If we truly look at we humans have achieved over the centuries, what we have created, it has been a reflection of how we wish to improve things.
A sculptor looks at stone and wishes to make it in a different image, an artist finds a way to decorate a blank canvas, a writer empowers imagination through words on blank pages – and we all decorate time. In fact, we regularly graffiti the tyrannical walls of time with our creativity.
We criticize by creating, our every invention a way an attempt to improve upon what already exists – or we would not create it at all.
Too often we get into a spiral of criticizing things without actually making things better, like over-exuberant sculptors working on sandstone with a sledgehammer, when maybe what we should be doing is simply building something different.
Sadly, it is not as easy these days to build great things- large companies seem to have sucked all the air out of the room in many contexts – but it doesn’t stop us from creating the small things, the little things that make the big things, the words that make the sentences that make the paragraphs.
I often have to remind myself of Michelangelo’s words: Criticize by creating.
Until the last decade or so,