Toggle your inner critic

Creators must learn to toggle their inner critic. Don’t make self-criticism a default mode.

TL;DR: Learn to activate and deactivate the “self-judgment persona” rather than considering it a part of your nature. Your taste is valuable and important, especially as it gets more honed. However, it’s also a disabling force if you can’t turn it off.

This weekend, I shared time with my kinder daughter/art director with some watercolors. What emerged was either a majestic mountain landscape or a dinosaur eating spaghetti. The jury’s still out.

I finally stopped pretending I was “just supervising” and actually painted. Immediately, my inner critic showed up like clockwork.

Every brushstroke screamed “amateur hour.” The gap between my taste and my talent was wider than my pandemic sourdough phase.

But I kept going.

Not because it would be fridge-worthy. Not because MoMA would call.

But because I realized something I keep relearning: the magic happens between doing and reviewing — not in the judgment parade that follows every first attempt.

My daughter looked at my painting and said, “Dad, why does your tree look angry?

She wasn’t wrong.

Here’s where this connects to what we do every day.

The best engineers I’ve worked with have extraordinary taste — a finely tuned sense for what good looks like.

That taste is a superpower during code review, during architecture decisions, during debugging. But that same instinct, running unbounded during creation, is a resource leak.

It kills the exploratory PR you never open. It damns us to forget to “just get it working” then “make it pretty.

The bold refactor you talk yourself out of. The half-formed idea you don’t share in the design review because it’s “not ready.

We’ve learned to separate writing code from reviewing code. We don’t run the full CI pipeline on every keystroke.

But somehow we refuse to give ourselves that same separation when it comes to anything creative or risky or new.

I question whether we’ve ruined “creator” by stapling it to outcomes and metrics. We measure sprint velocity, code coverage, deployment frequency — and the implicit message becomes: if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t count. Meanwhile, the work we could genuinely love doing gets strangled by comparison and judgment before it breathes.

In a world where machines optimize everything, our ability to make something — and enjoy making it, badly — might be the most human skill we have left.

I left that painting session proud.

Definitely, not of the painting. I connected with my daughter.

I felt real moments of peace finding the right color, watching a stroke land as I hoped, or fixing a blotch with a slightly smaller blotch.

My muse outlasted my critic, even if just barely.

I can’t imagine a world where I don’t create things — good, bad, or mysteriously angry.

When’s the last time you built something knowing it may be thrown away?