Just Draw Stuff
Introducing, the good-taste governor. Have you met yours yet?
From a very young age, our daughter loved to draw.
I wish I had taken a picture of her “self-portrait,” from her JK class. It was priceless. All I remember is that her eyes were highly disproportionate to each other and made up roughly 80% of her face. And I remember her body being mostly just … face.
When she was first drawing things, she would just draw anything.
All of her drawings had intricate stories behind them, regardless of how identical they looked.
As she got older, I began to notice an interesting behaviour.
She would start a drawing, then crumple it up and throw it away.
If the drawing had slightly “higher” stakes, like drawing a card for someone, the odds of crumpling would go way up.
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I recently came across a term in Questlove’s incredible book, Creative Quest.
The good-taste governor.
I’ve written about taste before, and what struck me about this term, The good-taste governor, is how it reveals the dark side of developing taste.
When we start doing or experiencing a lot of something, we develop taste in that thing.
The good-taste governor shows up somewhere along our taste journey, and their primary source of power is judgement.
They essentially help us decide what’s good and what’s bad, according to our taste.
A question I’ve been wrestling with is: Why does the governor show up in the first place?
The answer led me back to my least-loved friend, comparison.
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The reason our daughter started crumpling her drawings, was because her good-taste governor told her they weren’t good.
She has been drawing since a young age, she has seen a lot of drawings—both her own and many others. She has things to compare to.
We both develop and refine our taste through comparison, and it is comparison that gives birth to our good-taste governor.
The danger is, when it comes to creating things, the more powerful our governor is, the higher the rate of crumpling.
“A big part of making anything and especially music is allowing it to be bad before it’s good.” - Billie Eilish on Good Hang with Amy Poehler (podcast).
Key word: allowing.
Sometimes you have to say, “Relax, good-taste governor. Just let me draw stuff.”
