The Most Underrated Skill
How - and why - to develop your Taste
If you want to create anything in life - from an oil painting on a 40ft canvas, to an executive summary email to your internal stakeholders about the synergies of your quarterly updates or whatever - there is one common skill you need to have before all else. Taste.
Taste is the first step in creating anything. Even if you intend to steal a format or template that you’ve seen from someone else, you’re making a decision about why that particular template or format. Of all the possibilities, why did you go with this particular one? There was something inside of you that said, “yes, I like this one more than the others”.
Taste develops sub-consciously at first, and only after doing pattern recognition in yourself can you really say what your taste is. No two people will have exactly the same taste, and in that sense, our taste is an extension of what makes us human.
Taste is not criticism, though you do need to have a critical eye to develop your taste. Criticism is global, meant to be objective, and a direct response to the thing that is being criticized. Taste is simply a subjective feeling: Either, “Meh, not for me”, or alternatively, “Yes, that makes me feel something”. That check is not meant to influence anything other than your own thinking - a log of what you’ve seen and how you feel about it. Someone else could have a starkly different opinion and you may wonder why, but you won’t care to persuade them off of that stance. It’s ephemeral, in a way, also. As you log more and more things, your taste will change. You’ll have more and more reference points and what you initially thought about a thing will be updated based on the new things you’ve seen.
Once you have taste, you need skill, and once you have skill, you need execution. Those are the three steps in creating anything noteworthy, across any medium that you think is important. Ira Glass talks about The Gap - when your skill doesn’t yet match your taste. You know the things you like, and you’re trying to create similar things, but your skill isn’t there yet. This passes with enough repetition, but developing that skill is significantly harder without that taste first being established.
Your taste is your target. You can make decisions about what skills to develop and how to develop them and understand trade-offs for things you do and don’t care about, all simply by giving into your own taste. It makes your decision frameworks easier - should I include this thing, or change X to Y? What does my taste tell me? What things have I seen that have done that and how did I feel about them? Taste is your foundation - it is your “creative” personality.
Notice “creative” is in quotes, and that is very intentional. Being creative does not mean wearing a black turtleneck and bottlecap glasses and hand-selecting fonts. Being creative is the act of taking nothing and making something. It is putting your own spin on a thing that already exists, but you feel would be improved with some tweaks. Creations do not need an audience, but for most they will be served by one, including if you consider yourself particularly un-creative.
If you are a people manager, you create by crafting the right message to your leadership team at the right time. Too much information and they skip it, too little information and they don’t understand the value. You’re telling a story about whatever work you’ve been doing, and few things require more creativity than storytelling. You’re translating dull business jargon into user impact, and user impact is compelling. So even if you’re not painting or designing anything, doing good work will still almost certainly require you to be creative, and being creative starts with taste.
So how do you develop taste? The simplest way is to just acknowledge the things you’re taking in. You can not develop your taste by rushing, or skipping through the boring parts. Boredom is a necessity for good taste - it’s the synthesis running in your background that maps all of the things you’ve seen and makes a decision on whether or not you enjoy them.
Notice the things that you interact with - the things other people have created - and what you like or don’t like about them. You don’t need to share these observations, necessarily, but doing so may help you hone in on what’s driving your response to the thing. Once you’ve developed your noticing muscles, start collecting. Collecting can be anything from moodboards, to note taking, to photography. Simply keeping a log of things you enjoy is useful for developing taste.
The next step in that process is organization. Start organizing your collection by different themes - color patterns, styles, formats - anything that is a common thread in why you like those creations. Once you’ve accumulated enough organized collections, you can use them as reference points when you start to create for yourself. “I need to make X for work this week, let me refer back to my collection that features work like that.” Review your collection and look for common patterns or themes. Then, as you work through your creation, refer back to the collection and assess if you’re matching those patterns or themes, and if not, how can you do a better job at it.
And that is how you get better at making the things you want to make.