taste
musings on taste
sari and
taste
martin luther's wordle starter - by Brandon martin luther's wordle starter
Brandonblgtylr.substack.comI 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.
An entire metric of thought which is both impactful but also ignored
Taste – or lack of it – is the silent metric that permeates absolutely everything we create, and which has a far bigger bearing on success or failure than we’d care to admit.
The ability to intuitively discern the intrinsic harmony within something.
nature is intrinsically harmonious
how can you cultivate taste?
elevate your cultural diet so you can elevate your taste —> genre crossing ability.
View appreciation as a general skill
by learning to appreciate we learn to discern. by discerning we learn to decide. by deciding we learn to strategise.
The problem you solve for customers is increasingly one they can’t even articulate for themselves . The ones that are easy to understand have already been built and funded over the last 20 years. Building something of true excellence will require a hungrier engagement with the world—and that will have to start with developing superior taste.
Evan Armstrong • Want to Build? Technical Excellence Won’t Be Enough.
it’s not enough to have skill.
you need soul, good judgment, a strong why, and a profound understanding of culture.
As AI democratise software creation, a world with a billion developers will not lack for builders as much as it will lack for artisans.
Sarah Drinkwater • Artisans: Taste In Software
We have been co-evolving with ravenous attention predators forever. This is not a fight we can, or should want to, opt out of. We already live in a universe with church, slot machines, and Rhianna. The Sorrows of Young Werther. The Beatles. The bigger and more successful they get, the more boring they become, and the easier they are to ignore.
Frank Lantz • Unpluggers, Deflators etc. pt 3: Why Not Both?
taste is the business end of attention - we will need to learn how to use it to survive. humans are not helpless creatures who must be protected from the grindhouse of optimized infotainment. we are attention warriors.