A question that comes up a lot is how good is good enough?

When can we stop calling this thing a work in progress and put it out into the world to find the answer.

You need to know the trinity of quality.

One how good your work actually is to how good you think it is and three how good you want it to be.

So the first part of the trinity is the actual quality itself.

How good is your thing on an absolute scale?

How entertaining is it?

How funny?

How well edited?

How accurate is the science?

How good is the lighting, the resolution, etcetera?

Some measures of quality are fairly objective, such as the accuracy of color reproduction or having sound levels in the audible range of human hearing, or how correctly you portray a technical idea.

And there are some less objective measures, such as is the composition pleasing or is the narrator too snarky or is this just what I needed to brighten my day?

Any creation, whether a video, a piece of art, a news article or a meal will have different levels of quality on different axes.

A movie might have carefully designed lighting, high resolution imagery, painstaking sound design and mixing amazing visual effects, but the story might still be junk Internet videos historically have lower quality sound and visuals, but the content of the video and the story and editing and personality might all be high quality.

So the overall quality of something will be affected by how strongly you weigh the importance of the different possible axes, Whether you care more about humor or scientific accuracy or beautiful composition, but we're going to focus on the quality of each access independently and we'll pretend that quality is an absolute property of the video itself, independent of anyone's personal viewpoint.

Personal viewpoints are where the second part of the trinity comes in.

Taste also known as preference.

If quality is where you are, taste is the target where you want your creation to be on the quality axis.

Maybe you're what we call a perfectionist and want the quality to be as high as possible in every single possible axis.

Maybe you care a lot about scientific accuracy and clarity of communication but are fine with sloppy stick figure drawings, hands with chapped skin and no sound effects or maybe you just want to make as many videos as quickly as possible.

Taste is personal though there are some somewhat universal human tastes related to how our eyes and ears and brains process images and sound.

And there are also some broad, culturally learned tastes that have to do with the media landscape you grew up in, but whatever you want, that's fine, that's your taste.

It's your target.

So quality represents how good our video actually is on various different axes and taste gives us the target, how good we want it to be on each of those axes.

You might think the next step is to figure out how to reach our targets from where we are.

But focusing on how to make something good skips over a more important and fundamentally useful skill, how good you are at telling whether something is good because while in many fields or industries there are sometimes rules of thumb or best practices for making things good, even though sometimes fail or need to be broken or you find yourself in a new creative situation that the rule of thumb doesn't say anything about and a lot of times, even if you know something is good, you don't necessarily know why it's good, which makes it hard to reproduce its goodness and that's why we need the third and most underappreciated part of the trinity, discernment, discernment is how well you can perceive quality, how accurately and reliably you can tell how good something is.

If quality is where you actually are and taste is where you want to be, then discernment is how accurately, you know where you are.

It's the size of that blue circle of uncertainty on your gps being discerning or not is essentially the difference between perceiving something on a scale of 1 to 51 to 10, 1, 200 or whatever.

If I'm a stick figure, connoisseur and you're not, you might say this stick figure is a perfect four out of four.

While I'd say it's a pretty good eight out of 10, both of which would be totally reasonable for us to say.

But if our target stick figure quality is here, then we're going to disagree on whether or not we're there yet because on your scale we are and on my scale or not, if we don't realize this is a difference in discernment, you might think I'm nitpicking and want something better than perfection while I might think you secretly lowered your standards, discernment is important because you want to know when you reach your target and you definitely don't want to think you've reached the target when you haven't.

Of course maybe there really is no such thing as an intrinsic quality to discern and maybe our disagreement really is just a difference in taste.

But I think that's just a confusion while it's true that taste and discernment are linked.

You know, like after learning to discern the difference between different kinds of hot chocolate, you might develop a taste for one kind over others.

So improving your discernment leads you to change your taste, but it's also possible to be discerning without letting it affect your taste.

Like how a writer can know about and still ignore general concepts about prepositions and not using them to end sentences with.

I mean like how a writer can know the practice of not ending sentences with prepositions but still decide it's a place worth going to.

Is this a hill?

I'll die on.

Is it something I'll fight you over or is it grammar I know nothing about the point is there's often an absolute underlying truth.

Does the sentence ends in a preposition or not?

Is the note in tune or not?

Discernment of that truth is a real skill and the more discerning you are, the better you can decide what level of quality is appropriate for what circumstance, pairing different hot chocolates with different cookies or different cameras with different projects.

What's more improving your discernment abilities is critical to improving the consistency of the quality of your creative work.

Because if you can't reliably tell whether or not something is good, how can you make sure it is, however good you want it to be, You'll just be fumbling around in the dark.

This is all to say, discernment and taste are indeed different and pretending they aren't or confusing them can cause problems, especially when you work with other people.

In fact, there are three different ways that discernment and taste can combine to cause problems.

First, if one person is much better at discerning the level of quality than the other, then you can be aiming for the same creative target, but one person will think you've arrived and the other will think you have a long way to go?

We might both want a painting to be hung level and centered on the wall and I think it is level while you can tell it's slightly lopsided.

On the other hand, if two people have the same discernment capacity but different tastes, that is different creative targets, then they'll also disagree on whether or not they've reached the target, even if they agree on where they are.

Like maybe we both can tell that the painting isn't level, but it doesn't bother me as much.

I think this is the most common source of creative disagreement where two people just have different standards or goals, but it's also incredibly common for people to think they're disagreeing on taste when they actually have different capacities to discern and last.

Sometimes you have both differing discernment capacities and differing targets.

Maybe one person is more discerning about the lighting of the scene and they also care more about making sure the lighting is perfect when it comes to the question of how good is good enough.

So much of the time people focus on the taste aspect, how good you want something to be without realizing that discernment plays a huge role in determining whether or not you think you've achieved your target and therefore whether or not you actually have.

So remember the trinity of quality, quality is how good it is, taste is, how good you want it to be and discernment is how good you are at knowing the difference.

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