A strange question to ask someone is "how did you know you like chocolate?"

If you don't like chocolate, then replace it with a food you find delectable, in my case, fried plantain. At what point exactly did I decide fried plantain was incredibly delectable?

Trivial and odd question?- yes. But it finally helped me to express a counter-intuitive idea I had been musing over for some time: 

Figuring out what you like is a luck event. 

Most of your preferences/likes/pleasures have either come to you by chance or some sort of influence. This means in most cases, you're not using a scientific method to filter what you like but most likely using the Bayesian technique (updating your current predispositions based on every new information you get) to determine your preferences.

If we say figuring out what we like is serendipitous, what does this mean in the grand scheme of things? For example: My career, my pleasures, my friendships, and so on.

It means three things:

1. There are a lot of things out there that I possibly like but I do not know about
2. Some of the things I currently like may just be out of convenience and not what I truly like- That is, they are on the low end of the Scale of Likeability
3. I should increase my serendipity to find new interests

If we use career as a proxy, it can become daunting to think about it in this context. You may start to think of questions like:

1. What jobs out there do I like that I don't know about?
2. How do I know I truly like what I'm doing
3. How do I increase my luck [1]?

Using career as a proxy is daunting because it is hard to maneuver your life and career in an experimental way. As a young professional, my current career was a bet made by my past self, on what I thought I would be good at in the future even though I didn't have many cards on the table.

In an ideal world, finding out what you like can be done through trial, error and elimination but in the real world, the conventional way of finding out what you like is a matter of luck. 

Given that luck is not readily abundant, the question becomes, is there another way to maneuver and experiment so you can get closer to your ideal world? 

I think the answer is leverage.

Leverage

Those who have the privilege to figure out their likes are in a position of leverage. 

To illustrate, I’ll use a trivial example-- How to figure out your favourite fruit. To do this, you could go online, find all the fruits available on a grocery website and order them to your house. Once they arrive, you can taste, sort and rank the fruits based on your preference. The main point here is not to show you how to rank fruits but to show that you could do it. The ability to do this is leverage. It is important to note that there are people in this world that cannot do this even though it's trivial to you.

This idea of leverage applies to big ticket interests like career and aspirations. The key is not to constantly figure out what you like but to increase your leverage so you can maneuver easily. 

How to know when you have leverage? I think there are two key components:

• Knowing and;
• Experiencing

Knowing means you know what is out there (or have access to this information) and experience is the affordability to briefly experience what is out there. I think you need both.

Given that we have answered the luck question, the next question would be, how does one acquire leverage? Admittedly, I do not have a complete answer to this which in a way makes this essay feel incomplete.

However, I believe this first part -Figuring out what you like is a luck event- was worth exploring as it helps me determine what to do next. If you have any answers on the how, please feel free to email me.

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[1] A way to increase your luck is via Luck Surface Area

Thanks to Kayanna and Olamide for helping me edit this.