lidia
5 posts
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English
Most people assume that doing good work repeatedly develops good taste. But the causation mostly runs the other way.
People with refined taste find it painful to produce subpar work in areas they care about. And the signs have always been there, since childhood.
Their aesthetic sense creates an internal standard that drives them toward excellence, not because they crave external recognition, but because anything less feels wrong to them.
Compare this to people primarily motivated by external validation: recognition, rewards, or peer approval. They will optimize for what gets noticed and what is currently popular rather than what is genuinely good. With more experience they might produce impressive-looking work that hits the right notes for their audience, but this work lacks a deeper quality and differentiation.
This explains why some people naturally gravitate toward creative excellence while others demand KPIs and objective benchmarks of what’s acceptable to the right stakeholders.
It's not just about work ethic or ambition — it's about having developed the capacity to sense the difference between excellent and mediocre work. Once you can perceive that difference by directly examining the work, settling for less becomes difficult.
In other words: the drive for good work emerges from taste rather than creating it.
English