How do you trust your own taste?

Taste is often treated as something you either have or don't, like perfect pitch. In practice it behaves more like a palate. People who seem to have great taste have mostly just paid attention to a lot of things for a long time, and been honest with themselves about which ones they loved.

Notice what you actually like

This sounds obvious and is surprisingly hard. We absorb a lot of opinions about what is good: the acclaimed film, the restaurant everyone recommends, the classic you are supposed to admire. It is easy to confuse "this is respected" with "I enjoy this".

Try a simple test: what do you return to without being asked? The album you play on repeat, the café you walk past three better-reviewed ones to reach, the jumper you wear until it goes thin. Those choices are your taste speaking, unedited.

Collect references

Keep a running collection of things that delight you. It can be a notebook, a folder of photos, a list on your phone or a corkboard in the kitchen:

• Rooms you liked being in, and why.
• Dishes you still think about.
• Sentences from books (in your own summary, or with a note of the page).
• Colours, shapes, songs, a particular beach at a particular hour.

After a few months, look through it. You will start to see patterns: maybe you love simple things done very well, or a certain kind of light, or food with a sharp edge of acidity. That pattern is your taste, made visible. One version of this even has its own name; we write about it in the commonplace book.

Give the algorithm a smaller vote

Recommendation engines are useful for finding things, but they are designed to show you more of what you already clicked. Left alone, they narrow. A few counterweights:

• Ask a person with interesting taste for one recommendation, and take it.
• Browse physically: a bookshop shelf, a record shop bin, a market stall.
• Go back to the source: if you like a song, find out what the musician listened to.
• Occasionally choose something at random and see if it surprises you.

Be specific about why

"I like it" is a start. "I like it because the room is quiet and the light comes from one side" is taste. Practise naming the reason, even privately. Specific reasons are what let you trust your judgement next time, in a new place.

Allow yourself to disagree

At some point you will dislike something widely admired, or love something nobody else rates. That is the moment taste becomes yours. You don't have to announce it or win the argument. You only have to stop pretending, at least to yourself. Forming views of your own, more broadly, is the subject of forming your own opinions.

Taste changes, and that's fine

What you loved at twenty may bore you at forty, and the reverse. Changing your mind is not a sign your taste was wrong; it is a sign it is alive.