taste
musings on taste
sari and
taste
I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components:
Agency: i.e. some combination of the initiative/proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentlessness and resourcefulness to make sure you’ll succeed.
Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try. Taste is important both “in the large” (picking important problems) and “in the small” (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); I usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former.
“Rather than understanding taste as the particular way a person does a thing, I will argue that taste is a measurement of how well a person is able to see and act within a problem space. That it is the ability to skip ahead over previously assimilated decisions to get to the heart of a matter. And that the process of doing this over and over within a domain turns the many small insights made into a muscle memory of shortcuts that are stored as aesthetic feelings, away from the cognitive expense of language and reason. Much more than just a style of doing, good taste is a measure of a person's intuitive understanding of a problem space.”
taste can be a practice—a result, even, of living authentically.
Haley Nahman • #176: Accounting for taste
It’s easier to recognize beauty than it is to create it. You’re good enough to know that what you’re doing isn’t good, but not good enough to produce something great. When you find yourself in this frustrating limbo, the challenge is to never forget what got you there in the first place. Remember that thing that got you into the game.
Your love.... See more
Your love.... See more
James Clear • Ira Glass and What Every Successful Person Knows, but Never Says
As technology advances, software will increasingly be chosen not just for how well it addresses its use case, but how it conveys its personality, similar to how we choose our clothes. We’re already beginning to see this shift. In highly individualized spheres like note-taking tools and consumer crypto, software is often chosen based on identity.... See more
Andreessen Horowitz (AZ) • Why We Crave Software With Style Over "Branding"
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