Excellent ways to critique someone else’s idea

Feeling the urge to critique someone else’s creativity or business idea?

Here are some ways to do it that add value (instead of animosity):

1. Create an alternative
2. Improve on the idea’s limitations
3. Identify the problem they were trying to solve – and solve it
4. Challenge them to a public duel to duke it out over who solves it better
5. Have compassion for their attempt & see the value in trying
6. Back it financially to help give the creator time to improve it
7. Write a review that reflects on the work
8. Forget about their idea and focus on your own

Less than excellent ways to critique someone’s idea:

1. Poke holes, bitch, moan, and carry on
2. Hold secret gossip fests
3. Make the critique personal and mean
4. Like the idea but hope it fails anyway
5. Identify the problem, but do nothing

How to flip the narrative on critiques:

This little blog may not seem like much. But it had a long journey to be here. One that involved neural activity, conscious experience, and cognitive process. It was made via not one but three parts of the brain, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala, I suspect in a big cauldron with a large wooden spoon by the mouse that runs the power in my brain on low energy days.

Neurons fired after sensory input via my eyes and my fingers as I wrote collided. I remembered how to hold the pen, how to write, what to write, and to make sure I could read my handwriting later.

From here, the information touched the inside of my perceptions, asking to come out. It was refined and grown to realisation by the careful guardianship of neurotransmitters and neurons. I had to work through the formation of the idea, and then put it into a feedback loop as I refined it.

During that feedback loop, my brain actively tried to sabotage me by introducing past history and self doubt. I narrowly escaped the carping voices that said this was just a silly idea. Then, my decision-fatigue decided to have a crack. That meant I sat for almost two hours trying to figure out whether this should be a social media carousel, a new section on my Substack, a note on Substack, a pithy post on Facebook, this blog, or to stay in my journal. I still haven’t decided if it lands twice.

All because I was inspired while I read a book and it mixed in with some weird gatekeeping moment where someone explained rather earnestly how people should and shouldn’t create things who replied, “I haven’t had time to write seriously recently…” before trailing off as their own words hit their ears.

Let us all be someone else’s excellent way to critique ideas. Don’t you think?