Judgment & Taste
Telling good from great, and knowing which is worth making.
The behaviour, in one line: I can tell good work from great, and I make clear-eyed trade-offs about what’s worth making.
A sommelier is not trained by making wine. They are trained by tasting a great deal of it beside someone naming what is in the glass, until the difference stops being a matter of opinion. Taste works that way in any field, and nothing about it skips the exposure.
When anyone can produce a hundred options in a minute, the scarce thing is knowing which of them is good. Judgment is choosing well when the information is incomplete, which it always is. Taste is the trained sense that tells you something is not right before you can say why. Both get built the same way — by close exposure to excellent work, until the difference between good and great stops being a matter of opinion and becomes something you can see.
| What it is | What it isn’t |
|---|---|
| Able to say why it is good | Able to say that you like it |
| The trade-off named | The trade-off made anyway |
| Deciding while uncertain | Waiting to be sure |
| Measured against the best | Measured against your last one |
What it looks like. Nine variations on the screen, all fine. You can say which one is right and, when pushed, exactly what the other eight are doing wrong. Six months ago you would have picked one and called it a preference.
- When making things is cheap. Producing options stops being the constraint and picking them starts. Nothing else in the pipeline can do that part for you.
- Decisions that will not wait. The information is incomplete and it is going to stay that way. Judgment is what you use instead of certainty.
- Reviewing other people’s work. “Make it better” is not feedback. Naming what is wrong requires knowing what right looks like.
- Study excellent work closely enough to say why it is good, not just that it is. “I like it” is where taste starts and not where it ends.
- Name what you are optimising for and what you will give up for it. An unnamed trade-off still gets made, just not by you.
- Decide before you are certain. Waiting for certainty is also a decision, and usually a worse one taken later.
- Make a lot, and critique it against the best work rather than against your own last attempt.
- Break it into parts
Three parts: studying excellent work closely, making trade-offs explicit, and producing volume you critique honestly.
- The part that carries it
Close study of the best work in your field, until you can feel the gap between good and great. Taste is built by exposure before it is built by output.
- The order to learn it in
- Study excellent work in detail until you can name why it is good, not only that it is.
- Then produce volume, and critique it against that standard rather than against your last attempt.
- Then name the trade-off explicitly before each decision, and decide without waiting for certainty.
- Put something at stake
Publish one piece of work a month with your name on it, and ask someone whose taste you respect to critique it.
- Compress it
Know what great looks like. Make more than you keep. Name the trade-off. Decide before you are certain.
- The smallest useful dose
Thirty minutes a week studying the best work in your field, and one honest self-critique per thing you make.
- Anchor it to something you know
How a sommelier is trained: not by making wine, but by tasting a great deal of it beside someone naming out loud what is in the glass.
“Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you what you are.”
— John Ruskin
The interactive version is in the course. The diagram, the simulation and the four-question check for Judgment & Taste run in the free course, where your progress across all 24 skills is kept.
Open Judgment & Taste in the course →
Not sure where you stand? Take the twelve-minute self-assessment, or see the 30-day course that turns these skills into a roadmap.