Last week, on a Bloomstory team day out to the Design Museum in London, I said to my friend Myles, “Given we’re in a creative field, it’s important we develop taste.”
I know it’s subjective, but I’ve often wondered about how universal ‘good’ taste is. However, instead of driving myself mad with these impossible existential answers, I’ve settled for this meaning:
Having good taste means you are decisive about what you like and don’t like.
Yes, I pride myself on having excellent taste in food and coffee, which definitely borders on snobbery.
What can I say? My dad is a chef, and I inherited a palette for what great food tastes like.
It’s a bit of a side tangent, but most fine-dining restaurants aren’t as amazing as people make them out to be. I suspect people praise it because it’s an easy way to signal ‘taste’.
I’ve been to my fair share and only ever had 2 memorable experiences. The first was a Japanese place in Sydney. The whole experience was amazing. The second was in Vegas; the bread was phenomenal.
Great food and coffee should 1) change your world so much that life doesn’t feel the same again and 2) make you want to cry tears of joy.
Developing good taste is important, particularly in creative fields.
I see having good taste as a signal of good judgment because it requires you to say ‘no’ a lot.
In Steve Jobs’ biography, he says this:
Focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things. You have to pick carefully. — Steve Jobs
We all know that Apple products have impeccable design. Even the inside, which we don’t see, is beautifully organised and welded together.
While open-mindedness is generally seen as a good thing, too much of it can be counterproductive.
Developing taste is learning to be discriminatory in one’s judgment, in other words, being picky.
This is why asking someone what their favourite book or music is can feel weirdly intimate because it says a lot about who they are as a person.
Developing good taste applies to dating, too. In fact, I believe dating is where good judgment and decision-making need to be at the highest calibre.
It’s taken me many tries to realise this, but the first date isn’t about impressing the other person. It’s about asking yourself whether you actually like them enough to see them again.
Because knowing how to decide well leads to good taste, which in turn shapes who you are.
Sir Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
I’m going to modify this slightly:
“We develop our taste; thereafter they develop us.”
Speak to you tomorrow,
Jason.