WHY YOUR TASTE FAILS YOUR OWN WORK

A 5-MOVE SYSTEM FOR TRAINING CREATIVE JUDGEMENT

You sit with something you made, and you ask yourself if it’s any good. Some days the answer is yes. Some days the answer is no. Same piece of work, nothing changed except you, the hour, the light, whatever you read the night before.

We usually take that as evidence of something wrong with us. Weak instincts, undeveloped taste, the suspicion that other people have a reliable meter inside them and we’re the ones guessing.

But the problem isn’t your taste. It’s the question: “Is this good?” asks you to hold a piece of work up against an invisible standard and return a score. Human beings are bad at that, not bad in the sense of needing more practice but bad in the sense that the task doesn’t work, for anyone ever.

Album art for Come My Fanatics... by the band Electric Wizard, released in 1997.

There’s a version of the question that does work. It has been sitting in psychology since 1927.

This post is the system built on it.

Five moves that turn taste from something you hope you have into something you train on purpose.

You’ll get the mechanism behind why judgment fails, the method for building it, a standards document you write for yourself, and three drills you can run this week.