taste
sari and
taste
sari and
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.
How to define what makes it so — think about quality in Zen and the art of motor cycle maintenance — you know it when it’s there.


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.