Elizabeth Goodspeed on the Importance of Taste – And How to Acquire It

I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you.

The conversation around taste tends to focus on what it takes to develop it, but not what it takes to use it and unlock its potential, which is confidence .

Having and developing taste is one thing, but remaining connected to our taste is another. In order to take advantage of our taste, we have to be able to access its insights and guidance, which ... See more

taste > skills taste seems more scarce these days, and increasingly differentiating in the age of AI where so much of skills-based productivity is offloaded to compute. makes me think about the development of taste, and how we nurture taste for the next gen of humans.

Like many writers before me, I tend to lean on vague hand-waving when the need to define taste, or rather, good taste, arises. A common trope is to use the phrase US Supreme Court justice Stewart famously gave to describe obscenity, a similarly hard-to-describe bedfellow of taste, in 1964: “I know it when I see it.” In design, good taste can be kno... See more

But it’s important to recognize that the goal of developing one’s own taste is not to ultimately land on what other people think is good. Your taste belongs to you

Stopping to ask yourself, “why do I like this?” can give you answers that unlock even more than you initially thought. By slowly building up a strong sense of personal taste, it creates confidence in that taste.