Why Taste Matters More Than Skill

Right now, while you're watching this, someone just typed one sentence into a computer and got back 100 finished logos. Someone else made a song in the time it took me to tell you about the logo. People are producing novels, business plans, movie posters, all of them in seconds at almost no cost. For the first time in history, almost anyone can make almost Anything. That's good news. No doubt about that. Here's the question nobody wants to sit with. If a computer can make everything faster and cheaper than you ever could, what exactly are you for? I've spent 20 years writing about work and what makes people good at it. The answer might come down to a single skill. It's not coding. It's not prompting. It's something older and far more human. The people who have this skill are about to pull away from everyone else. And the strange part is you spent your whole life building it without ever giving it a name. It is taste. Not taste buds. Taste. A point of view. The sense that some things are good, some things are less good. Now that matters more than at any point in your life. Again, for almost all of human existence, the bottleneck was making. You could picture something extraordinary in your head, but turning it into a film, a song, a building, a business took years of technical know-how most people never developed. The dreamers were one group, the doers were another group, and the gap between them was enormous. Well, AI just shrunk that gap. The dreaming and the doing are now nearly the same act. You can describe it and 10 seconds later it exists, which sounds like the greatest gift ever handed to creative people. And in some ways it is. But look closer and you'll see what actually happened. The hard part didn't disappear, it moved. When making things was expensive, the scarce skill was the ability to make them. Now that making things is nearly free, the scarce skill is the ability to know which ones are any good. Generation got cheap, judgment got priceless. You want proof? Watch what happens to an industry the second it gets cheap to produce. Take mine, books. Researchers at Cornell and the University of Minnesota looked at what happened to publishing after ChatGPT showed up so that Between 2022 and 2025, the number of new books released roughly tripled. Tripled! If volume were the same as value, we'd be living during the greatest literary golden age in history. But we're not, because over that same stretch, the average quality of published books went down. A world with infinitely more stuff is a world, by definition, with lots more crappy stuff. And the only thing that separates the good from the bad is someone standing there with the taste to tell them apart. Think about what a model actually does when you ask it for something. It hands you options, 20 melodies, 50 logos, 100 headlines. But here's the thing it has a tougher time telling you, which ones are right for you? It has no idea what's good or bad. It doesn't have a point of view. It feels nothing when it shows you the brilliant one, nothing when it shows you the forgettable one. It's just predicting the next statistically most likely word over and over and over again at impossible speed. You have to choose. You have to apply taste, which means that over the long run, the machine needs you far more than you need the machine. So the real question was never whether AI is coming for your work. It's whether you've developed the one capacity that makes you the person who decides instead of the person who gets replaced. And here's the good news. Taste isn't something you're born with or you're not. It's a skill you can build. And it runs on 3 rules. Rule number 1: Create more than you consume. You do not develop taste by just watching. You build it by making. This is the rule that lots and lots of people get wrong because consuming feels creatively useful, and it is to a point. You can spend an entire day studying brilliant work, feeling inspired, and yet developing little taste at all because taste comes from the friction of making your own thing And watching it fall short of what you pictured in your head. Every draft you scrapped, every project that embarrassed you a year later, every time you looked at your own work and thought, nah, not yet. That's the gym. That's the gym where muscle gets built. The model trains on a billion examples of everyone else's work. You get to train on your own work. So keep taking in great stuff— art, film, writing, the occasional YouTube video— but watch the ratio. If you're consuming 10 times more than you're creating, you're starving your taste. So flip the ratio. Make more than you consume, and your taste will compound. Rule number 2, get comfortable with saying no. Now, here's the objection I can almost hear forming. Taste is just opinion. It's subjective. Who are you to say what's good? And look, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it. Taste is subjective. But subjective is not the same as arbitrary. A subjective judgment is still a serious one. Taste isn't a shrug, it's a stand. It says, no, that's not good enough. No, that's not it. No, we're not shipping that. And saying no is harder than ever because the machine just handed you 100 options and every single one of them is fine. That's the problem. Fine is everywhere, which means that fine is your enemy. The professional isn't the one who can generate the most options. She's the one who can look at 99 perfectly acceptable choices, Throw them all out and protect the one that's actually great, even when everyone else in the room has already said, those are fine. Rule number 3: If your taste never changes, you don't have any taste. Pull up something you made 3 years ago and were proud of. If you look at it today and you changed nothing, not a single thing, that's not proof that you had great taste back then. It could be a sign that your current taste is slipping, that it's stopping evolving. The creators who matter over a whole career are not the ones who found their lane at age 25 and stayed parked there for the next 40 years. They're the ones who remained a little uncomfortable, who kept getting surprised by what they loved, who treated their taste not as a trophy they won once, but as a practice they show up for again and again and again for the rest of their lives. So there it is. Create more than you consume. Get comfortable saying no and let your taste keep changing. Remember the question from the start? If a machine can make anything, what are you for? Well, you're for the part the machine can't do. It can generate forever, but it can't care. It can hand you everything, but it can't tell you what's worth keeping. In a world overrun with competent, forgettable stuff, the rarest thing on Earth is a human being who can look at all of it and say, this one. This is the one that's human. This is the one that's true. This is the one worth making. That's taste. That's a skill, and it's been yours the whole time. If you like this video, I think you'll like another video I made about the 6 skills AI will never replace that will help you take your learning to the next level, and you can find that video right here.