As a creative, you know this too well. You have a vision of what your work should look like, but it’s hard to live up to it. It can be a frustrating distance.
But instead of letting it discourage you, you can learn to use it and turn it into growth step by step.
WHAT IS TASTE?
In creative work, taste is a skill itself. It’s your ability to recognize quality and resonant ideas. It acts as a compass guiding your creative decisions to align with your vision. It’s being able to identify what resonates with people and captures a human experience.
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Cultivating good taste helps you produce work that reflects personal style and originality, because you’ve trained your instincts to know when something feels right.
How do you develop taste? It’s not something you’re born with fully formed. Taste develops through exposure, curiosity, and reflection. You can’t develop taste in isolation. The more art, writing, music, and media you experience, especially beyond your comfort zone, the sharper your instincts become.
By seeking out diverse influences and studying the greats in your field, you expand your creative vocabulary. Pay attention to what excites or moves you in others’ work. Over time, you’ll notice patterns. Those patterns are clues to your own aesthetic and values.
The works you admire set the bar for the work you aspire to create. Good taste gives you a north star for your creative journey. This is why good taste is so valuable.
It also keeps you authentic. You’re more likely to pursue projects that align with your unique taste rather than just following trends.
Now, think about the creative works that have shaped your taste. Your favorite novel, film, painting, album. How do you engage with them? Do you treat them as untouchable masterpieces, or do you break them apart to see how they work?
We often romanticize the work that inspires us. There’s a case to be made that we need a new lens on how we look at the art we love. Instead of just putting your heroes on a pedestal, try viewing their creations as learning opportunities. What exactly about this do I love? Maybe it’s the message, the mood, the structure, or how they play together.
Maybe some of the works that shaped your taste aren’t magic from another planet. They’re made of choices that you can study.
Adopting this lens, appreciating the craft and intent behind great work, rather than idolizing it as pure genius, empowers you. It demystifies the masterpieces and shows you the ingredients you can apply in your own way.
WHAT IS ABILITY?
Essentially, what you can currently do with your skills and resources. Ability has two sides. There’s creative ability, which includes your imagination, vision, and talent for ideas. And there’s execution ability, which can be boosted (or limited) by external resources like time, tools, training, or collaborators.
It’s important to recognize this distinction because when we compare ourselves to other creators, we often overlook the second part. We might envy someone’s polished output without seeing the support system behind it. The reality is that the ability to produce polished work is shaped by surroundings and resources more than we often admit. Living out creativity in many ways is a luxury. It flourishes when you have the freedom, resources, and support to nurture it.
Think of two painters with equal passion. One has to work a full-time job and paint at night in a tiny apartment, the other has a spacious studio and financial support. Their creative vision might be equally vivid, but their ability to execute that vision will differ. The second painter’s ability is amplified by access and time.
Doesn’t mean you don’t have a chance. You do. But be fair to yourself. It might take you more time and effort than it took some (probably most) of your idols.
If your taste outstrips your current circumstances it means you also need to create these circumstances for yourself which can be as hard or harder than making the work itself.
Same goes for skills. Maybe you don’t have time for the same amounf of practive that others have. Doesn’t mean you aren’t cut out for it.
Ability can be built. It can also be borrowed. You can improve your execution by learning new skills, or sometimes by enlisting help (for example, working with an experienced mentor or investing in better tools).
So when you see someone producing amazing work, remember you might be seeing the tip of an iceberg of support, practice, and privilege. Your job is not to magically have what they have. It’s to grow your own abilities over time, given your reality.
THE GAP
That pesky space between your killer taste and your current ability. You have an idea of how good your work could be (because you know what good work looks like), but what you’re actually able to make right now… This discrepancy is often painfully obvious to you (especially you). Welcome to the gap.
There’s a double-edged nature to this gap. On the danger side, it can be a source of real anxiety and self-sabotage. If you fixate on how far behind your work is compared to your taste, you can spiral into negativity. In extreme cases, creatives become paralyzed. They stop sharing work, or endlessly tinker and perfect but never finish (because nothing ever feels good enough).
We all do this to some extent. Comparing your Chapter One to someone else’s Chapter Twenty. They might also have had advantages that you don’t. Different starting lines. How can you even start to compare yourself to them.
But there’s also potential in the gap. In fact, it’s essential for growth. That tension between what you want to create and what you can create is what drives you to get better. Imagine if your skills suddenly matched your taste exactly at the start. You’d have no impetus to improve, no satisfying challenges to overcome. The gap is what makes us stretch. It’s the space where we learn. Every project that falls short of your expectations isn’t a failure so much as a stepping stone, training your abilities to inch closer to your vision. Being just outside your comfort zone is where real development happens.
Crucially, the gap is bridgeable. It won’t magically close overnight, but with consistent work, it does get smaller. Your skills begin to catch up. Stay patient, because it’s normal for your taste to outrun your skill at first, but with practice, your work will catch up to your vision.
The frustration you feel is actually your taste telling you to keep pushing. If you keep going, one day you’ll create something and realize it does come much closer to what you imagined. Many celebrated creators didn’t arrive at their signature greatness until well into mid-life. They were grinding away, unpublished or unnoticed, for years. If you have to work harder or longer than you expected, you’re not an outlier.
A QUICK RELIEF
The gap, to some degree, will always be there, especially if you keep improving (because your taste will evolve too). You can’t eliminate it entirely, and that’s okay.
What you can do is rob it of its negative power by changing what you focus on. Instead of obsessing over the outcome, shift your attention to the purpose and meaning of your work. When you focus on why you create and what it means, the gap’s teeth become much less sharp.
Start by asking yourself some questions whenever you finish a piece or even during the process. For example:
What did I learn from doing this? Perhaps you picked up a new technique or found what doesn’t work.
Did this work help someone or connect with someone? Even if it’s just one person saying they enjoyed it or felt seen because of it.
Did I collaborate or connect with others? If it brought you a new connection or teamwork, that’s a win.
Did I feel inspired doing this, and might it inspire someone else? Sometimes the act of creating energizes you or others, regardless of the polished result.
These questions re-frame success in terms of purpose and impact, not just technical excellence. If a piece has a meaningful purpose, if it says something that matters to you or your audience, you’re far less likely to look back and only see the flaws. You’ll see the point of it. You’ll remember why you made it and who it reached, rather than cringing at a clunky sentence.
In fact, creative audiences tend to respond to the heart of a work more than its polish. If your work carries a genuine message or feeling, it’s doing its job even if the execution is rough in places.
EXERCISE: NAME THE MESSAGE NOT THE MEDIUM
In general, refocus your attention on the message over execution.
Look at a favorite work (by someone else). Why do you love it? If it’s just the execution, you’re lacking meaningful inspiration. Probably it’s the message. Try to name the message in a sentence. “This movie is about how friendship can overcome any obstacle,” or “This photograph reminds me to find beauty in the everyday.”
You might realize that what you cherish about it is how it makes you feel or what it means to you, more than the fact that, say, the cinematography was perfect. Often, the technique serves the message, but the message is what lodges in your heart.
Now, look at one of your own works. It could be something you finished recently or even an older piece. For a moment, forget any disappointment you have about the execution. Instead, ask: What’s the message here?
Write down in a sentence what the piece is about at its core. Maybe you’ll write, “This song was my way of coping with change,” or “This illustration was meant to make people laugh at how silly office life can be.”
By doing so, you may find new appreciation for what you created. You might also see more clearly how you could execute it differently next time to highlight that message. That’s a useful, specific insight, very different from the vague I suck feeling the gap can give us.
Essentially, you’re training yourself to see your work (and others’ work) with clarity about content and form, not just an amorphous sense of good or bad.
BOTTOM LINE
The gap is a reflection of the fact that your ambitions are ahead of your current skills, and that is a good thing.
If something you made feels hollow or off-purpose, that’s actually within your power to fix immediately. You can pause and infuse more of your values and voice into it, right now. You don’t need anyone’s permission or 10 years of practice to give your work meaning. That comes from being honest and intentional about what you want to say.
You’re always growing. The crucial thing is not to let the gap discourage you into silence. Instead, let it inspire you into action.
Mind the gap, but don’t fear it. Let your good taste drive you, not deter you. Embrace the learning curve with pride. Each stage of not-quite-there-yet is still part of getting there. If you persist with purpose, you’ll not only close the distance, you might even come to value the gap for all it taught you along the way.
Major hat tip to Ira Glass who famously explains this so well. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-gap
A feeling I battle with so eloquently explained. Thank you I needed this today!!