Reining in Criticism

The advice Dan Reynolds gave to young people on the Lex Fridman podcast resonated with me and gave me a new perspective on something I have been struggling with. To summarize Dan’s advice:

Self-criticism and outside-criticism pushes you, but too much criticism, and you can kill the artist.

I am no stranger in using criticism to push myself to be better. For years self-criticism has had a profound positive effect in my professional life. I have used it to hone my programming knowledge, craft, and skills over 20 years. Where my problem lies is I have used that same intense degree of criticism that benefits improving my programming skills today to new pursuits that I am only in the early stages of fostering. My takeaway:

Different pursuits in life require different degrees of criticism. Failure to do so and you can kill off that new pursuit before that spark even had a chance to ignite a new worthwhile pursuit.

I recognize that I have killed off a lot of personal projects in recent years due to self-criticism. I have written a couple opinion pieces and various streams of consciousness where I start of with every intention of publishing the work. After spending hours researching, writing, editing, I end up just archiving the work and never publishing it. I tell myself what I have created is not really interesting, or it is not earth-shattering, or that whatever I have just written will get lost in the noise, or could in fact just be amplifying the noise problem (There’s that self critical voice again).

The advice given by Dan is why I am pressing the publish button on this article. I press the button without applying any pressure to myself that there needs to be another post.

-HumdrumPotato