Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a decade away, and I had no access to any interesting software other than what I wrote myself or could find in a magazine. I was having a blast, and felt like master of the universe, though my programs by today's standards would be laughable.

This is the only field in which I had this kind of luck. (I am about 30 now and I can write a song within about three days that I would be happy with. A more recent one was when I took an Estonian poem by Johan Liiv and set it to music. I can sing the words, know their meaning, wrote the song accordingly, but I don't speak Estonian.)

My other interests had no such kind of luck. I am still aweful at soccer, but better than other people who started off as rugby players. My MSc was the first time I discovered/invented mathematics and I still am looking for my taste, though I know what it is (self-dual frameworks). I can program the way I think in mathematics, but I am not an accomplished programmer. All of this takes a lot of time, but the recognition along the way is important–especially that one song that I could write at an early age–but then again, I started playing piano when I was, indeed, a six-year-old.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Snow-Drifts-Sing-Essential-Translatio...

I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that next milestone.

But then again, if there had been YouTube already, I'm not sure I wouldn't have been immediately discouraged by some 4-year old whiz kid somewhere in the world doing it better than me.

Back then I was the king of computer science because I was comparing myself to the rest of my rural high school. Now where I'm instantly comparing myself to 4 billion people, that can get pretty discouraging pretty quick.

There's so much educational content on YouTube, I envy my brother who has access to courses from CMU, MIT, and Stanford, and countless other presentations he can learn from. Kids, on the other hand...have it worse, ironically, when they should be the ones benefitting the most from all the accelerated learning on offer.

You will need that taste to progress eventually, but in the more mechanical early phases it can be a distraction.

By default, our instinct is to conquer the fear, but our feelings are much, much, less within our control than the goals we set, and since it's the conflict BETWEEN the two forces blocking you, if you simply change your goal from "writing well" to "writing badly," you will be a veritable fucking fountain of material, because guess what, man, we don't like to admit it, because we're raised to think lack of confidence is synonymous with paralysis, but, let's just be honest with ourselves and each other: we can only hope to be good writers. We can only ever hope and wish that will ever happen, that's a bird in the bush. The one in the hand is: we suck.

We are terrified we suck, and that terror is oppressive and pervasive because we can VERY WELL see the possibility that we suck. We are well acquainted with it. We know how we suck like the backs of our shitty, untalented hands.

We could write a fucking book on how bad a book would be if we just wrote one instead of sitting at a desk scratching our dumb heads trying to figure out how, by some miracle, the next thing we type is going to be brilliant. It isn't going to be brilliant. You stink. Prove it. It will go faster.

And then, after you write something incredibly shitty in about six hours, it's no problem making it better in passes, because in addition to being absolutely untalented, you are also a mean, petty CRITIC.

You know how you suck and you know how everything sucks and when you see something that sucks, you know exactly how to fix it, because you're an asshole.

So that is my advice about getting unblocked. Switch from team "I will one day write something good" to team "I have no choice but to write a piece of shit" and then take off your "bad writer" hat and replace it with a "petty critic" hat and go to town on that poor hack's draft and that's your second draft.

— Dan Harmon

-- Jake the Dog

Another one is (and I don't even know if it's 100% true, but I don't much care) that a common housefly will change its path if it runs into a window more than twice. I strive to be better than a common house fly.

I'm not sure I agree -- sometimes you get lucky or circumstance is favorable -- but I am certain that my second ten-thousand photographs were better, on average, than my first.

That said, the incredible digital processing helps a lot.

If it does for you too - I could not more highly recommend Pendleton Ward's latest project The Midnight Gospel.

"How did you almost know my name?"

"I have approximate knowledge of many things, child..."

So when my role says electrical and I teach people about cooling, hydraulics, human factors and user experience, some people raise questions and I generally debuff with a paraphrase of this line.

You can get to the point where no one can see any mistakes. It appears perfect... But not to you. The only way to get to that point is to never be satisfied with your own performance, it could always have been a bit better, you could see that small error (or more likely--those small errors) that no one else could see.

Ayrton Senna talked about trying to drive the perfect lap using this anology: "It is like trying to tie your necktie so that both ends are exactly the same length; experience and practice say that you can do it--but you can't."

The funny thing is, as time went by and I valued this lesson more and more, I couldn’t, for the life of me, find this video again, nor the author of the quote. I remember going on lengthy google sessions trying to find it back, but failed hard every time, to a point I thought I had dreamed of it, or that it was lost for good.

And here it is, 10 years later, on HN, and we meet again. Finally!

Thanks for posting this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

https://www.notion.so/songz/26617ff591e44d4f9c376950e7449819...

Its been a year and he went through a few notebooks of practice problems back to back. He now catches bugs in my book and proofreads my lesson exercises. He can understand my code and give me feedback. His perseverance and dedication to my content is the greatest gift I can ever receive from anyone.

I love art and would love to learn to paint or draw but I can't figure out how to enjoy the small victories there. It's not about being objectively good but about enjoying an "ah-ha" moment where you feel like you've gotten better. Any advice for me? I'm very open to anything but I just can't seem to enjoy learning a lot of the activities that I value more than anything.

For many, a good way to do that is just to take a class. You commit to showing up with other people and just working on the thing. A good friend joined an MFA program not because she really expected to learn much from the teachers, but because she benefits from the structure that forces her to write, write, write.

The main thing that pushed me through, and still motivates me, is that now I know the language and the reasons for the 'wrong' parts in my drawing. Now when I draw a figure I catch myself thinking 'These legs look weird because I didn't pay attention to the calf muscles and now my figure looks completely out of proportion' or 'My initial gesture drawing was rigid and as a result my figure looks static, with none of the weight being balanced'. For me I can see myself get better, but a lot of the 'Ah-ha!' moments actually come from realising where I've gone wrong and what I need to look at next to make sure I can do better next time.

As an aside, a huge bonus with this sort of thinking is an renewed interest and appreciation for artists you like, I catch myself looking at the work of guys like Charles Dana Gibson and marvelling at their control over light and shadow, or the expressions they're able to conjure with a few lines. It's an intensely rewarding experience. I'd really recommend grabbing a pencil and just going for it.

I’ve never tackled drawing, but if I did, I would probably pick some simple object and sketch it at the end of every practice session. By drawing the same object over and over again, you’ll notice it getting easier and better over time, and you’ll build a ritual around drawing that feels familiar and comfortable.

After 30-40 days of this I started putting the results on Instagram. I had an Instagram account for maybe five years, only to follow friends there, never posted on it. I kept drawing and publishing at least one piece a day, every day, from April to December. In some cases (e.g. I went away for a holiday) I either took drawing stuff with me or built up a bit of "buffer" before the trip in order to keep posting regularly.

Now it is a bit over a year since I started, I post at least once every two days, actually more like once every 1.3/1.5 days...

I do believe I am improving, and anyway I am enjoying this immensely. I do not know if for you the publishing part may act as an incentive or you maybe feel intimidated by this. So try just drawing without publishing for at least one month, possibly daily.

And here is my webpage on the process (I want to add more about how I draw, including some technical tips): http://pa-mar.net/Hobbies/Drawing.html

Like saying “How bout them Cowboys” at a club in Dallas.

Everybody wants to think they have good taste and everybody wants to be told they have good taste.

Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?

It's kinda like your example. No one in Dallas really thinks the Cowboys are any good. Not anymore. It's just something mildly amusing you can say. In fact the comment is rooted in being obviously tasteless. It's just the local team that was really good way back when. Those with taste may recognize that Romo was actually good or that he's made a good commentator but no one actually thinks the Cowboys are or were good since their heyday. (Though honestly I don't know or care about the team. I'm basing this on listening to sports people.)

Those who actually fight their way through their creative difficulties as the quote suggests, as opposed to those who read the quote and think "yup, no one recognizes my good taste, screw em".

We should all be OK with the idea that we're not all geniuses (creative genius, business, mathematical, whatever) waiting to be unlocked.

This says it best: https://mashable.com/video/jj-watt-robbie-rudy-snl-sketch/

You asked: Of all the people who read that quote and nod along thinking, “yes this is me” how many are actually right?

Of those people who think "yes this is me" as beginners, those who stick with it and move beyond the stage of beginner by fighting their way through their creative difficulties will be the ones who actually did have good creative taste and were right. Those who reach creative roadblocks and blame the cause on external circumstances are not among those with good creative taste.

Glass' is talking about good taste by your own standards, and standards that are higher than you can achieve as a beginner. Whether other people think you have good taste is irrelevant to the quote/advice.

The point is to not let this discourage you from putting in the work.

I didn't learn to use a command line or write python scripts instantly. I spent thousands of hours banging my head against the wall. Progress is slow. Imperceptible even. Stick with it and eventually you get there.

Does this mean everyone can do everything? No. It means you'll never find what you are good at it if you just give up at the first sign of failure.

That's not how I read the quote. I read it as him saying, you can't know whether or not you have good taste without first producing a lot of bad work, and that producing bad work is not necessarily a sign that you have bad taste.

If anything, those who judge themselves harshly are demonstrating good taste because they can see the flaws in their work compared to the works of others. It's those that don't feel any sense of criticism toward their own work that lack good taste, but they wouldn't feel this quote applies to them in the first place, because they wouldn't feel that their work is disappointing. They would instead be blaming others for not recognizing their superior work.

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

Perhaps such verisimilitude is impenetrable to the stubborn set, who would be already fatigued at the awareness of the mountain they have yet to climb in sharing to the world what they imagine they see. They do not get excited at the prospects of the sweat they need to be drenched in to arrive at the glistening of perfection they think sparkled in the corner of their mind’s eye and holds them captive until they unearth it from the stream of their consciousness. They misplace their feeling of self satisfaction in feeling the illuminating spark versus the product of anguishing labor. And more so, with collaborative works, they fail to concede that spark of the incomprehensible is not solely their ownership, it is merely a beacon to direct their will towards and that they must acknowledge that the sublime they are reaching towards can be identically perceived by their fellow artists. As such, the collaboration itself can and does bring a greater fulfillment than what can possibly be imagined by the artist on his own.

Again, the strong-headed simply have misconstrued perfection as existing sufficiently in their minds. And this is reasonable to understand when taken in terms of understanding the sense of gratification that is involved in creating the work. Having to accept the labor involved is demoralizing. But what other choice does the artist have? He is not rewarded in hiding his gifts to himself, indeed, society punishes him for it.

It is expected, however, that the artist finds pleasure in the labor of creating his being. But again, not all artists possess the same courage in reaching beyond them and of confronting uncertainty. For the creative process is similarly heroic in this sense. The artist must have faith in his efforts, or at the least, be so blinded with passion any creative ejaculation creates the pleasure of self-fulfillment. Indeed, this is the Dionysian method, where the artist has no regard for the merit of his work and is simplistically fulfilled with its spawning. And how poetic; by being so unhinged and drunk, the artist is, through the process, rationalizing the incomprehensibly rational with its final appearance as his artwork. He is making Providence coherent to human conscious experience. There is no impedance erected by his subjectivity’s stubbornness. He merely acts as a conduit to a higher realm of truth, by in a certain sense becoming one with a higher power. It is a tantric dance that dissolves the self, which itself has no concern for its quality and therefore no prejudices which block the artist from becoming an artist. Might we say this oracular feat is pure will?

Note that the artist in this instance does not make the work for anything other than itself. He has no expectations, no simian entanglement with which he concerns the relation of his creation to others. The work transcends society, and transcends appropriately human experience. This is the entire aim of art."

From my essay On the Struggling Artist: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01M037G3I

[1] Which is the quintessence of idealism contra materialism.

I think this is key to building any skill. Find a way to get more reps in. Find a safety net to allow you to finish quickly and start over.

For example, when I learned how to juggle the important thing was to find a way to recover from failure and start over. I started juggling standing up. The balls would fly everywhere and I would spend 10seconds picking them up, bending over, etc. Very annoying. Then I found out that if I use cloths or juggled over my bed or on the ground, I could easily pick them up and start over within seconds. This got me reps. They weren't always quality reps, but I wasn't going for quality, I just wanted to get the skill down.

https://xkcd.com/1015/

I don't know. Readability and aesthetics are at odds. I believe there used to be a strong aesthetic desire for text to be of uniformly block-like shape. It took centuries for spaces to appear between words and even longer for paragraphs to become as short as they are today.

I'm not sure. If it's a cafe front, I can deal with Comic-like windings. If I'm reading something for a reasonably long time, I start valuing functionality - here it's readability.

Maybe people could train to read easily that font - they didn't have much of alternatives. That would mean readability is rather conditional. I'd like to know.

I feel like comprehension of the underlying language will aid readability. If it were written in English, despite the illegibility, I'd be able to read it easier by having a general sense of what the words are supposed to be from context.