- “To do something correctly is not necessarily to do it correctly.“ It’s like a blend of skill, experience, standards, personality, and identity. - It's found in fashion, art, social media, technology, companies, and the people we hire. [[Taste is a key differentiator in industries with cheap and easy creation]] - People with good taste may have grown up with nice things, but that's not all it takes to have good taste. - **X-factor**. [[Visakan Veerasamy]] described it as the ability to infuse a product with emotion ([[taste is the beating heart of all creative value – @visakanv]]), and Thi C Nguyen connected this to how the state cannot understand the complexity and variety of taste ([[Transcript - Ezra Klein Interviews C. Thi Nguyen]]). (see also: [[Umami as a quality of experience]]) - **Standards**. Ira Glass noted that everyone who does creative work has good taste but it takes time and lots of work to close the gap between ambition and reality (see [[Ira Glass quote about taste]]) - [[Words are polluted. Plots are polluted]] noted that people wear beliefs like clothes and often mistake opinions, tastes, and philosophies as who they are. ## quotes [Ben Cline on Twitter](https://x.com/yocline/status/1695144192865927300?s=12): > The biggest misconception about hiring great designers is over indexing on their professional work portfolio. And under indexing or ignoring their personal taste and potential. [[Notes on “Taste” — Are.na]]: > Taste has historically been reserved for conversation about things like fashion and art. Now, we look for it in our social media feeds, the technology we use, the company we keep, and the people we hire. > As John Saltivier says in an essay about building a set of stairs, “surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.” > Taste in too many things would be tortuous. ==The things we have taste in often start as a pea under the mattress.== > While taste is often focused on a single thing, it is often formed through the integration of ==diverse, and wide-ranging inputs.== Steve Jobs has said, “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.” > Taste is not the same as correctness, though. To do something correctly is not necessarily to do it tastefully. For most things, correctness is good enough, so we skate by on that as the default. And there are many correct paths to take. You’ll be able to cook a yummy meal, enjoy the movie, build a usable product, don a shirt that fits. But taste gets you to the thing that’s more than just correct. Taste hits different. It intrigues. It compels. It moves. It enchants. It fascinates. It seduces. > Taste requires originality. It invokes an aspirational authenticity. Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves…At this level, good writing is assumed; the goal is to help them acquire the technical means to become defiantly and joyfully themselves.” > It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize  true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul. This is why it is so alluring. > if rich people often have good taste it’s because they grew up around nice things, and many of them acquired an intolerance for not nice things as a result. That’s a good recipe for taste, but it’s not sufficient and it’s definitely not a guarantee. [[Visakan Veerasamy]], [[taste is the beating heart of all creative value – @visakanv]]: > “Taste is the ability to infuse a product with emotion. In a taste-based industry, its products are stripped down to their very core: how it makes its users feel. We see this phenomenon happen in books, music, movies, games and increasingly tech products [[The Taste Gap - Ira Glass on the Secret of Creative Success, Animated in Living Typography]]: > Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? > A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. > And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal. > And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay? [floguo on Twitter](https://twitter.com/floguo/status/1828778651984515136): > on taste & creative direction: > People with taste can cook across disciplines: from techno-creative pursuits to fashion, friendship, gathering, writing, self-conduct, inner awareness, etc. Even if they are not well-versed in a specific discipline, they can learn to appreciate the nuances of craft. To have taste is to exercise restraint. A "yes" is impotent when a "no" is impossible. People without taste cannot discern their own condition. > To me, having taste means to understand one's internal compass and to live accordingly. You cannot have taste if you do not know who you are. This is analogous to creative direction. A good creative director can clearly define and convey a vision without needing to spell everything out. Taking care into what is omitted, they ruthlessly revise until each character is placed with care, a chef applying the finishing touches with tweezer-tip precision. > Curating taste and a sense of craft can be done by adopting the beginner's mindset. Ego is the enemy, but pride our friend. Pride is our sense of dignity, ego forges our ceilings. To take pride in our work is to live fully. We cannot learn without abandon until we shed our protective layers of insecurity. There is something to learn from everyone. The journey is long, but its fruits are sweet. [Danny Trinh on Twitter](https://twitter.com/dtrinh/status/1668650354446139394?s=12): > I frequently quote this bit from [@dhmeyer](https://twitter.com/dhmeyer?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw). The best people I've been lucky to work with have the excellence reflex. If you don't see it in anyone with you work with, you're on the wrong team. > “People duck as a natural reflex when something is hurled at them. Similarly, the excellence reflex is a natural reaction to fix something that isn't right, or to improve something that could be better. The excellence reflex is rooted in instinct and upbringing, and then constantly honed through awareness, caring, and practice. The overarching concern to do the right thing well is something we can't train for. Either it's there or it isn't. So we need to train how to hire for it.“ Connection made in [[Transcript - Ezra Klein Interviews C. Thi Nguyen]] taste isn’t quite legible to the state in the right ways ([[Standardization processes often reduce visibility with harmful effects]]): > If our taste and our values and our interests are varying and wide, and plural and rich, the state can’t see that. The state can’t get a handle on my bizarre taste in the tabletop role-playing games. [[The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety]]: > “I’ve been on the internet for the last 10 years and I don’t know if I like what I like or what an algorithm wants me to like,” Peter wrote. She’d come to see social networks’ algorithmic recommendations as a kind of psychic intrusion, surreptitiously reshaping what she’s shown online and, thus, her understanding of her own inclinations and tastes. Quotes from [[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow - Kindle Notes]]: > Her time with Dov and her years studying games in general had made her critical of everything. She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway. > He was an experienced gamer, and as such, made an excellent level tester and bug spotter. Beyond all that, Marx also had taste and a sense of story. It was Marx who suggested the famous “underworld” sequence in Ichigo (“Ichigo needs to be as low as possible,” he said), and it was Marx who turned them on to Takashi Murakami and Tsuguharu Foujita. It was Marx, with his love of avant-garde instrumental music, who played Brian Eno, John Cage, Terry Riley, Miles Davis, and Philip Glass on his CD player while Sadie and Sam worked. [[Taste for Makers]]: > I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste." [[Words are polluted. Plots are polluted]]: > That is to say: I think people wear beliefs like clothes; they wear what they have grown to consider sensible or attractive; they wear what they feel flatters them; they wear what keeps them dry and warm in inclement winter. They believe their opinions, tastes, philosophies are who they are, but they are mistaken. (Aging is largely learning what one is not, it seems to me). [On Cultivating Taste - by Sherry Ning - Pluripotent](https://www.theplurisociety.com/p/on-cultivating-taste): > The danger of having bad taste is that you become comfortable with distractions and other things you don't really like. Not only does it distort your ability to make wise choices, but it's also how you tell yourself, "I am okay with not being intentional in the way I live." > **Don't forget that we get what we settle for**—much of the discontent in modern people is the result of settling for things that don't make us truly happy without even realizing it. Consider dating, for example—we label certain people as our 'type' when, really, they are just a pattern we've grown comfortable with and are good at looking for. [Visakan Veerasamy on Twitter](https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1440818159598985218): > following your nose and screwing around with frivolous “unimportant” things is how you develop taste, and taste might possibly the most precious force in the human domain. Everything good is made by people with taste. But we discourage its development bc it “seems frivolous” [😈 on X](https://twitter.com/turtlekiosk/status/1701663043103375596?s=12&t=TGBZX3UiCa3dy1kQY-S2HA): > wanna start a new type of discourse around "taste gap" relationships ## See also - [[Enthusiasm exchange trumps matching tastes in relationship compatibility]] - [[Things can be defined by what they are not]] #career #creativity #topic