Best Practices: Habits and the Long Game | Taste and Aesthetic Literacy Tutorial

This chapter distils the habits that build taste over years, the anti-patterns that look like progress but aren't, and the questions worth asking yourself about what you're looking at.

Habits That Compound

Expose yourself to good work, weekly

Not daily. Weekly is a sustainable cadence most people can keep. One hour a week with one piece of work you respect, looked at slowly. Over a year, that's 52 deep encounters. Over a decade, 520. That is a real taste-building volume.

The form doesn't matter. A book, a building you visit, an album, a painting at a museum, a film, a product you use carefully. What matters is the deliberate slowness of the encounter.

Write down one observation per week

A single sentence. What you noticed, what surprised you, what you'd remember.

Week 1:  The negative space in Richter's paintings does more work than I realised.
Week 2:  Short sentences at the end of a paragraph feel like landings.
Week 3:  The Stripe dashboard's hierarchy is almost all type weight, not colour.

Over a year, 52 sentences. Over a decade, enough to write a book from. More importantly, the discipline of articulation sharpens your eye more than any other single practice.

Keep a short personal canon, revised annually

Five books, five albums, five designs, five buildings, whatever the categories are for you. Write the list. Come back to it each year. Change it when it deserves changing.

The list forces honest assessment. What have you actually returned to? What shaped you? What earns a spot?

Don't aspire-list. Honest-list. An item that's "important" but you've never actually engaged with doesn't belong.

Build at least one cross-discipline fluency

Pick one field outside your primary one. Read its canon. Look at its work. Develop working vocabulary. Not to become an expert; to develop a second eye.

Primary field: writing. Second field: typography. Primary: software. Second: architecture. Primary: music. Second: product design. The pairs are arbitrary; the discipline is general.

A cross-disciplinary eye saves you from the narrowness of your field's in-house conversations.

Read one critic whose prose is alive

Not Wikipedia. An actual critic, working in your field or adjacent, whose prose is itself good. They're teaching you how to describe as much as what to notice.

For most fields, a few critics stand out. Find them. Read them regularly. Their framings enter your vocabulary by osmosis.

Revisit the work you loved

Every year, return to something you'd called great the previous year. Does it still hold? What did you miss? What changed?

Rereading, relistening, rewatching is where your taste audits itself. Things that hold over multiple encounters are the durable ones. Things that fade were maybe current-moment.

Make something, even if badly

Taste without making is decadent. It becomes pure judgment with nothing to judge. Even if you're primarily a critic or a consumer, try making in your field sometimes. A short essay, a crude drawing, a simple product mockup, a home-recorded song.

The making teaches you what's hard and what's easy. Your taste gets more forgiving where it should and sharper where it should.

Stay in contact with beginner minds

Find a person new to the field and occasionally see through their eyes. They'll ask questions you stopped asking. The answers you're forced to give often reveal gaps in your own understanding.

This is why teaching works. Explaining what you know exposes what you don't.

Take long breaks occasionally

Your taste benefits from not consuming the field for a while. Leave it for a month. When you come back, you'll see things with fresher eyes.

Over-consumption can numb you. Silence is part of the practice.

Anti-Patterns

Collecting without engaging

Some people build impressive libraries, playlists, Pinterest boards, and reading lists, and engage with almost none of it. Curation without consumption. Accumulation without attention.

The library on your shelf that you haven't read is not taste-building. The 10 books you read carefully are.

Performing taste in public

Some people use taste as social performance: strong opinions for an audience, not for their own work. This can accompany actual taste or replace it.

The test: if no one were watching, would you still care? If yes, fine. If no, you're performing, and performance atrophies the thing it performs.

Chasing novelty

A subset of performing. "I like obscure things" is an identity claim, not a taste claim. Obscurity itself isn't a virtue. Some obscure work is great; most is just obscure because nobody found it and the market was right.

The opposite trap ("I only like popular things") is just as bad. Neither obscurity nor popularity correlates reliably with quality.

Snobbery

Using taste to sort people. If you find yourself caring who else likes what you like, your interest is social, not aesthetic. Ugly and also dulling.

Refusing to engage with things you don't yet understand

Taste grows through engagement with material you don't yet get. Dismissing work as "not for me" before spending time with it is how you stay where you are.

Engage first. Dismiss later, with reasons. The reasons are where the growth is.

Treating taste as morality

Aesthetic judgments are not ethical judgments. Someone with bad taste is not a worse person. Keeping these categories separate is a discipline. They leak easily.

Over-studying

Reading about art, design, music can substitute for engaging with art, design, music. Theory without practice drifts. Study the work first; read about it second.

Imitating the visible without the underlying

The easy trap of any maker: copy the surface style of someone you admire, miss what they're doing underneath. You end up with the aesthetic without the content.

The fix: ask what's driving the surface, not just what the surface looks like. The answer is usually not another aesthetic; it's a specific reason, a specific constraint, a specific concern.

Letting algorithms pick your inputs

Social platforms, recommendation engines, streaming services will curate your taste for you. The curation is optimised for engagement, not for your development. If you let it run, your taste becomes whatever produces the most thumb-scrolls.

Deliberate, effortful curation beats algorithmic curation for taste-building. Not as a moral matter; as a practical one.

Confusing confidence with taste

Strong opinions feel like taste. They can be; they can also be bluster. The test is specificity and consistency. Strong and specific is taste. Strong and vague is just strong.

The Monthly Self-Audit

Once a month, ask yourself:

What did I look at carefully this month? Name three things, honestly
What did I learn to notice? Specific, not general
What surprised me? Without surprise, you're confirming, not learning
What did I make? Even small output counts
What did I outgrow? An influence I no longer need. A habit I've moved past
What do I want to engage with next? A book, a building, a kind of music, a new field

If the honest answers are "nothing", your taste-building has stalled. Pick one of the habits above and restart.

The Signals of a Developed Taste

You don't arrive; it's a lifetime practice. But you can notice progress:

You can articulate why something works, specifically, without reaching for generic praise
You notice things others miss
You can describe work you don't personally like without dismissing it
Your own work improves visibly from year to year, on dimensions you can name
You recognise influences in work, your own and others'
You have stable preferences that aren't hot takes
Your opinions update under pressure from specific evidence
You can enjoy work across registers
You know what you don't know

The Signals of Stagnant Taste

The reverse. If you notice these, adjust:

You keep using the same small set of phrases to describe everything
You can't tell why something works; you just know it does
You're certain, and certainty hasn't loosened with time
You consume only what you already like
You dismiss whole fields or genres
Your work at year 5 looks the same as your work at year 1
You perform taste more than you exercise it
You haven't been surprised in a while

Stagnant taste is fixable. It just requires a new intake and renewed attention.

The Long Game

Taste is a long game. Most of the returns are in year 5 and beyond. The first two years feel like nothing is happening. They're like the first two years of compound interest: the amounts look tiny, but they matter because they're the base that later years grow on.

If you've read this tutorial in a month, don't expect results next month. Expect them in 2028, if you keep the practices going.

The practices are simple. They just take time.

The Point of Taste

A final note: taste is not an end in itself. It's a tool for making your work better and engaging more richly with the world.

People who treat taste as its own goal tend to become brittle. They've built the tool and forgotten what it was for. Taste without purpose becomes snobbery, collection-for-its-own-sake, and over-refined sensitivity.

Taste with purpose stays alive. The purpose varies: making better work, understanding your field more deeply, enjoying what you engage with more fully, contributing to a conversation you care about.

Keep the purpose. The tool serves it.

Where to Go From Here

Pick one habit from the top of this chapter and commit to it for three months
Audit your current intake: what's algorithmic, what's curated, what's canonical, what's contemporary. Adjust the mix
Pick one work you've been intimidated by and spend an hour with it
Write one observation per week for a year; come back and read the notebook
Revisit this tutorial annually; what felt abstract will feel obvious, and new chapters will matter

Taste compounds. Start. Keep going. The returns are real but they're slow. The work is its own reward long before it shows up in anything else.