Hi friends,

Today is the last day to sign up for our upcoming Write of Passage cohort, which begins on October 5th.

For a taste of what it's like to be a student, I recommend two videos: this one about the course experience and this tour through my note-taking system.

I'm going to experiment with new formats for Musings. I've written this newsletter every Monday for almost five years, and it's time to switch it up. So today, there's no list of recommended links at the top and no "Photo of the Week" section.

I'd love to hear from you: What's your favorite part of Musings, and what do you want to read more of?
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The Best Job You Can Have

The ideal career is to be paid well for having good taste. Why? Because it lets you be yourself.

In a taste-driven career there’s little distinction between what you intuitively want to do and what you need to do to earn a living. Since you don't need to rely on willpower to be productive, you continuously improve at your craft — without the toil we associate with hard work.

To me, the most attractive way to achieve this harmony is to be paid for your taste.

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Is Taste Even Real?

One of the modern world’s biggest delusions is we think certain kinds of quality are subjective, just because they can't be quantified.

People who say “beauty is subjective” forget that Paris, perhaps the most beautiful city in the world, is also the most visited one. It's a city of exquisite taste, from its cheese, to its architecture, fashion, bread, music, and painting. Walking the streets of Paris impels any pedestrian to raise their standards of what quality looks like.

In Paris, good taste is seen as an end in itself. But in America, taste is generally only seen as a means to the end of wealth.

Good taste can be greatly rewarded though. There are pockets of the economy where good taste is exceptionally well-compensated. My friend Jeremy Giffon remarked that the venture capital industry is a cash transfer to those with good taste in people (especially at the seed stage). The higher you rise in the economy, the more your job revolves around taste.

A CEO's core job functions are all driven by taste: recruiting requires good taste in people, a vision requires good taste in business strategy, and leading company culture requires good taste for what a productive work environment feels like.

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Improving Your Craft By Improving Your Taste

When you're paid for taste, you can spend your entire life refining it, which yields compounding benefits.

Since we are the sum total of what we consume, quality creation begins with quality curation. Every creator I know is extremely discerning about what they consume in their field of excellence. The best writers I know are the most selective in what they read. They read not just to consume information, but to refine their taste for what quality writing looks like.

I learned this from Tyler Cowen, who's built a career around his taste for people and ideas. His blog, Marginal Revolution, is one of the most popular economics blogs in the world because people trust his ability to curate ideas. His Emergent Ventures grant program has received millions of dollars because he's so good at curating up-and-coming talent (yes, that's a bit self-serving because I'm a recipient). Where most people see free time as a way to enjoy themselves, I've noticed Tyler sees it as a way to cultivate his taste. Tyler's careful about what he reads, and who he brings into his life. He spends 100+ days on the road every year to explore a diversity of environments and integrating their best attributes into his intellectual arsenal.

One benefit of refined taste is it only takes an instant to tell if something is good or bad. Every time I visit a museum with an artist, I'm surprised how fast they walk away from paintings they don't like (and how deeply they study the ones they do). Y-Combinator famously believes they can distinguish winning entrepreneurs from losing ones in a ten-minute interview. The more refined your taste, the faster your judgement, and the faster your judgement, the more leverage you get with your time.

These days, "acquiring better taste" is the #1 way I spend my free time.

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The Liberal Arts: How to Cultivate Taste

Today's students go to college to build ‘skills.’ We’ve moved away from Liberal Arts programs designed to refine our taste. A Great Books program says: "You are much more likely to create something great if you're familiar with the best and most influential ideas that've ever been published." Though the outcomes are hard to quantify, I can say this: the people I know with the best taste are almost all trained in the Liberal Arts.

The more the world moves towards training skills, the more alpha there is in having good taste — even if it's tough to quantify.

In any facet of life, your taste is only as good as the "best you've ever seen," so if you want to refine your taste, surround yourself with excellence. Consumption enhances creation, which is why restauranteurs travel to dine at the world's best restaurants and serious painters do a tour of duty in Paris or New York.

Being begins with seeing. To be excellent you have to see excellence. But to my surprise, I've noticed taste is fairly domain specific. I've refined my taste in non-fiction essay writing, but don't have the faintest clue how to evaluate a novel — let alone, a ballet or symphony.

Taste is different from smarts or competence. People with taste have an intuitive (and often, unique) sense of quality, even when they can't describe it. Taste is what lies beyond what can be written down. It's a valuable asset precisely because it's so hard to define.

So, ask yourself: Where do you have good taste, and how can you build a career around it?