Taste is not innate. It is a trained instinct built from exposure, constraint, and time spent paying attention to things most people skip past.

The people whose work feels "obviously right" — Emil Kowalski, Benji Taylor, the Vercel design team — all share a habit: they collect references obsessively. Screenshots, recordings, products opened just to feel them. The library is the training set.

What this means in practice

Build a reference library. Save the interactions, animations, and screens that stop you. Re-watch them when stuck.
Constraints breed taste. Limiting yourself to two fonts and three colors forces decisions. Unlimited choice is paralyzing and tends to produce average work.
Imitate before deviating. The first hundred buttons should look like buttons. Originality earned after fluency lasts. Originality before fluency reads as confusion.
Taste compounds with care. The first version of a thing should be ugly. The third version starts to feel inevitable.

When to use this knowledge

When the user says "I don't know why this feels off" — the answer is usually that they haven't looked at enough reference yet. Ask what they've been studying.
When choosing between two valid approaches — usually one is closer to what the user's reference set looks like. That one wins.
When justifying time spent on polish that "doesn't matter" — see feeling-right and delight-impact-curve.

Gotcha

Don't confuse taste with novelty. A button that looks exactly like Linear's is more tasteful than a button that "innovates" with a gradient and a custom shape. Imitation of considered work is taste; reinvention of solved problems is not.

Sources

Emil Kowalski, emilkowal.ski — "Taste is trained, not innate."
Benji Taylor, benji.org — collecting references as a daily habit.
guidelines.sh — "Taste is opinions; collect references obsessively."