taste

I see three distinct drivers of taste: Inputs, Filters, and Discernment.

• INPUTS are the experiences, knowledge and data you seek. Your brain is a system that absorbs whatever is around it, and then mashes it together alongside a lot of emotionally-driven randomness that results in all sorts of ideas, mistakes of the eye, and a lens on the world

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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.

Taste is easily defined as the ability to discriminate between the valuable and the expandable. It’s another word for Good Judgment. When you decide whether to eat sushi or calamari for dinner, you're in fact erecting a hierarchy of value, and passing judgment according to said hierarchy. If you choose sushi, that is because you've deemed it best... See more

Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. But if you come out of the closet and admit, at least to yourself, that there is such a thing as good and bad design, then you can start to study good design in detail. How has your taste changed? When you made mistakes, what caused you... See more

Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers. Because while having taste is cool, taste itself reflects a certain type of uncool earnestness – a commitment to one’s own obsessions and quirks.