Acquire Taste, Then Build It
Effort climbs. Taste picks the hill. Most people train legs. Few train direction.
Taste starts with ancestors. Choose them. Pick three living, three dead, and one from a different field. Read the originals. Copy passages by hand. Recreate one artifact exactly, then again with one element removed. Precision first, subtraction next. Imitation is a bridge, not a destination.
Prune inputs. Unfollow most voices. Keep a handful that make you feel slow. Build a swipe file of ten exemplars in your domain. When in doubt, compare your work to the file and ask what is missing, what is extra, what is noisy.
Subtraction is often the answer.
Ship small, daily. A paragraph, a decision memo, a micro-feature, a chart, a design sketch. The unit of learning is the artifact. Feedback is the teacher. Volume reveals variance. Variance reveals signal. Keep the signal, discard the rest.
Use boredom and silence as sharpening stones. Sit alone without stimulation for thirty minutes. No phone, no notes. Watch the mind reach for sugar. Wait for the cravings to pass. What remains is attention with edges. Taste listens there.
Make concrete drills. Rewrite one headline ten ways and pick the cleanest. Explain a complex idea to a smart twelve-year-old and keep only the words that survive. Refactor a hundred lines into thirty with the same tests. Redesign a screen using half the ink. Blind-compare three reference tracks and describe them without genre words. Build a product page with one metric and one action. Next week, do it again. Keep score.
Now encode taste into systems. Turn heuristics into defaults. Set templates that enforce whitespace and naming. Create pre-commit hooks that block complexity. Define a one-page investment memo with a hard stop at five variables. Build a screener that prefers fewer moving parts and higher margins of safety. Use design tokens, constraints, checklists, and kill switches.
Systems make taste transferable.
Transfer turns into leverage.
Taste attracts talent, capital, and chance. Talented people want to work where the bar is clear. Capital trusts stewards who say no often. Luck flows to clean surfaces because they show the next move.
When hiring, test for taste. Ask for work they admire and work they regret. Ask what they would remove from your product today.
Look for people who cut before they add.
Taste is a compass, not a map. It narrows the search space so effort compounds. Acquire it by choosing better ancestors, pruning inputs, and shipping daily. Build it by encoding judgment into systems that outlive your moods.
I am still tuning my ear. You will be too.
That is the practice.