Acquired Taste

I was waiting on a friend at a coffee shop last week and struck up a conversation with the barista. He started walking me through the different ways to brew a cup and how each one pulls something different out of the same beans. I nodded along like a man who knew what he was talking about.

I don't. I've never been a coffee guy. I don't like hot drinks, I don't love bitter, and this is the real problem: I've never been a sipper.

I'm the youngest of three boys, which means eating in my house was a contact sport. Slow eaters didn't get seconds. So I learned to eat like an inmate: big bites, casseroles with everything mixed together, no lingering. Then I played sports, where you're always moving from class to work to practice and you eat in the truck on the way. Gulp, don't sip. Fuel up and go.

Useful adaptations at the time. Terrible qualities if you ever want to appreciate a good cup of coffee. Or a glass of whiskey. Or wine.

Gulped coffee tastes like shoveled dirt. Gulped whiskey is like drinking gasoline. Gulped wine is like biting into a lemon.

But sip them, and the structure starts to make sense. The notes separate out. You start to catch what the person who made it was going for.

What it Means

For most of my life I thought "acquired taste" meant some people were born with the palate and I wasn't one of them.

It means exactly what it says. The taste is acquired. Nobody's first pour is a thoughtful evaluation of the finish. Your first one burns and you wonder what's wrong with everyone else. The appreciation isn't waiting there for you at the start. You have to build it, and you build it by putting in reps that aren't enjoyable yet.

Which means gulping isn't the failure. Gulping is stage one. You can't sip something you've never tasted. You don't have the palate yet.

I'm Gulping Right Now

I'm two months into a new career and the expression people use is drinking from a firehose. That's accurate. There's more information coming at me than I can process, and I'm swallowing most of it whole without tasting it. Terms I half understand. Systems I'm operating by imitation. Conversations where I catch maybe seventy percent.

That's what being new feels like, and I've stopped apologizing for it. The volume has to come first. You take in more than you can appreciate, badly, for a while, because that's the only way to build the palate that makes appreciation possible later.

What I'm watching for is the shift. At some point the firehose becomes a glass, and the glass becomes something you can actually taste. Then the work changes. Instead of just getting it down, you start noticing structure. Why that call went well and the last one didn't. What the good ones do differently. The notes.

The Cost of Rushing

Rushing and wanting to be done feel the same while you're doing it. The difference is that one is about getting the volume in, and the other is about getting out of the part where you're bad at it.

We rush learning because we want to get to the other side of it, where we know the thing and don't have to try anymore. So we cram. We imitate without understanding. We look for the shortcut that skips the unpleasant reps. And what we're really trying to skip is the part where we're bad at it, which is also the only part that builds the palate.

You can't rush experience. You can put in more reps, sooner, more deliberately, but you can't compress the number of times you have to do something before you understand it from the inside. Mastery isn't just knowing how. It's appreciating why it works, which only shows up after enough exposure that the structure becomes visible.

Nobody skips from first sip to sommelier.

So the honest question isn't whether you're rushing. When you're new, you should be taking it in faster than you can process. The question is whether you've stayed a gulper long after you had the palate to do better — still shoveling it down out of habit, still trying to get through the thing instead of into it.

What are you still gulping that you've earned the right to sip?

—Ricky