We have never had more ways to make something look good.


You can build a website without knowing how to code. Fix a photograph after you take it. Generate an

image from a sentence. Find a thousand references in ten minutes. Ask a machine for fifty ideas

before you’ve finished your coffee.


The distance between having an idea and making something from it keeps getting shorter.


That’s exciting.


It’s also making one thing increasingly obvious.


The tool was never the interesting part.


The interesting part is knowing what to do with it.


Everyone has access now.


For a long time, execution was a barrier.


You needed the camera.


The software.


The equipment.


The training.


The connections.


The money.


Some of those barriers still exist, obviously. But a lot of them are disappearing.


Someone with an iPhone and good instincts can make an image more interesting than someone

standing next to $20,000 worth of equipment.


Someone who has never studied graphic design can make something incredible.


Someone with every resource in the world can still make something completely lifeless.


Access can give you the tools.


It can’t tell you what deserves to be made.


That part is taste.



Taste isn’t knowing what’s cool.


This is where things get confused.


Knowing what’s trending isn’t taste.


Knowing which font everyone is using isn’t taste.


Knowing the restaurant everyone wants a reservation at, the photographer everyone is referencing,

the shoe everyone suddenly owns, or the song everyone put in their last campaign doesn’t necessarily

mean you have good taste.


It means you’re paying attention.


Taste starts after that.


It’s what you choose when there are a hundred good options in front of you.

It’s knowing when the obvious choice is actually the right one.


It’s knowing when it isn’t.


It’s choosing the photograph where someone blinked because somehow that’s the one that feels alive.


It’s removing the thing everyone else wants to add.


It’s keeping something weird because making it cleaner would kill it.


Sometimes taste is knowing exactly what to do.


A lot of the time, it’s knowing when to stop.

The machine can give you options.


And that’s useful.


More options can make us faster. They can get us unstuck. They can show us possibilities we might

not have considered.


But eventually someone still has to choose.


Keep this.


Delete that.


Too polished.


Too obvious.


Almost right.


Try again.


That sentence feels like us.


That one sounds like everybody else.


No tool can make those decisions without first being taught what you value.


Even then, it’s working from what already exists.


Taste is stranger than that.


It comes from everything you’ve absorbed without realizing you were absorbing it.


Your childhood bedroom.


A movie you watched too young.


The way your grandmother decorated her house.


A terrible haircut.


The first album that made you feel understood.


A stranger you saw on the train ten years ago and somehow still remember.


The expensive thing you hated.


The cheap thing you kept forever.


All of it gets filed away somewhere.


Then one day you’re choosing between two photographs and you just know.


That one.


“I don’t know. It just feels right.”


Creative people say this constantly.


It sounds like a cop-out.


Sometimes it is.


But sometimes that sentence represents years of looking.


You’ve spent your entire life developing preferences, noticing patterns, changing your mind, copying

people, regretting it, discovering something new, getting bored, becoming obsessed, and slowly

figuring out what you actually respond to.


Eventually some decisions happen before you can explain them.


That instinct isn’t magic.

It has history.


Taste is built.


Which means bad taste is useful too.


You need to get things wrong.


You need the phase you look back on and wonder what you were thinking.


You need to copy someone too closely once and realize the result doesn’t feel like you.


You need to buy the thing you thought you loved and hate it six months later.


You need to make something embarrassing.


That’s part of developing taste.


If every decision is optimized before you make it, you lose some of the experiences that teach you

what you actually like.


Taste needs friction.


It needs mistakes.


It needs time.



Technology changes. Judgment stays valuable.


The tools are going to keep getting better.


Things that take hours now will take minutes.


Skills that once required years of technical training will become accessible to almost anyone.


That doesn’t make creativity less valuable.


It changes where the value lives.


When everyone can generate an image, choosing the right image matters more.


When everyone can make something polished, knowing when polish is ruining it matters more.


When everyone has access to endless inspiration, having a point of view matters more.


When making becomes easier, deciding becomes harder.


And maybe that’s a good thing.


Because the future probably doesn’t need people who can simply make more stuff.


We already have plenty of stuff.


It needs people who can look at everything that could exist and decide what actually should.


You can automate the options.


You can automate the execution.


You can even automate parts of the process.


But eventually, somebody has to look at what came out and say:


Keep that one.


That’s taste.

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TASTE NEEDS MISTAKES.