On taste
Imagine thinking you can sing. You love it, practice constantly, even audition. Then one day you record yourself and realize you're terrible. The scary part isn't being bad. It's having been completely blind to it. That's the core fear: what if your taste itself is broken, and you can't even tell?
Taste isn't just opinion
A simple test: can you engage with the people you admire when you disagree? Not just have a preference, but articulate a position they'd take seriously? Every creative field has a rough consensus on what's great and what isn't. You don't have to agree with every expert, but if you can't understand why they hold their opinions, well enough to have a real conversation about it, your taste needs work.
Your work has a ceiling, and taste is it
Beginners get into creative work because they have taste, but their skills haven't caught up. That gap is where most people quit. Ira Glass said it better than anyone:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it's like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you're making stuff, what you're making isn't so good. It's not that great. It's trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it's not that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit. And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. It is only by going through a volume of work that you're going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you're making will be as good as your ambitions. —Ira Glass
Recognizing bad is easy, recognizing good is hard
You know bad when you see it. It doesn't take deliberation. Bad is loud, it announces itself, anyone can spot it. Good is quiet. It just works. The decisions that made it good are invisible because they're the right decisions, and right decisions don't draw attention to themselves. That's why a lot of people stall at "I can tell what's broken." Spotting brokenness is the easy half. The hard half is looking at two things that both seem fine and knowing why one is actually great. That's where taste lives, and that's the part that takes years.
Getting better at it
Start by accepting that quality exists on a scale. If you don't buy this, nothing else matters. You don't have to be a snob about everything, but in whatever you care about doing well, you need to believe there's a real difference between good and great.
Then find the people whose work blows you away, and find who they follow. Keep going. Build a web of people whose judgment you trust. Don't just consume their work, learn their lens. Read what they read, watch their talks, understand their reasoning. Watching a hundred movies teaches you something; watching them through the eyes of someone at the top of the craft teaches you ten times more.
Critique everything. Move past "I like this" or "this sucks" and ask why. What decisions did the creator make? Would you have done it differently? Were any decisions non-obvious? This is a muscle. Do it constantly until it's automatic. And talk about it with others, because opinions kept to yourself never get tested. Most of what you'll learn comes from nerding out over details with people who care.
Then make things and get honest feedback. Doing teaches more than watching. And feedback that stings is feedback that's useful. Always.
The uncomfortable middle
There's a stage between realizing your taste is lacking and it actually getting good. You start seeing flaws everywhere, in your own work, in things you used to admire. Everything feels worse because you're finally seeing clearly. That's not regression, it's progress. The discomfort means the calibration is working.
Taste compounds
Taste compounds because every piece of work you encounter becomes a richer signal. The same hour spent looking at the same thing teaches a beginner one thing and teaches someone with developed taste ten. You start seeing the decisions, the trade-offs, the alternatives that were rejected, the intent behind small choices. Your input rate goes up without you doing anything different. That's why people with great taste improve faster at the craft itself, not because they're smarter, but because they have a sharper target to aim at and a clearer read on every example they encounter.
Taste is a skill. Some people pick it up faster, but anyone can develop it.