Taste

Taste over tactics

I used to lie awake at night wondering why my business attempts were failing.

At the time I didn’t realize it, but I had neither taste nor tactics.

Taste is knowing what to make. Tactics are knowing how to make it.

This is a hot take, but here’s a mistake most beginners make…they start with tactics and completely ignore taste.

They think, “I’m smart. I can just brute force learn how to do this thing and then if I do it for long enough, it’ll work.”

So they spend months meticulously learning the long tail of skills required to make said thing.

But when they improve to a point where their output is technically superior, they still net below average results.

Why is this?

How could it be that if you have the best skills and generate the best quality output, you are not achieving the best results.

It’s because you have no taste.

You’re making the wrong thing or in a way that isn’t interesting to the world.

A perfect example of this are the camera YouTubers that make amazing quality videos but have less than 10K subs.

They have all the gear and lighting and editing skills in the world. But why isn’t their stuff resonating?

Why aren’t they Peter McKinnon?

It’s not because their tactics are worse. That’s what most creators in this position assume…but they’re wrong. They’re skills are already 99th percentile!

It’s because Peter has better taste than them.

Taste in storytelling, visual aesthetic, product selection. Everything.

The overall vibe he gives off is a better match for what the world naturally wants.

You can win in a small way with all tactics and no taste, but your ceiling will be always be capped.

This is because like everything else, the world operates with a Pareto lens, where 80% of the wins accrue to the top 20% of the players.

Most of your favorite creators across every category are not in the top 1% of technical mastery. They usually hire those people. They’re the face of the operation (and the biggest earner) because they have taste.

Okay, so the big question…how does one improve their taste?

At the highest level, taste is your unique selection of a few out of many. It’s picking 100 needles out of a million haystacks. It’s your intuition for what the world wants.

In my view, the primary sensory experience tied to taste is vision. How does something look visually and is it what the world wants at that time?

Branding, UX, copy, design…this is how humans communicate taste to one another.

This is why great designers are often thought of as having good taste, because they are masters at making things that resonate with the world.

The best way to improve your taste is to start making things, sharing them with others, and seeing how they stack up.

When you compare your thing to other projects you naturally gravitate towards, does yours hold its own?

I know this is a bit vague, but there isn’t a set formula to taste. It’s kind of an invisible feeling.

Like anything else, the more you surround yourself with people that are universally known to have good taste, the more you will hone the sense for it.

The fun part is that your taste can be the unique combination of things that you like across the categories you play in.

The frustrating part is to have “good taste” means you need some portion of the world to like your combination of things.

If you want to win big, don’t ignore taste.

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