The Taste Gap

Monday morning, February 17th. A designer scrolls through her portfolio from two years ago and physically cringes. Every piece looks amateurish—typography clumsy, spacing awkward, colors garish. The strange part? At the time, she thought this work was good. She posted it proudly. What changed wasn't the work. It's still exactly as bad as it always was. What changed was her taste. She can now see all the problems she couldn't see before. This should feel like progress. Instead it feels like torture, because she can see exactly what's wrong with her current work too—and she still doesn't know how to fix it.

The Thesis

The hardest part of getting good at anything creative isn't the beginning, when you don't know what you don't know. It's the middle, when you've developed the taste to recognize quality work but haven't yet developed the skill to produce it. This gap—between your taste and your ability—creates a special kind of suffering. You can see exactly how far you are from where you want to be. Every piece you make falls visibly short of your own standards. Most people quit here, mistaking this acute awareness of their limitations for evidence they lack talent. But the gap itself is the mechanism of improvement. Taste develops faster than skill precisely because recognizing quality is easier than producing it. The taste gap isn't a failure state—it's proof you're learning. The question is whether you can tolerate the discomfort long enough for your skills to catch up.

Ira Glass described this perfectly in an interview about creative work: "All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good... your taste is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you."

The gap is universal. Every expert has been through it. But we rarely talk about it honestly, so people in the middle think they're uniquely failing.

Why Taste Develops First

It's cognitively easier to recognize patterns than to generate them:

You can listen to a song and know immediately whether the mix sounds professional, even if you couldn't mix a track to save your life. You can read a paragraph and feel whether the rhythm works, even if your own writing is clunky. You can look at a design and spot that something feels off, even if you don't know how to fix it.

Recognition is pattern matching. Your brain is very good at this. You've been exposed to thousands of examples—good writing, professional designs, well-crafted products. You've internalized what quality looks like, even if you can't articulate the rules.

Generation is different. It requires not just recognizing the pattern but deliberately constructing it. You need to know not just that "this feels wrong" but specifically what's wrong and how to make it right. You need technique, not just taste.

This asymmetry is why taste develops faster. You can level up your taste just by consuming—reading good writing, studying good design, listening to good music. Your taste improves passively through exposure.

Skill requires active practice. You have to do the thing badly, repeatedly, until you start doing it less badly. This takes much longer.

The result is a painful mismatch: You can see quality before you can create it. Every piece you make is measured against standards you can't yet meet.

What the Gap Feels Like

It manifests as a persistent, specific discomfort:

You finish something you've been working on. Maybe you're even a little proud of it in the moment. Then you step back, look at it with fresh eyes, and immediately see the problems.

The spacing is slightly off. The argument doesn't quite land. The feature feels clunky. The brushwork is amateurish. You can see exactly what's wrong. You just don't know how to fix it yet.

This is different from beginner ignorance, where you think your work is fine because you can't see the problems. This is aware incompetence—you know it's not good enough, and you know you're the limitation.

The cruel part is that this awareness itself is progress. The fact that you can see the problems means your taste is developing. You're getting better at recognizing quality. You're just not yet getting better at producing it.

But it doesn't feel like progress. It feels like proof that you're not good enough, that you'll never be good enough, that maybe you should quit.

And many people do quit here. Right at the inflection point where they're actually starting to develop real capability.

Why People Quit in the Gap

The gap makes failure highly visible:

When you're a true beginner, you don't really know what good looks like. You might think your first attempts are pretty decent. You're protected by ignorance.

Once you develop taste, you lose that protection. Now you can see exactly how far your work is from what it should be. Every piece you make comes with acute awareness of its shortcomings.

This makes the work psychologically harder. You're not just practicing—you're repeatedly confronting evidence of your current limitations.

Social comparison becomes brutal:

When you couldn't tell the difference between good and great work, seeing experts didn't sting much. Sure, they were better, but you couldn't really perceive the gap.

Now you can. You look at expert work and see exactly what you're missing. You notice every technique you don't have, every choice you wouldn't have made, every detail that makes their work sing while yours falls flat.

The comparison used to be abstract ("they're better"). Now it's specific ("they got the rhythm right here, and I don't know how to do that yet").

This specificity makes the gap feel insurmountable.

The skill curve isn't linear:

Getting from terrible to mediocre can happen relatively fast. Getting from mediocre to good takes much longer. Getting from good to great can take years.

But your taste keeps developing. You can see the distance to great work, even while you're still stuck at mediocre.

The result is that subjective experience gets worse as objective skill improves. You feel further from your goal even as you're actually getting closer, because you can now perceive the full distance.

People interpret this as evidence they're not making progress and quit.

What Actually Happens in the Gap

The gap is where real learning happens:

The discomfort of seeing problems you can't yet solve is the engine of improvement. Each time you notice something wrong with your work, you've identified a specific target for practice.

You can't improve what you can't see. The fact that you now see the problems is what makes fixing them possible.

This is the mechanism: Taste identifies the gap between current and desired state. Discomfort with the gap motivates practice. Practice slowly builds skill. Skill eventually catches up to taste. Then taste develops further, creating a new gap.

The gap never fully closes—it just moves. But each iteration happens at a higher level.

The gap is also a filter:

Not everyone has to push through it. For many domains, you can stop at "good enough" and be perfectly fine. Competent writing, decent design, workable code—these are valuable without being excellent.

The taste gap primarily matters if you want to get genuinely good at something. And "genuinely good" is a choice, not a requirement.

But for those who do want to push through, understanding that the gap is normal—that everyone goes through it—can make the difference between quitting and persisting.

How to Survive the Gap

Expect it:

The single most useful thing is knowing the gap exists and is normal.

When you hit the phase where everything you make looks bad to you, that's not evidence you lack talent. It's evidence your taste is developing faster than your skill. This is supposed to happen.

If you know this in advance, the experience is much less demoralizing. You can recognize it for what it is: progress that temporarily feels like regression.

Separate taste development from skill practice:

Study excellent work to develop taste. Create lots of work to develop skill. But recognize these are different activities serving different purposes.

When you're studying expert work, you're training your eye. You're building your mental library of what quality looks like. This makes your taste more refined.

When you're creating your own work, you're training your hands (or your writing muscles, or your coding intuition). You're building the specific techniques that let you execute what your taste demands.

Both are necessary. But conflating them makes practice painful—you're constantly comparing your practice output to expert reference material.

Better: Study the experts, then close the reference and make your own thing. Judge it against yesterday's work, not against the masters.

Volume over perfection in the gap:

When your taste exceeds your skill, each piece you make will be imperfect. This is guaranteed.

You can either make one thing and agonize over its flaws, or make many things and treat each as practice toward the next one.

Volume is more effective. Each piece teaches you something. Each iteration is slightly better than the last. The improvement is too gradual to see piece-to-piece, but it compounds over time.

The taste gap is exactly when you should be prolific. You're going to make imperfect work anyway—might as well make a lot of it and learn faster.

Document the journey:

Keep your old work. Revisit it periodically.

The main symptom of the taste gap is that you can see how bad your current work is. The cure is being able to see how much worse your old work was.

When you look back six months and cringe at what you thought was good then, that's proof you're improving. Your taste is sharper. Your skill is developing.

This retrospective evidence of progress helps counteract the prospective feeling of inadequacy.

Find peers in the gap:

The gap is lonely when you compare yourself to experts. It's much more tolerable when you compare yourself to peers at similar skill levels.

Other people in the gap understand the specific frustration of seeing problems they can't fix. They can celebrate marginal improvements that look trivial to outsiders. They provide social proof that the struggle is normal.

Expert communities can help with this, but only if they're honest about the gap. The best are—they remember their own time in the middle and can validate that it sucked for them too.

The Gap for AI-Augmented Skills

This is about to get interesting:

AI tools are changing the relationship between taste and skill in creative work.

You can now use AI to generate outputs that exceed your current skill level. A novice writer can edit AI-generated prose. A junior designer can prompt their way to professional-looking layouts. A beginner programmer can ship working code.

This might seem like it closes the taste gap—you can now produce quality work that matches your taste, even without the skill.

But it creates a different gap: Between taste and understanding.

You can recognize that the AI's output is good. You can even direct it toward what you want. But you don't understand how it works or why it's good. You're consuming quality, not producing it.

This matters less for some domains (if all you need is the output, the process doesn't matter). But it matters a lot for developing deep skill.

The taste gap was uncomfortable, but pushing through it built genuine capability. The understanding gap is more comfortable but potentially shallower.

We're still figuring out what expertise means when AI can execute but humans need to direct. Likely taste becomes more valuable, not less—you need even better judgment about what's good if you're editing rather than creating.

But the learning curve changes. Less time building execution skill, more time building taste and direction. Different gaps, different discomforts.

Takeaways

The taste gap is normal. If you can see problems with your work that you don't know how to fix, you're not failing—you're in the natural middle stage of skill development.

Taste develops first because recognition is easier than generation. You can identify quality before you can produce it. This asymmetry creates temporary suffering but drives improvement.

The gap is the mechanism. Seeing the distance between your current work and your standards is what motivates practice. Discomfort means your taste is ahead of your skill, which is exactly where it should be.

Don't quit in the gap. Most people quit when they develop enough taste to see their limitations, right before their skills would catch up. Push through—the suffering is temporary and necessary.

Create volume, not perfection. When you're in the gap, every piece will be imperfect anyway. Make many things. Each one teaches you something.

Use retrospective comparison. Judge today's work against last month's work, not against expert work. The improvement is incremental but real.

Separate study from practice. Develop taste by studying excellent work. Develop skill by creating lots of work. Don't conflate the two.

The gap eventually shifts but never closes. As skill catches up to taste, taste develops further. This is good—it means you keep improving. But it also means you never fully escape the discomfort of seeing the distance.

The taste gap is a feature, not a bug. It's proof you're learning. Your standards are rising faster than your ability, which means you're developing the judgment that eventually produces mastery.

The question isn't whether you'll experience the gap. It's whether you'll recognize it for what it is and keep going.