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.
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
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.
Steve Jobs in 2005: "You know we've gotten a lot of people that say our shuffle'... | Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com