Taste Can Be Taught
What looks like a gift is almost always a quietly enormous amount of careful attention.
We have a quiet, defeating habit of treating taste as a gift. We say someone "just has an eye," or "was born with it," as though the ability to tell good from almost-good arrived with them at birth, fully formed, and the rest of us were simply standing in a different line. It is a comforting story, because it excuses us from trying. It is also, as far as I can tell, almost entirely wrong.
What taste actually is
Taste is not magic. It is memory. The person with great taste is, underneath, a person who has seen an enormous amount, paid close attention to it, and remembered the differences. When they glance at two things and instantly know which is better, they are not consulting an innate gift. They are consulting a vast internal library of comparisons, assembled over years.
Taste is not a gift. It is a library of comparisons, built one careful look at a time.
Born with it. Fixed at birth. Either you have the eye or you don't. A comforting story, and an excuse never to try.
Built one careful comparison at a time. Learnable by anyone. A library of seen-it-before. You were missing the hours, not the gift.
Nobody is born able to tell a great sentence from a merely competent one. The editor who can do it read tens of thousands of sentences, slowly, until the difference stopped being invisible. The same is true of the designer with the famous eye, the investor with the famous instinct, the chef with the famous palate.
Why this matters more now than ever
When competent work becomes free and infinite, the ability to produce it stops being scarce, and the ability to judge it, to look at a hundred good options and know which is right, becomes the whole game. Taste is no longer a pleasant extra. It is the differentiator.
The thing that becomes most valuable is also the thing almost nobody tells you can be built. It can. The same boring way the people with it did.
How you actually build it
You expose yourself, deliberately and often, to the very best work in whatever you care about. You compare things, on purpose, and force yourself to say which is better and, harder, why. You make the call before you know the answer, then check. You do this for longer than feels reasonable, and slowly the difference you could not see becomes a difference you cannot unsee.
You are not missing the talent. You are missing the reps. Only one of those is a problem you can solve, and it is the one you were quietly told you could not.
Nobody is born with taste. They are born with eyes, and then they spend thirty years actually using them.
"But some people are just born with it"
The honest objection: we have all seen the prodigy. The eight-year-old who draws like a master, the kid with perfect pitch, the colleague whose eye for design seems to have arrived fully formed. Surely that is talent, plain and innate, and no amount of reps explains it. If taste were only hours, where do the naturals come from?
Look closely and the naturals almost always turn out to have front-loaded the reps before anyone was counting. The clearest case is deliberate. In the 1960s a Hungarian named Laszlo Polgar argued that genius is made, not born, and set out to prove it by raising his three daughters on chess from earliest childhood. All three reached the elite, two of them earning the grandmaster title, and the youngest, Judit, became the strongest female player in history. Not three lottery tickets. One method, applied early and relentlessly. The prodigy is rarely evidence against practice. It is usually practice that started so young we mistook it for a gift. That does not shrink the talent. It just relocates it, from something you were handed to something that was built, which means it is something you can still build.
Put this down
If you have ever felt locked out, born into the wrong line, you were never missing a gift. You were missing the hours. And the hours, unlike a gift, are something you are completely free to start putting in today.
I write about AI, data, and learning regularly at pinaldave.com, and I have been teaching this hands-on in my AI workshops.