A Toolkit for Criticism
Life abroad has become increasingly more difficult in everyday ways. Reclusion and homesickness has fully set in. For almost six days I haven't left far past my hostel room, trying to acclimate more through the home I know best—design. However, this week has had a lot of exciting launches. I just released Quill, a scheduling app with a bright and bubbly interface I created for selecting collegiate courses. I also released new work I did for Calvin College, with their new Application for Admission package and Courage and Wonder Academics piece. After that, I fine-tuned my bubbly branding for International Passport. And to top it all off, I’m still working on new branding project, independent research, a personal piece I’m designing cover-to-cover that will be printed into a hard-bound book, and a huge project on governmental design out the door. It’s been busy, and so, so rewarding.
Whether you’re a designer or not, you’re going to get thrown into an industry riddled with play-it-safers and creatures of conformity. No matter how hard you work, you’re going to get critique that’s going to make you want to renounce your entire career. You’ve got to get out of your own way and move out of your lane. And then you’re going to learn grace, use design lessons to shape your life, and you’re going to lead the pack.
It’s happened to all of us: feedback on our creative work has, at one time or another, caused us to get stuck.* Maybe a client or audience member really turned away from your work, and your confidence was shaken for the months that followed. Or a friend told you your work straight up wasn’t good, and you wasted hours or even days arguing with them in your head. Or maybe it’s the quieter criticism of no response at all that has you feeling demoralized. You’ve got to find your way back to creating consistently, in spite of the ups and downs of audience receptions to your work. And now, as a working writer and entrepreneur, again and again, I have to unhook from praise and critique all the time. I have to turn my wifi off, check my shit at the door, and make great work.
Through your work, with the general stresses of making stuff, you’re going to burn out at one point or another, all because of critique. And that’s incredibly embarrassing to admit, when you’re making stuff which is designed to reduce stress in other people. I’ve been to design competitions, where a lead designer with two masters degrees softly tell excited, budding design students that their work “just isn’t there yet”, and watched the students coil in and break down. I’ve heard seasoned designers tell designers of the same level, “Nope. I don’t know what you’re doing or where your focus is, but it’s not here right now,” and looking back to see their downcast faces. I’ve washed my hands in a bathroom of my school and seen the anxiety of the girl next to me washing her hands before a critique session. Once I gave a fellow designer a design draft, and with one brief look, handed it back saying, “What is this, some sort of childlike, Fisher-Price event? Go back and do it again.” Getting unhelpful critique sucks. Getting criticism about your work when you’re destined to your career is the worst.
Repeat after me: I will not let critique paralyze me.
Evolve the criticisms. Take them and use daily practices to completely change your relationship to criticism for the better. Here are some of my personal practices that I feed on to keep going.
Tool One: All fantastic work receives criticism.
More often than not, it’s the not feedback itself that gets us in trouble, but the way we interpret it. Being rejected is often a statement that you (or your ideas) are too far from the current mainstream of society right now to be considered comfortable. This could actually be a good thing. You’re ahead of your time. Keep killing it, man.
Tool Two: See critique as giving you information about the person giving critique—not as giving you information about yourself.
Perhaps your boss has given you the feedback that your work on a recent project is “bad”. So here’s the question: Does that give you any facts about your work, your talent? I’d argue it doesn’t. But it does tell you something about your boss’ preferences and taste.
Think back to some negative feedback you’ve received. What insight did it give you into that person’s preferences, their style, or their expectations? How does that perspective alter how the feedback feels, and what you might do about it? When you see critique in this light, it simply becomes strategically useful information that can tell us how to engage the people we want to engage: bosses, clients, colleagues, or the audience for our creative work.
Tool Three: Make your own personal manifesto. When things get rough, reflect on it.
As Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, but with the complications of daily life and criticism that you glue yourself to, you may not have taken the time to get to know yourself. Couple that with the fear you might carry about what’s really under the hood and what people could think of you and your work, and you may prefer to stay unexamined and contained forever. The problem with ignoring the deeper parts of yourself is that you disengage from a more sacred, dynamic experience of life and people. You leave the bests parts of yourself on the table, and sadly, you may not know what you’re missing.
With that, I’ve created my own manifesto that I look up to when stuff really hits the fan.
- What are your strengths? (Check out the book called the StrengthsFinder 2.0, to help you identify and learn more about your top five strengths. Build on your strengths rather than strengthening your weakness. This is a better use of your time and energy, and it gives you a real boost in self-confidence.)
- How do you want to manifest your inner traits and values?
- What challenges do you want to grow upon?
- How could your passions change the world?
Don’t expect that this will all come together in twenty minutes; it takes time to figure out who you are and what you stand for. But developing a manifesto as your personal guide is an excellent way to stay true to yourself and your goals, all while keeping to the light when criticism gets rough.
My personal manifesto that picks me up and makes me run faster. Click to enlarge.
Tool Four: No one really knows what the hell they’re doing.
Hate to break it to you, this is just one of those terrifying realizations that might trigger an existential meltdown, even in the sanest of us. Yet when it comes to creativity, this is actually enormously liberating. Human beings are comparers: our happiness depends, at least partly, on feeling better off of other’s criticisms. Research suggests that the so-called “impostor syndrome” may get worse as people get better: the more accomplished you get, the more likely you are to rub shoulders with more talented people, leaving you feeling even more inadequate by comparison. Knowing that nobody really knows what they’re doing is an invaluable reminder, as we navigate the world of creative work. Never take other people’s critique as reliable evidence of what’s going on within. We’re all in deep water, and you may feel like you’re swimming out of your depth.
But know this: if you’re worried you don’t measure up, that’s probably a sign that you do.
So this is my invitation to you. This is my invitation to free yourself from the expectations of group norms, and push the limits of novelty—hell, push the boundaries of what’s expected. This is my invitation to enhance your innate abilities by changing the way you respond to rejection. Instead of dwelling too much on the pain of being turned down or turned aside, consider the freedom you now have to explore new possibilities and less mainstream options. In the struggle for creative fuel, you must learn to use criticism. It is a renewable resource, and only through critique do we find peace of what already is and make progress.