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There’s this recurring conversation I keep finding myself in. First with a friend and then with a mentor. It always starts somewhere practical: strategy, research directions, evaluating career moves. But it somehow always circles back to this harder-to-pin-down quality. Call it judgment. Call it discernment. We’ve started calling it taste.
And the more I sit with it, the more I’m convinced: taste is everything.
Not in the superficial, aesthetic sense. But in the way a jazz musician has taste for when not to play a note. In the way a writer knows when a sentence is trying too hard. In the way a researcher senses the kind of problem that, if solved, would shift the field entirely versus one that just fills space on a publication list. It's the invisible compass behind meaningful work. The filter that shapes your decisions before anyone else even sees them.
Most people don’t talk about it because it’s hard to define. You can’t measure it, can’t list it on a resume, can’t optimize for it with a productivity system. But you can feel it. And once you start noticing who has it and who doesn’t, you can’t unsee it.
I used to think that technical skill was the great differentiator → that mastery came from sheer ability: how well you could code, write, think, build. But the longer I’ve spent around people who are truly operating at the edge of their craft, the more I’ve realized that what sets them apart isn’t raw horsepower. It’s taste. The intuitive sense of what’s worth building. What’s worth discarding. What deserves their full attention.
Taste is why two people with the same skillset can produce wildly different results. One spins their wheels on problems that go nowhere. The other takes a quieter, smarter path and ends up shaping the entire direction of the field.
And the frustrating thing? Taste takes years. You can grind out technical chops in four or five years if you’re disciplined enough. But taste is slower. It’s built from mistakes, from proximity to excellence, from long hours of seeing what works and what doesn’t. It’s not something you learn once, it’s something you refine forever.
So this is what I’ve been thinking about lately. What it means to have taste. Where it comes from. How to cultivate it. And why, in a world obsessed with speed and volume and output, developing taste might just be the highest-leverage thing you can do.
the quiet edge.
Taste isn’t loud. That’s what makes it so elusive. It doesn’t announce itself in KPIs or GitHub commits. It doesn’t show up in titles or follower counts. It lives in the subtle but crucial decisions people make i.e what they don’t do, what they choose to pursue before others notice it matters, how they sense what’s missing and choose to build toward that.
You can’t brute-force your way into having good taste. It’s not a product of output alone, or hours clocked. Some of the most prolific people I know still produce forgettable work. Because volume and discernment aren’t the same thing. Taste is about what you decide not to ship. What you decide not to chase. The forks in the road you quietly take that compound over years.
A researcher with good taste doesn’t just ask, “What’s publishable?” They ask, “What’s inevitable? What are we all going to care about in five years that no one’s paying attention to right now?” A builder with taste doesn’t just ship features, they anticipate shifts in how people want to use technology and build for that future. They read the room before the room exists.
This is the thing: taste looks like intuition, but it’s built on exposure. The more excellent work you consume, the more you begin to develop a gut feel for what stands out. It’s trained through contrast i.e seeing the good, the mediocre, and the timeless enough times that you start to internalize patterns that can’t be formalized. You start noticing what’s missing in most things, and where the edge really is.
In the ML world, I see this all the time. Dozens of people rush to reproduce a result. A few quietly pursue a new framing that rewrites the problem itself. One of those things gets forgotten in six months. The other seeds a new subfield. Same skills. Same tools. Different taste.
And here’s the kicker: people with great taste often look slow from the outside. Because they’re saying no more than they’re saying yes. They’re not optimizing for busyness or quantity. They’re optimizing for leverage. For timing. For elegance. And that’s hard to spot unless you know what to look for.
Taste is a force multiplier. It’s what makes the same amount of effort lead to outsized results. But because it doesn’t come with a certificate or a splashy metric, it’s often overlooked. Especially early in your career, when the pressure is to do more, not less. But the people I’ve come to respect the most aren’t the ones doing everything, they’re the ones doing the right thing, at the right depth, at the right time.
So if skill is what gets you in the game, taste is what quietly wins it.
picking the right games to play.
Most people don’t fail because they weren’t smart enough or didn’t work hard enough. They fail because they spent years mastering a game that ultimately didn’t matter or didn’t matter to them.
This is where taste comes in. Taste isn’t just about refining ideas once you’ve started; it’s about sensing what’s worth starting in the first place. Before you pick a problem, a field, a method, a bet, taste is already operating in the background, nudging you toward certain instincts and away from others.
The most interesting people I know don’t just execute well. They’ve developed a feel for which games are worth playing at all. They don’t chase the shiny, high-status projects just because everyone else is. They recognize when the real opportunity lies in the weird, neglected corner of the field that nobody is paying attention to. They don’t just ask, “Can this be done?” They ask, “Why this? Why now?”
That’s the real power of taste: it’s a compass for where your time will compound.
And the problem is, the world doesn’t reward this early on. It rewards conformity. It rewards momentum. It rewards people who know how to play existing games better than anyone else. But eventually, that hits a ceiling. Because the truly great work i.e the work that shifts a field or creates a category, it almost always starts from playing a different game entirely.
Taste is what gives you the courage to walk away from games that don’t excite you, even when they come with prestige. It’s what makes you pay attention to quiet intuitions instead of loud incentives. It’s what helps you discern the difference between a hard problem and an important one.
And it’s what helps you see that a life of meaning isn’t built by maximizing effort across all directions, it’s built by choosing the right direction before you even begin.
Taste, then, is the rarest kind of intelligence: not the ability to solve the problem, but the ability to choose the right problem in the first place.
closing the loop.
We tend to think of progress as a matter of force. Push hard enough, show up long enough, and the results will follow. And to an extent, that’s true. But if there’s anything I’ve learned watching some of the most brilliant people work, and trying to build things myself, it’s that effort alone isn’t the differentiator. What separates those who leave a mark from those who quietly fade out isn’t just how hard they worked, but what they chose to work on in the first place.
It’s a vector problem. Effort is magnitude. Taste is direction.
You can work tirelessly, pour yourself into something, iterate endlessly. But if your direction is even slightly off, you end up chasing the wrong problems, optimizing the wrong metrics, following someone else’s idea of what matters. As a result, you’ll end up far from where you meant to be. Worse, you might not even realize it until it’s too late.
Taste is what keeps your vector aligned. It’s what lets you trade local optimizations for global perspective. It’s what helps you ignore the noise, resist the pull of prestige, and focus on the deeper arc of what you’re building toward.
And unlike technical skill, taste can’t be brute-forced. It has to be earned through attention, through experience, through paying close attention to what moves you and what doesn’t. It’s slow. It’s subtle. But when it’s sharp, it changes everything.
I used to think the secret to getting ahead was just to move faster. Now I think it’s to move with precision. With intention. With taste.
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