On Taste

Taste gets a bad reputation because it's easily confused with snobbery. Someone says they have taste and it sounds like they're saying they're better than you. But taste, in the sense I mean it, has nothing to do with superiority. It's closer to attention.

Taste is the ability to notice. To walk into a room and feel that something is off before you can name it. To read a sentence and know it could be tighter. To hear an argument and sense the gap between what's being said and what's being meant.

Taste is learned, not inherited

Nobody is born with good taste. It's built slowly, through enormous amounts of exposure and a willingness to sit with your own reactions. You have to look at enough things to develop a sense of what works. You have to be wrong enough times to learn why you were wrong.

This is why taste often correlates with obsession. People who care deeply about a domain—design, writing, music, food, software—tend to develop finer discrimination within it. Not because they're naturally gifted, but because they've spent more time paying attention.

The only way to develop taste is to consume a tremendous amount of work and then think carefully about what you consumed.

The gap

There's a famous idea, often attributed to Ira Glass, about the gap between your taste and your ability. When you're starting out, your taste exceeds your skill. You can see what good looks like, but you can't produce it yet. This gap is painful, and it kills a lot of creative ambitions.

But the gap is also useful. It's a compass. If you can feel that something isn't right, you have the information you need to improve. The people who never develop are the ones who can't feel the gap at all—who look at their work and see no distance between it and the work they admire.

Taste as a practice

I've come to think of taste less as a trait and more as a practice. It's the ongoing work of refining your ability to notice—to distinguish the merely adequate from the genuinely good, the fashionable from the lasting, the clever from the true.

It requires a certain kind of honesty. You have to be willing to admit when something you like isn't actually good, and when something you dislike actually is. You have to separate your preferences from your judgment, which is harder than it sounds.

The reward is a kind of quiet confidence in your own perception. Not certainty—taste is always evolving—but a growing trust in your ability to see clearly. And once you can see clearly in one domain, you start seeing more clearly in others.

It turns out that paying close attention is a transferable skill.