You post a video online. It has music, clean cuts, and a rhythm that feels right. You didn’t do it randomly. While editing, you had a rough idea of how you wanted it to feel. You followed your instinct.
The video does well. A hundred likes. A few nice comments. Your brain picks up on this quickly. You put in effort and got something back. That feels good. Your mind quietly notes this as something worth doing again. So you open your editing software again. You use a similar style. Similar pacing. Similar music. It works again. Nothing feels wrong.
That first edit was driven by intuition. And intuition is real. It’s how you feel timing and flow before you can explain it. But early intuition is still rough. It can tell when something feels right, not always why it does.
When people respond positively, that intuition feels validated. The edit worked, so the thinking behind it must have been right too - or at least that’s what your brain assumes. It feels like the loop is done. Because of that, there’s no strong reason to sit with the edit for longer. The job feels finished. You don’t pull it apart. You just try to make the next one work the same way.
Around here, you start feeling comfortable. Not cocky, just reassured. And that's a bit problematic.
This is where the Dunning–Kruger effect helps explain what’s going on.
The Dunning–Kruger effect describes how people with limited skill tend to overestimate their ability, not because they’re arrogant, but because they lack the awareness to see what they’re missing yet. When you don’t yet know what great editing looks like, decent editing feels exceptional. And when decent work gets rewarded publicly, that illusion hardens.
Social media makes this worse. It reacts fast. It rewards energy and familiarity. It doesn’t wait for deeper things to show up. So attention starts feeling like proof. And slowly, without noticing, it replaces understanding.
That doesn’t mean feedback is useless. It just means it tells you something else.
If you really want to get better, you have to keep the loop open. Even after an edit works, you need to sit with it. Ask what actually mattered. What held the edit together. What could be removed without breaking it.
That’s where taste comes in. Taste is simply the ability to notice, to see why one piece of work feels better than another. And over time, to move your own work closer to that. As taste improves, things change. You start seeing problems in work you once liked. Stuff that felt exciting now feels obvious or heavy. That’s uncomfortable, but it’s part of growing. Taste usually moves faster than skill. You can see more than you can do. That gap feels frustrating, but it’s also a good sign. It means you’re paying attention.
This isn’t just about video editing. The same thing happens in writing, design, coding - anything where instinct, feedback, and skill converge. People who improve aren’t the ones who ignore praise. They’re the ones who don’t stop thinking because of it. Over time, your skills catch up. The gap gets smaller. Confidence comes back, but it’s different now. Less about being seen. More about getting it right. Attention still feels nice. It just stops being the thing you build on. What keeps growing instead is taste. And once that’s there, learning starts taking care of itself.
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