The case for having clear favourites?
Over the past few years, I’ve made a conscious attempt to choose, to rank, and to have unequivocal favourites. This is harder than it sounds, and perhaps sometime unnecessary — but can pay dividends.
Quickly looking up the trusted OED, we get a definition of favourite:
Preferred before all others of the same kind.
From the definition, it seems like a favourites are unequivocal — ranked before all others of the same kind. Real life is a more complicated. Often we have competing favourites. Or equal favourites. Or indeed even contradictory favourites.
It is a wide spectrum.
Favourites
All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others. — Animal Farm (George Orwell)
We might have an favourite colour, sports club, toffee, car model, web browser, song, personality, etc. However, upon close reflection, we rarely have unequivocal favourites. For example, say that orange is my favourite colour. But, blue is also a very very close second. How close? Maybe 100:99.5. Very close. Practically interchangeable.
Deciding on clear favourites is difficult because it forces us to think about criteria and trade-offs in a deeper way.
Unclear favourites
My favourite animal is the koala, but his life would be boring. I would rather be a giraffe so that I could contemplate the beauty of Africa. — Caterina Murino
Since absolute favourites are relatively rare, we usually find ourselves in the world of unclear favourites.
Sporting contests cruelly expose the competing and often contradictory nature of favourites. Let us take the Italian Serie A as an example. My favourite club is Fiorentina. But unfortunately, they are unlikely to threaten for the Scudetto any time soon. It is a great club but I also need to find a favourite amongst those gunning for league honours — otherwise the season has no meaning for me. For me, this is AC Milan, who were the greatest club in the world when I started watching football. So now I have two favourites.
What happens when they play each other? Well it depends on the scenario. If AC Milan can win the league, or indeed, stop my least favourite team (Juventus) from winning the league, by beating Fiorentina, then AC Milan will be supported. Welcome to the murky world of ‘tactical’ favourites.
Sometimes, favourites can also be contradictory. We can like two things even if they are polar opposites of each other — physically, philosophically or psychologically. Our top 10 lists of songs might contain pop remixes and classical music.
Unclear favourites make for some very interesting permutations. They reveal that our preferences are not always mutually exclusive.
Un-favourites
I don’t spend a lot of my time in the locker room. That’s my least favourite place in the world. — Maria Sharapova
Un-favourites are the opposite of clear favourites. These are the most fun to have. I again take sports as an example. Seeing our least favourite teams getting beaten (fairly) is a unique joy. Seeing them getting beaten controversially is schadenfreude of the highest order! But just like clear favourites, least favorites are also part of a continuous spectrum of choices. There can be ambiguity between two things we feel we like least equally.
Un-favourites are about our boundaries, our bottom lines. Often these lines are not as rigid as we think they are.
The case for CLEAR favourites
Over the last few years, I’ve deliberately tried to have clear favourites i.e. rank preferences for products and features — unambiguously.
I’ve found this approach to be quite beneficial.
Having clear favourites simplifies life. I’ve found this to be especially true for lower cost items or trivial choices. Toothbrushes are classic examples. They come in all colours. If we have a favourite color, we can quickly pick that one. If we like two colors equally, it becomes a rather unnecessary mental contest. Same goes for say sports shoes. If we start off with a favourite style or favourite color base/accent, then our choices are immediately cut into a manageable number. For more complex choices, we have to keep an open mind. Otherwise we risk being limited by our favouritism, to our own peril. But equally, complex decisions require decent cognitive load, so that extra thinking is worthwhile.
Secondly, deriving favourites allows me to truly understand what I value — what resonates with me, what criteria is important and also what criteria is not important. Clear favourites are about reductionism — about distilling and discovering the criteria that truly matter to us and influence us.
My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman.- Jimmy Carter
Ultimately, the real value lies in the process of discovering what is — “preferred above all others”. This leads to deeper analysis and every time we discover a clear favourite, we’ve also discovered an aspect of our personality. We may go through the process and discover that we don’t have or indeed, even shouldn't be tied to a favourite. That is equally valuable.
Should we always have clear favourites? Perhaps not always. But in my experience, it is always beneficial to undertake the process of discovering a possible clear favourite.
