Taste…it’s always mattered. Not just today because of AI; it has always mattered. Taste isn’t a product of the AI era. Taste is a human capability that has always separated the ordinary from the extraordinary.
With that said, how do you develop good taste?
First, you have to be able to identify what it looks, tastes, feels, sounds, and smells like. It’s about the senses. Because before you can develop good taste, you need to learn to perceive quality. You can’t appreciate what you haven’t learned to notice.
You have to immerse yourself in it. Absorb it. Then you can develop your taste. Taste begins with exposure, develops through discernment, and matures through judgment.
The development of taste
I see six stages.
- Exposure. Experience the extraordinary. Immerse yourself in exceptional examples. Architecture, music, food, design, storytelling, craftsmanship, human interactions. Expand your sensory vocabulary by experiencing things beyond your existing preferences.
- Attention. Learn to notice. Exposure alone isn’t enough. Two people can experience the same thing and perceive entirely different levels of detail. Train yourself to notice proportions, textures, rhythms, balance, subtleties, and imperfections.
- Discernment. Recognize meaningful differences. Compare good against great. Ask what makes one experience superior to another. Learn to distinguish deliberate choices from accidents, substance from decoration, and genuine excellence from superficial polish.
- Understanding. Discover why it works. Move beyond “I like this” toward “I understand why this works.” Study the principles, constraints, tradeoffs, and intentions behind exceptional work. Develop the ability to articulate what you perceive.
- Creation. Put your taste to work. Make something. Evaluate it. Improve it. The distance between what you can recognize as excellent and what you can produce becomes a powerful learning mechanism. Taste becomes sharper when you’re responsible for making decisions.
- Judgment. Develop your own point of view. Eventually, you move from recognizing other people’s excellence to forming your own standards. You’re no longer simply imitating what is considered good. You decide what should be considered good and create accordingly.
An exercise: The Taste Laboratory
Try this with anything: websites, restaurants, products, architecture, even business models.
Choose three examples: one ordinary, one good, and one exceptional.
For each, answer:
- What do I notice through my senses?
- What emotions or reactions does this create?
- What specific decisions account for the difference in quality?
- What is unnecessary or missing?
- What would I change to make the exceptional example even better?
The fifth question is where you begin transitioning from appreciation to creation.
And repeat the exercise with something you initially dislike but that knowledgeable people consider exceptional. Understanding why others value it develops your judgment without requiring you to agree.
One last thought: immersion is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient. Some people spend their entire lives surrounded by beautiful objects, excellent food, extraordinary architecture, and brilliant people without developing particularly good taste. Because exposure without attention is just consumption.
The difference is deliberate observation, comparison, reflection, and application.
And perhaps the most important thing about developing taste is that you’re not merely accumulating preferences. You’re developing your capacity to perceive distinctions that were previously invisible to you. That’s what makes taste such a valuable human capability.
