Taste vs Skills 🚣♂️
A simple mental model that can help you navigate your career.
Last week I spoke with one of my best friends, who is pondering some shift in his career.
He is not happy with his current job (at a FAANG, btw) because he doesn’t see much of a growing path ahead. He has 10+ years of experience in tech doing various different things, and he doesn’t know exactly what is the career path he should/would like to pursue now, nor in which type of company.
Many of these feelings resonated with me.
Rather than giving specific advice — which I don’t feel qualified to give — I told him about my experience; about similar thoughts I had in the past, and some mental models that worked for me.
I thought this conversation could be useful to more people, so here I am writing this article! Today we will talk about:
⚔️ Taste vs Skills
🩹 Closing the gap
👁️ What you should work on
Let’s go! 👇
Having been a founder for most of my work life has done (at least) two things to my career:
I never thought much about it — I was constantly thinking about my company, rather than my career path.
I have become a jack of all trades — I feel I know my way around many things but, like in classic founder stories, I am a master of none.
I see this as neither good nor bad. It is what it is, with upsides and downsides.
Anyway, when two years ago I moved on from my startup, a byproduct of such experience was that it was hard for me to figure out what my next act should be.
It was hard to settle on things like 1) what to work on, 2) what my “role” in the tech space is, and 3) what I ultimately wanted to be.
At that time this felt like a general, existential version of the impostor syndrome — but while in my case it might be a bit extreme because of my journey, I believe most engineers feel it to some extent.
What are we good at? And therefore, what should we do?
⚔️ Taste vs Skill
I believe that to do any great work we need two fundamental assets: taste and skill.
This is true for anything, from building a product to managing a team — but let’s stick with the building example as it is easier to follow.
Taste is knowing what is good — being able to recognize it.
Skill is the ability to build — to do what’s needed to do the work.
Taste and skill are mostly independent.
Movie critics (may) have great taste but they don’t know how to make movies themselves. Mediocre directors, in turn, might know exactly how to shoot scenes, but have no taste for making good ones.
To make truly great work you need both.
But why does this matter to your personal growth? Because, framed in these terms, a fundamental question for your growth becomes whether your skill is good enough for your taste.
Based on this, you can be in one of two scenarios: