Don’t Judge a Book By Its Timestamp

I moved into my first apartment when I was 19 and a sophomore in college. Until then, I had lived with my parents for the first 18 years of my life, then lived on campus in a dorm for a year. I decided to get an apartment with a roommate so I could practice some adulting.

Along with getting my first apartment, I decided I should learn to cook, something I had never done before. I started with simple frozen meals that needed to be defrosted in a skillet.

I didn’t have a skillet.

So I bought the highest recommended one on Amazon within my price range.

When it arrived, the box was heavy… way heavier than I anticipated. Turns out I had bought a Lodge cast iron skillet. I didn’t know what a cast iron skillet was; I thought it was just a really heavy skillet, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would want that.

I decided it sucked. Luckily, I mentioned my plight to a co-worker. He mentioned that he was in the market for a cast iron skillet and offered to buy it from me for exactly what I paid for it. I gladly gave it up and bought the kind of skillet I was initially imagining.

20 years later, I cook a lot more. My cast iron skillet is one of my most-used kitchen essentials.

It wasn’t that the cast iron skillet sucked then and it’s better now. It’s that I wasn’t ready for it.

My kids are pretty adventurous eaters. One of them read somewhere that taste buds change every few months. If they perceive that it’s been a few months since they’ve had a particular food, they’ll try it again even if they hated it before. They don’t accept that a food is bad; they seem to take it more as they didn’t like it before but now they might have new taste buds that react better to it.

If I read a book I don’t like, I don’t assume that the author is a poor writer or that the book itself was somehow inherently bad. I choose to think that it wasn’t the right time for me to read it, which keeps me open to reading it again some time in the future.

Before you write anything off as good or bad, consider the timing.