There are many forces that dictate what kind of life you end up living. Where were you born, what kind of family did you grow up in, where do you choose to live, and where do you work? These are some common examples of those forces. They are easy to spot. However, there are also two quiet forces : what you believe you can change, and what you believe is worth wanting in the first place. The first one is agency, the sense that your choices matter, that you can move the needle in your own life. The second is taste, your sense of what is good, beautiful, meaningful, or simply "worth the effort."
We are our choices.
Most advice leans hard on one side or the other. Some people tell you to "take control of your life," "hustle," "be ambitious." Others tell you to "follow your curiosity," "develop taste," "only do work that feels right." But they miss the larger picture that both are incomplete on their own. Agency without taste turns into blind ambition. Taste without agency turns into quiet frustration. But when you put them together, something changes. You start to see your life as a craft instead of a series of accidents. You stop feeling like things just "happen" to you, and you also stop chasing everything that moves. You become picky about what you aim at, and brave enough to actually aim.
What Is Agency?
Agency is the feeling that you are not just a passenger. It is the belief, confidence in yourself built slowly over time, that your actions have real effects, that you can choose a direction and move toward it, even if the road is messy and full of detours. You see it in small things first, like deciding to go for a walk instead of doom scrolling, writing the first paragraph of something instead of waiting for the "perfect idea," (how I got started) or saying no to a plan that you know will drain you.
These moments seem minor, but they are small proofs that you can shape your day, and by extension, your life. Agency grows every time you act in line with what you think is right, especially when it would be easier not to.
Agency is not about controlling everything. It is about owning your part of the story, and being there, actively. You cannot choose all the cards you are dealt, but you can choose how you play them. You cannot control the economy, the weather, or what other people think of you, but you can control how you show up, what you practice, what you say yes to, and what you walk away from.
What Is Taste?
Taste is your inner sense of "this is good" and "this is not good enough." We all have it. It shows up in the books you finish and the ones you put down, in the people you admire, in the work that makes you lean forward instead of tune out, in the side projects you complete and the ones you abandon.
Taste is not only about art, music, or aesthetics. It is also about decisions, such as what kind of friend you want to be, what kind of work feels worth giving years of your life to, and what kind of environment you want to stand in every day. It's about what you want and what you don't want.
It doesn't have to be fancy or elite. There is no such thing as universal "good taste" or "bad taste." It is about having standards that are honest and personal. It is the quiet voice that says, "This might be fine for others, but it is not good enough for me." or "This might not be what others want, but it is what I want."
Taste often shows up first as a kind of dissatisfaction. You see something and feel, "This could be better." A conversation that stays shallow when it could go deeper. A product that almost works but cuts corners. A project that does the job but has no heart. That little discomfort is not just judgment, it is a signal about what you value.
The Painful Combo: High Taste, Low Agency
One of the most uncomfortable places to be is having strong taste but weak agency. You can see clearly what "good" looks like, but you do not feel able to move toward it. Even if you know you are capable of changing it, making it good, but you just don't know how to act.
Maybe you read great writing and then look at your own drafts and feel sick. Maybe you see healthy relationships and then look at your own habits and feel stuck. Maybe you admire bold careers but feel boxed in by your choices so far.
This gap between what you like and what you can currently do hurts, it stings. It can turn into cynicism, where you pick apart other people's work instead of improving your own, make jokes about how "nothing is ever good enough" instead of risking an attempt, or hide behind taste, telling yourself "I have high standards" (dangerous game) as a way to avoid starting.
But that painful gap is also a map. The things that bother you the most often point to the things you secretly care about the most. You just have to be honest enough to accept that discomfort. If you let it, that discomfort can be fuel. It is your taste asking your agency to grow.
The Other Trap: High Agency, Low Taste
On the other side, there is another trap: lots of drive, very little taste.
This looks productive from the outside. You are always busy. You are always saying yes, always "on the grind," always chasing the next thing: more money, more status, more projects, more wins. But if you pause for a second and ask, "Why this? Why here? Why these people?" the answers do not ring true.
Without taste, agency becomes raw energy with no direction. You can climb a ladder very fast and still end up on the wrong wall. You can become excellent at something that does not matter to you. You can fill your days with motion that never turns into meaning. It's wasteful effort.
This is why some people hit their goals and still feel strangely empty. It is not that they lacked effort. It is that their effort was not guided by a sense of what truly matters to them. They built a life around someone else's taste, what family, culture, or the internet told them was "good."
Why Agency and Taste Need Each Other
Agency without taste is noise, it's wasteful. Taste without agency is fantasy, it's fugazi.
But when they work together, agency and taste create a loop. Taste becomes your eyes and agency becomes your body. Taste shows you what could be better, what "good" looks like in your eyes. That vision moves your agency to try, to practice, to take small steps toward it. The work you do then changes your taste. As you get better, you see more details, more nuance, more possibilities. That sharper taste asks your agency to stretch again, and the cycle repeats.
This is how people become quietly excellent at something over time. Not by chasing every trend, and not by waiting for a perfect moment. They use their taste to choose what to care about, and their agency to do something about it, again and again, for years.
Ambition as an Act of Taste
Ambition is often framed as wanting more: more success, more money, more reach. That's not the only kind of ambition. The more deeper kind of ambition is about wanting better.
Better conversations, not just more followers. Better craft, not just more output. Better product, not just more users. Better alignment between your values and your daily life.
Seeing this way, ambition is a form of taste. It is refusing to accept the lowest common standard for yourself. It is choosing not to live on autopilot. It is looking at the default path and saying, "I understand why people pick this, but I want something different."
That kind of ambition can look strange from the outside. It might mean saying no to a stable path that does not fit. It might mean spending years on skills that do not pay off right away. It might mean disappointing people who expected you to want the same things they do. It might even look like overconfidence, or stupidity to others.
But this is where bravery comes in. To act on your taste, you have to be willing to be misunderstood for a while.
Bravery in the Small Moments
When people talk about being brave, they often picture big dramatic moves: quitting a job overnight (especially without a backup plan), moving to a new country, parting ways with friends. Those moments can matter, but they are rare. Most of the courage you need in life shows up in far smaller, quieter moments, in more frequent opportunities.
Bravery can look very ordinary. It might mean admitting to yourself that you actually do care about something, letting your standards rise even if that means seeing your own inadequacies, acknowledging how far you still have to go, starting a project you might fail at, asking a real question at the risk of sounding stupid, or saying, "This is not good enough for me," and then doing the work to make it better.
These moments are easy to skip because nobody is watching, and there is always a more comfortable, cowardly option. But each small act of bravery is a brick in the structure of your agency. Over time, they add up to a different kind of life.
Taste as a Compass in Hard Times
Adversity has a way of stripping away the non-essential. When things are hard, when plans fall apart, when resources are tight, when you feel tired or lost, your taste becomes a kind of compass. You cannot do everything. You cannot fix every problem at once. In those moments, taste helps you decide what to protect and what to let go of. What you focus on and what you slip off.
Maybe you cannot chase every opportunity, but you can choose one project that still feels true. Maybe you cannot be perfect, but you can refuse to lie to yourself about what matters. Maybe you cannot keep up with every ambition, but you can protect one: showing up honestly to yourself.
Adversity also sharpens your taste. When you go through something difficult, you start to see which values are real and which were just decoration. You notice which pursuits still feel meaningful when things are heavy and which ones suddenly feel empty. If you pay attention, hard times can clean up your taste. They make it harder to fool yourself, if you are willing to listen.
Growing Your Agency
If you feel low on agency, the solution is rarely a big, dramatic gesture. You grow agency the same way you build a habit: small, repeated effort.
Some simple ways to start are to pick one small thing you have been putting off and do it today, to add the word "yet" when you catch yourself saying "I cannot" and see what changes, to set a tiny daily practice toward something you care about such as ten minutes of writing, reading, sketching, or learning, and to notice the moments you give away your choice by default, like doom-scrolling, saying yes when you mean no, avoiding hard conversations, then experiment with changing just one of those.
Each time you act differently, even in a small way, you send yourself a message: "I am not stuck. I can move." That message, repeated over months and years, compounds and changes how you see yourself.
Refining Your Taste
Attention and honesty. These are the key ingredients for growing taste. You can expose yourself to better examples of the things you care about, ask "What exactly do I like about this? What feels off?" and answer in detail, let yourself dislike things you are "supposed" to like and like things you are "not supposed" to care about, and slowly raise your standards. Attention lets you see what you are missing while honesty allows you to be accepting of what you find.
Refining taste does not mean becoming judgmental of others. It's about experimenting, observing and reflecting. It's about becoming clearer on what feels true for you. The goal is not to walk around rolling your eyes at everything. The goal is to know, with some clarity, what you value, and what does not belong in it.
Putting It All Together
Agency and taste are not things you "have" or "do not have". They are more like directions you can move toward.
Every time you take responsibility for a choice, instead of blaming the world, you move a little closer to agency. Every time you notice what actually moves you, instead of copying what everyone else values, you move a little closer to taste.
Over a long enough timeline, these small moves compound. You become someone who does not just drift, and also does not just hustle blindly. You become someone who can say, "This is the kind of life I want, this is the kind of person I want to be," and then quietly build in that direction, even when it is hard, even when it is slow.
That is why it matters to be both ambitious and brave in the face of adversity. Ambition without taste burns you out on goals that are not really yours. Taste without bravery traps you in a life you have outgrown. But when you let your taste guide your ambition, and let your agency carry it forward, you give yourself a chance at something rare: a life that feels, in a deep and steady way, like it is actually yours.