Being Overly Critical

Being of a critical bent of mind is unambiguously a good thing, as long as you can be equally critical of your own work, and accept others' criticism of your work with good grace. Years of working as a journalist has sharpened my bull-shit meter, and I'm instinctively skeptical of new claims and ideas. Yes, picking holes in an idea or an argument is easy, coming up with new ideas or arguments much less so. That said, coming up with new ideas is a long process of picking and patching holes, until the end product has more flesh than holes. It is often the manner rather than content of criticism that causes it not to go down well. Today, I was guilty of picking holes in a new friend's ideas, and he was none too pleased about it. I thought I had gotten better at tempering my criticism, but it turns out I still slip up. To remind myself of what it feels like to be criticised, I want back to my last experience of criticism that felt like a sock on the jaw(chronicled here and here). Reading the blogs was a humbling experience.