. Describe what you want from that occasion before deciding which is better. Include any particular pleasure the object itself gives you; it does not have to be reduced to a function.

Then make the comparison specific. Which option supports that experience? What would you gain or give up by choosing the other? If you can try both without creating another commitment, let what happens inform the next choice.