What I Do When I Can’t Sleep

Smelling things blind, and then labeling them helps your brain to connect smells to words. Naming smells, in turn, helps you understand, refine, and communicate what you like and why. In short, naming is crucial to the development of taste.

Making what you like explicit is a powerful tool. It will help you articulate it to yourself and to other people. This will help you refine and make more of it.

The truly great creatives I’ve run into in business or in art can all do this incredibly well. They can look at a painting, a pitch deck, a product, or a novel and reel off exactly what they like and why.

Articulating what you like is the only way to make great stuff. And it’s a skill that can be learned. Interestingly, it’s one of the things that AI is great at teaching.

The place to start when you’re trying to develop taste is to find and record the things you like.

What you read, what you hear, what you do, what you see—it all rushes past you like mud and icy water in a rocky creek. Your task is to scoop it into a pan

For years, I’ve kept a note in the Notes app on my phone for this purpose. I call it my Ineffable List. These are sentences, quotes, and images that have that thing. Whatever it is that I like, but cannot express

Any time I come across something I like I pull out my phone and record it at the top of my Ineffable List. Over the years it has grown to include hundreds of entries from different eras of my life. It’s packed with quotes from writers I admire, little bits of conversations I’ve overheard in restaurants, or little lines that come to me but that

Keeping a list like this trains your brain to look out for things you like. It teaches you to savor and save them, instead of passing over them blindly. But just keeping this list is not enough:

Once you’ve collected these raw materials you have to practice using them.

I realized that things felt lifeless because I couldn’t really express what my taste was anymore. That somehow, at the heart of all of this, was the feeling that I’d lost touch with what I like.

On a whim, I threw the list of writers I admire into ChatGPT and asked it to describe them for me

Reading this almost made me cry. It is exactly the kind of writing I like, and hope to produce. It carries all of the qualities that I knew were there, but that I couldn’t name. And once they were named for me—they felt both obvious and unforgettable

I felt at once like the AI had given me a mirror and a North Star. It told me about who I am, and where I need to go. And it did it just by naming what was already there. It named things that were obvious but that I couldn’t see or say for myself.