How to cultivate your taste - 8.1
First, let's find it.
This piece continues on from our April newsletter on taste and recommender systems.
The single biggest thing that stopped my creative journey as a younger human was my work.
It’s not that I was unmotivated or uncurious. Not at all. It was that the work I was creating was…well, kinda crap!
It wasn’t until I came across a wonderful mini talk from Ira Glass, storytelling legend and NPR All Things Considered host, that unlocked my brain.
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
Of course, this is obvious in all works. We don’t wake up after years without touching a guitar and play perfect chords, but we know when we hear a great riff. My design endeavors are the same. When I’m not flexing my muscle, training myself in areas I’m not adept, they deflate. I still know when I see wonderful design, though.
The next line of the same talk. Yes.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
Taste is typically unique to each of us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have better taste in areas we spend more time in. Someone has great taste when they can recommend something — to the correct party — that they will enjoy.
So then the question is, how do we get better? Some of this is straightforward.
____ the damn thing!
This is a form of playtime. Your time spent writing, drawing, playing piano — whatever it is. The parts of the day that fade into the background, hours going by before you realize how in it you just were. People call this flow. I doubt this is a foreign concept to any of you.
Beyond just playing, though, we need to orient our frame to what’s actually good.
There’s a wonderful fella on Twitter named Visa. If you spend time around me, you probably hear his name a bit. I love the way he talks about developing taste as a writer.
If you want to write well, I think you may need to spend more time identifying good writing than actually writing. At least at the start, but IMO, *always*. You need to develop your aesthetic taste re: what good *is*. No one else can do this for you.
The work to be done goes beyond the moment of doing. This is also obvious. Think to the game film athletes watch or the reading Ben Franklin did as a child.
Jesse Schell, hero of mine and many other game designers, framed cultivating taste via reflection.
"The more you analyze your own experiences, the more clearly you will be able to think about the kinds of experiences your games should create.
Ah, I love it. Reflection plays a huge part in our understanding.
Most of all, the process of developing taste can’t feel like work. It’s gotta be fun. Back to Visa…
“How do I develop taste?”
Well it shouldn’t be something you force yourself to do. What do you already like? What are you already interested in? Explore that with a playful curiosity and ask yourself what’s good, what’s not good. Have fun!
And so I’ve dove into my own area of geeky interest — albums. And I’m here, now, building an album recommender tool (link).
Cultivating taste is fun work
The journey of cultivating your taste is like any other ambitious one.
Once we’ve oriented properly, analyzed the great works, and reflected on what we’ve done with deliberate feedback, we’re almost there. To get great, realistically, we need to go for it, repeatedly.
I began with Ira. It’s only right to close with him, as well.
We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or 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. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
That’s this. I’m cultivating my taste with you, each month I write a piece. I’m refining my voice, diving into my deep feels, and trying to mold an interesting artifact for you. The deadline of the last day of each month is a forcing function to improve.
And I want to do it with tunes, too.
If you’re interested, and a Spotify user, DM me for early access.