What does it mean to have taste?

When I was 20 and already working in marketing, my colleague showed me four different visuals and asked me to choose one. I realized it was difficult for me because I didn’t know based on which factors to pick one. They all looked similar, and I wasn’t able to explain which one was best for that purpose.

Then I questioned myself: why is that? And does having taste somehow correlate with being able to immediately say what you like and what you don’t?

Yes, it does.

So I started exploring how to build taste.

We are living in a taste economy, a moment where taste has become one of the scarcest professional assets a person can hold. AI has made execution fast and cheap. Anyone can produce a visual, a campaign, or a deck in an afternoon. The technical barrier that once separated good work from great work has effectively collapsed. What remains, what cannot be automated, is the ability to know whether something is ACTUALLY good.

Taste is pattern recognition across culture, not across data. It's the ability to sense what will resonate with a specific audience at a specific cultural moment and, more importantly, what won’t.

AI can generate a thousand options. It cannot tell you which one is right.

Pierre Bourdieu wrote about this in 1979, though obviously not about AI. In Distinction, he argued that taste is never purely personal. It’s a form of social and cultural capital, a way of exercising power. Those who control what counts as “good taste” have always had disproportionate influence over culture and markets. Taste structures society. It decides who gets taken seriously.

What’s changed now is that the gap between having taste and not having it is visible in real time, at scale. Bad taste spreads faster than ever before. A founder who can’t distinguish great things from mediocre ones will flood their brand with mediocrity before the quarter is over. A founder who can, and who has built that muscle deliberately, has a compounding advantage that becomes harder to close the longer they hold it.

Guy Ritchie shot Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on a $1.35 million budget with a style every producer in the room told him was too much: nonlinear editing, freeze frames, overlapping storylines, a pace that made people dizzy. He didn’t negotiate it down. The film made $28 million and introduced the world to Jason Statham.

Anna Wintour didn’t just have taste. She treated it like a discipline. Every cover choice, every designer she backed, every collection she publicly dismissed became a signal the entire industry organized around. Neither of them was making aesthetic decisions. They were making business decisions through the lens of taste.

Taste shows up in who you hire, what you price yourself at, which partnerships you take, and which ones you quietly decline. It shows up most clearly in what you walk away from.

My key observations and personal factors that shaped my understanding of taste through traveling across 35 countries, years of working in marketing, studying culture and human behavior, analyzing real world examples, and continuously refining my own eye for what resonates and what doesn’t.

Taste starts with attention. The ability to notice details most people move past without thinking. Observe how certain colors create tension or calmness. Why one font immediately feels premium while another feels cheap. Why some people command attention the moment they speak, while others disappear from the room after two sentences.

Observe patterns in culture, behavior, aesthetics, and communication. Pay attention to what feels timeless versus what already feels tired. Study why one visual creates emotion and another feels empty, even if technically both are “good.” Observe how brands position themselves, how people dress, how restaurants design atmosphere, how founders present ideas, and how luxury communicates without trying too hard.

Taste is built through conscious observation repeated over time.

Read things outside of personal interests. Study architecture, psychology, cinema, fashion, sociology, music, behavioral science, philosophy, hospitality, branding, and art history. Compare things that seem unrelated. Observe how luxury hotels create emotional experience and apply that thinking to product design. Study how filmmakers build tension and apply it to storytelling in business. Some of the strongest creative breakthroughs happen when the brain connects dots that previously had no obvious relationship.

There are people who intentionally walk into libraries and choose books randomly from shelves they would never normally approach. Not because the topic already interests them, but because unfamiliar information forces the brain outside of its own patterns. A person who only consumes what already feels familiar eventually starts repeating the same ideas in different packaging.

Taste grows when the mind is exposed to perspectives it would never naturally choose on its own.

One of the strongest taste-building exercises is learning how to articulate discomfort. Sometimes something immediately feels wrong, forced, cheap, outdated, try-hard, emotionally empty, or simply “off,” even when technically everything looks correct. Most people stop at the feeling. Very few people investigate it deeper.

Taste develops in the moment a person starts asking why.

Why does this campaign feel inauthentic? Why does this brand look expensive but not desirable? Why does one founder feel trustworthy on stage while another sounds performative saying almost the same words? Why does one interior create calmness while another feels visually exhausting?

Usually the answer is not one thing. It is a combination of tension, proportions, emotional precision, timing, restraint, energy, cultural awareness, and coherence. Sometimes something feels off because it is trying too hard to impress. Sometimes because it imitates instead of expressing something real. Sometimes because every individual element works separately, but together they create no emotional harmony.

The ability to notice these invisible mismatches is what sharpens discernment over time.

People with strong taste do not only recognize what works. They can explain exactly why something does not.

I once had a conversation with a woman who had been doing her makeup exactly the same way since her early twenties. At that point she was already 37, which meant almost two decades had passed while the industry, techniques, products, proportions, and beauty aesthetics around her had completely evolved. Entirely new ways of applying makeup appeared, new understandings of facial structure emerged, and beauty became much more individualized and nuanced than it used to be.

But she continued repeating the same technique simply because it was the technique she had once learned.

The interesting thing is that very often people around us notice these things but never say anything because they are afraid to offend someone. And as a result, a person can spend years never discovering another version of themselves that may suit them far better.

At some point, after we became close enough, I carefully suggested that she explore newer makeup techniques and study proportions more deeply based on her own facial features. She went on YouTube, researched different approaches, experimented with several techniques, and almost immediately saw herself differently. Not because she became a different person, but because her perception finally caught up with the present moment instead of staying attached to an old version of herself.

Taste requires the ability to update perception in real time.

To recognize when something no longer reflects who you are, what the world looks like today, or how culture and aesthetics have evolved around you.

Good taste is not only about knowing what looks good. It is about remaining emotionally and culturally awake enough to evolve with the world instead of unconsciously repeating the past.

One of the biggest misconceptions about taste is that people assume good taste is immediately understood by everyone around them. In reality, some of the strongest creative decisions initially confuse people because they do not look familiar yet.

Very often people already feel drawn toward something more original, more emotionally honest, more strange, more niche, more innovative, or more personal, but they stop themselves before fully expressing it because they are afraid it will look ridiculous, too different, too much, or simply misunderstood.

And this is exactly where taste and courage become deeply connected.

Some of the most powerful ideas emerge when people allow themselves to combine things that were never supposed to exist together. To trust an instinct before there is social proof around it. To follow emotional resonance before the market fully understands it. Almost every major creative shift once looked confusing, excessive, risky, or even wrong to the majority of people seeing it for the first time.

Taste is not built by constantly choosing what already feels socially approved. It is built through the courage to recognize something before everyone else does.

Sometimes the strongest signal is the thing that makes no sense to the room yet, but makes complete sense to your intuition.

Taste is not static. It is trained, challenged, refined, and constantly shaped by curiosity, courage, observation, and exposure to the world around you.

Would genuinely love to hear what, in your opinion, helps develop taste. Are there specific experiences, habits, environments, books, people, or observations that shaped yours?

Feel free to reply directly to this email. In one of the next newsletters, I would love to share thoughts and recommendations from members of this community.