TL;DR
Good work requires both hard work and good taste, but discussions often focus only on hard work because good taste is harder to quantify. Good taste means knowing what’s good and is crucial for high-agency individuals. It involves discerning finer qualities in work, like choosing the right projects, collaborators, and recognizing quality. Developing good taste is similar to critical thinking and involves comparing, contrasting, and criticizing artefacts to understand their finer details and broader contexts. To improve your taste, start by learning to appreciate and critique different works, much like how a chef discerns the quality of food. Now, go talk to a chef!
Doing good work involves two major components: working hard and having good taste. However, most discussions on good work focus primarily on hard work. This might be because good taste, though arguably more important, is less tangible and harder to measure. Unlike the concept of 10,000 hours for mastering a skill, there’s no clear metric for developing good taste. Unquantifiable as it may be, the rarity of good taste makes it all the more important for aspiring high-agency persons.
What is good taste?
Every time I visit a new restaurant, I like to ask a chef or waiter very nicely for a recommendation. From my experience, the fact that you like a particular meal has nothing to do with how well the restaurant makes the meal in question. So I defer the choice of what might be best for me (at least for the first time), to those who have the most information about what is best about the restaurant from serving many customers over a long period of time and from insider knowledge of kitchen events on that particular day. I have hardly been disappointed. In that particular instance, I like to think that the restaurant staff have better taste than I do, and statistically speaking I seem to be right.
Good taste is simply knowing what is good. In the context of work, that means a range of things; being able to decide the right things to work on; being able to appreciate the working conditions and influence them to create optimal ones; being able to pick the right people to work with; knowing when the work that is being produced is not good enough; sometimes identifying what the missing piece that leaves a body of work mediocre; and sometimes having the iconoclast that simply says a body of work doesn’t make the cut because of your gut feeling. Having good taste is about being able to discern the finer qualities of work.
Back to our world of restaurants.
Imagine walking to a chef with a dish they specialize in. If you ask the chef to taste it, it will most likely be immediately obvious what they think of it. For the competitive types that they are, most of them will either praise or curse and only a few will conceal their judgements in fake humility. Being able to discern the quality/taste of their food is an essential skill for any good chef, and by God do they know how to do it!
Our chef friends can be placed in two broad categories; those who will pass judgement on your poor dish and be able to articulate arguments in defence of their judgement, and those who simply say, “Not good”, and cannot for any reason say anything after that - they feel it, they don’t think it.
People who do great work (and have great taste) are much the same. They are either always armed with articulate arguments that demonstrate their discernment, or they just feel it. A good example of someone you can place in the first category is David Ogilvy, and Steve Jobs will be a good example for the latter category.
Being in either of these categories is not a fatal problem, being in none is dangerous.
To be in none is to say that you cannot pass judgement on the work you commit your precious hours to; that you cannot say when you are doing good work; that you cannot appreciate when others are doing good work; that you may never be able to improve the quality of work. Such persons are carried by the wind and give their time and energy to whatever screams the most, they have no filters. It is the hallmark of a low-agency individual that they do not have any taste.
The interesting thing about having good taste is that it is arguably as transferable a skill as critical thinking, and although it is a simple skill to develop, it is not an easy one to develop.
It has been my experience that people who have good taste do so across domains and that it takes only three C-letter words to develop good taste; compare, contrast, and criticize.
If you want to develop good taste, you must first have a strong ability to compare and contrast artefacts. How does Beethoven’s 9th Symphony compare/contrast to Mahler’s 4th? How does French rap compare/contrast to rap in the Anglosphere? The primary benefit of learning to compare and contrast is that it forces you to get down to the fine details, to notice the small things, and to appreciate the effects that small things can have on the whole.
It is most important that you learn to criticize artefacts (and I mean criticism in the full sense, not the contemporary idea that to criticize is to point out negatives). The primary benefit of criticism is that it forces you to broaden your understanding of an artefact by considering aspects of it that are unobvious. In its extrinsic form, criticism will compel you to consider the external factors that define an artefact, and in its intrinsic form, it will force you to consider the essential aspects of the artefact that often go unnoticed. The former will significantly broaden your perspective, and the latter will strengthen your ability to identify building blocks and creative patterns.
For aspiring high-agency people, developing good taste is crucial because it provides filters that guide decision-making in a world with so much abundance. What type of work is worth your time? Is the work being done good enough? What deserves your attention? These and many more questions about the quality of our actions/decisions need answers, and I believe you can get closer to those answers if you learn to develop good taste.
Now, get off and go talk to a chef!