I'll Leave It Up To You

on omakase, trust, recommendations, introductions, and taste

Stephan Ango, one of my favorite writers and creatives (his day job is making Obsidian, the software I use to write and collect my thoughts), wrote an essay called In good hands. It's short, so I'll quote it in full:

“There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive.

I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.

I can feel it almost instantly. In any medium. Music, film, fashion, architecture, writing, software. At a Japanese restaurant it’s what omakase aims to be. I leave it up to you, chef.

When I am in good hands I open myself to a state of curiosity and appreciation. I allow myself to suspend preconceived notions. I give you freedom to take me where you want to go. I immerse myself in your worldview and pause judgement.

I want to be convinced of something new. I want my mind to be changed. Later I may disagree, but for now I am letting the experience soak in.

That trust doesn’t come easily. As an audience member it’s about feeling cared for from the moment I interact with your work. It’s about feeling a well-defined point of view permeate what you make.

If my mind was changed, I must have been in good hands.”

I shared it with some friends when Stephan published it last year, and E recently brought it back up. He said it reminds him of me:

"you're one to seek out being in good hands. Whatever the subject matter. It's admirable. There's something quite reciprocal in it too -- sharing things with you feels like I'm in good hands because of your appreciation for the feeling."

I think he's right. I crave a smoothness that comes with thoughtfulness, intention, and empathy from the creator. The feeling is abstract, and as Stephan notes, it can be experienced across domains. You can feel it when using an intuitively designed technology product, being served by a great waiter, or reading a writer with a strong voice and style. As he says, it's about trust, be it implicit or explicit. It's intuitive to be in this world they've created for you, for this moment. You're glad to be on the journey with them at the wheel.

For a while, I've been obsessed with an idea from C Thi. Nguyen. He argues game designers sculpt agency, creating tension between player abilities and goals. This creates the space for play, discovery, and growth. I'm interested in other ways to sculpt agency and make people more agentic.

That framing applies here, too: you're in good hands with the best game designers who strike the balance between a curve that's too steep that you give up trying and one that plateaus and becomes boring. In the best games, you don't even notice. The design choices fade into the background so you can play.

I love this bit about game design from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow:

“You aren’t just a gamer when you play anymore. You’re a builder of worlds, and if you’re a builder of worlds, your feelings are not as important as what your gamers are feeling. You must imagine them at all times. There is no artist more empathetic than the game designer.”

This is key to feeling in good hands: the person needs to have considered you, the audience, and realize that you'll have less context and lack their perspective. They are building a world for you to inhabit and in many creative areas, they won't be there to guide you. Even if they are hosting you, they still need to earn your trust.

The nature of this idea transcends any discipline. My friend J is an good example. He's a designer by trade and the best amateur chef I know. He could be an interior designer in another life. He loves to host and tell stories. Always, if he's the author of a situation, the feeling is that you're in good hands. I've noticed the same with Stephan in his writing and the products he creates. It's like some people have a gene that makes them this way. Or, once you learn it—probably after it is modeled to you—you can't help but want to make others feel this way.

I'm drawn to these kinds of people. Designers, artists, writers—thoughtful people. I'd like to be more like them. Candidly, if there is a gene, I'm not sure I have it. I don't make many things. At first, I wasn't sure how to feel about E's comment. It's nice to feel in good hands, but I don't just want to be on the receiving end.

While I hope to have lots of making in my future, I think E nailed it in a way I didn't realize at first. I am constantly trying to give others this experience, and I'm doing so when I make recommendations. It's one of the things I do most in my life. I simply can't help myself. I write a newsletter on the premise. I get high off the idea that I might share something (or someone) with another person that brings them joy, clarity, or opportunity. I feel like I'm connecting some invisible set of dots for them or showing them that I see them.

I'm sure it's exhausting for my friends sometimes. Sorry about that, but I won't stop. While I'm obsessive in recommending some things to just about everyone (see: The Bear s2e7, Tomorrow x3, The Dark Forest, Before Sunset, About Time…), my favorite is recommending something I think you, specifically, will love.

I love recommending art and media, but my favorite kind of recommendation is introducing people. An introduction implies you're in good hands here: I think you two might connect on something. What a delight, especially if non-obvious!

Some recommendations or introductions can feel a bit like a riddle. It's saying: there's something in here that made me think of you. My friend T is great at this. Her rec's make me feel like she peered inside my brain and used AI to generate something that would light me up. Similarly, the best introductions can be the most unlikely ones. The ones that only could have happened if someone saw both of you and a hidden link.

There's probably another essay to be written about it, but all of this starts to tease some truth about the ever-elusive idea of taste. Whether there's objectivity to taste or not, I think the foundation is the feeling of being in good hands. Taste is mainly discussed externally: when we talk about someone having good taste, we mean what they share or display is coherent to us. Knowing another person's taste is seeing them. Making a recommendation is finding the overlap in the Venn diagram and offering it.

Perhaps that's the truth underlying the creative advice to make things for yourself. If you know your own taste and make things that fit it, you're more likely to create something cohesive for someone else. As Stephan notes, this feeling doesn't happen when you give someone what they think they want. It comes when you give them something they weren't looking for. When you create a space for them to say, "I'll leave it up to you."