Your taste in music, books and clothes gets sharper every time you choose something without checking what’s popular first.

Taste is trained rather than given, and the training happens in the moment before you check what anybody else thinks. Every unassisted choice sharpens it slightly, because you have to consult yourself to make one. Every assisted choice costs you a little, since you learn what is approved of rather than what you like.

Make one choice blind this week, reviews closed and counts unseen. Pick the album by the cover, the book by the first page, the shirt because of the colour. You will be wrong sometimes, and being wrong on your own is how the instrument gets calibrated.