Its All About Taste
Yesterday, when some neighbours were chatting with my wife, one person made a comment:
“My brother is not only interested in movies, but he has such a good taste for movies. He watches a variety of movies, and he has cultivated a real good taste.”
This is such a compliment that I really yearn for myself. I really like this kind of compliment because I believe taste & style is the culmination of all the hard work and effort put over a long period of time. I used to think that, style and taste are an elite value that one should be not so proud of espousing it.
If you think hard, it is completely not true. We are all striving our best to a good judge of things that we consume. We might start consuming everything at the start. But after sometime, we will know what is good and bad. More importantly we would all know, what is excellent. This is applicable to every tangible and intangible thing that we consume. Books, music, food, apparel, shoes, perfumes, chocolates.
I don’t know where to draw the line on when to compare our taste with others and claim our superiority over others. I don’t know about that part at all. I wish I can articulate a little more on that in a latter occasion. But I want to quote Ira Glass on this to emphasise the importance of cultivating taste:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.