Taste & Detachment

A way to produce good work

Photo by Tanbir Mahmud

💌 Taste & Detachment

I’ve come to realise that I can become good enough (not great) at a craft by just practising 2 skills: building my taste & learning to detach myself from the work.

Taste

Knowing what good looks like is the first step in becoming better at something. I believe that one cannot produce good work without consuming enough of what one wants to produce. The knowledge of history and previous work can teach tons to help us understand what *good really means*.

Building taste should be a conscious effort rather than a passive one. Let’s take the example of cinema. I can watch movies that are made in Tamil my whole life and need not expose myself to genres that I won’t enjoy. But if I wish to build a better taste of the craft, I should be watching movies from across the world, across timelines, and across genres. Without knowing what every aspect of the craft feels like, it is not possible to build a taste for yourself.

Building taste is just another form of building good judgement. In the age where creating something is becoming easier and easier, good judgement is the skill that can differentiate your ability to produce good work.

But here’s the caveat, good judgement != practising good judgement. This is where the role of detachment comes in.

Detachment

The process of creating something is very hard and not straightforward. We would have put in tons of effort and spent our energy, money and time into building something. Unfortunately, this can become the biggest evil in producing good work.

It is very easy to attach ourselves to our ideas and our work. We spend so much time with them, so they end up becoming a part of us. So detaching ourselves from our work from time to time is an extremely important skill to develop.

Coming back to the same example of cinema, director Vertimaran mentioned in an interview that his most valuable skill is detachment. He believes that this is the only reason why he could produce good films one after the other. His judgement is sharp and he can judge his own work. He is ready to scrap off a bad scene from a movie even if he had spent so much energy, money and time executing the scene.

Rigorous judgement of our own work can take us way beyond others. It’s so powerful because of the simple fact that it’s hard to build & practice. Being an audience of your work will help you overcome the shortcomings that you face while executing the work.

The killer combination

My hypothesis is, if you add Deliberate Practice (read more on this below) with these 2 skill sets, one can become extremely good at a craft they love. The love for the craft stands above all as it helps us put in the work required to become better at something.

Taste + Detachment + Deliberate Practice = 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

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📝 Best article I read

• The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice (6 mins)
  

  Deliberate practice refers to a special type of practice that is purposeful and systematic. While regular practice might include mindless repetitions, deliberate practice requires focused attention and is conducted with the specific goal of improving performance.

  Perhaps the greatest difference between deliberate practice and simple repetition is this: feedback. Anyone who has mastered the art of deliberate practice—whether they are an athlete like Ben Hogan or a writer like Ben Franklin—has developed methods for receiving continual feedback on their performance.

🎙 Best podcast I listened to

• Sidu Ponnapa interviews
  
  I’ve been listening to Sidu Ponnappa’s interviews & I’m fascinated by his clarity of thought. Sidu is an entrepreneur and previously led teams at GoJek during its growth years. Tons of valuable insights & contrarian views (yet obvious) from Sidu. Here are 2 podcasts to start with:

  1. Sidu Ponnappa - Lessons from entrepreneurship & investing (about 30 mins)

  2. Founder Minus One - Ep3 - Sidu Ponnappa, ex-SVP Gojek (1 hr 41 mins)

📹 Best movie I watched

• Everything Everywhere All At Once
  

  Oh, man. What a movie. I got a chance to watch this movie in theatres this week and I was mind blown. The movie made me laugh, cry, shout, and think; all at once. Highly recommend you watch this movie in theatres if possible, you won’t regret it.