Martin Müller designs covers for Specious Books

The project was inspired by the dilemma graphic designers and illustrators are so often faced with in commissioned projects – all your efforts won’t heighten the quality of a poorly written book.

Most times, ideacide hap­pens with­out us even real­iz­ing it. A pos­si­ble off-the-wall idea or solu­tion appears like a blip and dis­ap­pears with­out us even real­iz­ing. As a result, some of our best stuff is sup­pressed before even get­ting out into the world. Whether it’s because we’re too crit­i­cal or because we recoil at the impend­ing pain of change, the dis­rup­tion of nor­mal­cy, self-cen­sor­ing aris­es out of fear. Welsh nov­el­ist Sarah Waters sums it up elo­quent­ly: “Mid­way through writ­ing a nov­el, I have reg­u­lar­ly expe­ri­enced moments of bow­el-cur­dling ter­ror, as I con­tem­plate the dri­v­el on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick suc­ces­sion, the deri­sive reviews, the friends’ embar­rass­ment, the fail­ing career, the dwin­dling income, the repos­sessed house, the divorce…”
We know self-cen­sor­ing by many names. Carl Jung called it our “inner crit­ic.” Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers called it the “voice of judg­ment” in their clas­sic book, Cre­ativ­i­ty in Busi­ness, based on a pop­u­lar course they co-taught at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty Grad­u­ate Busi­ness School. Nov­el­ist and screen­writer Steven Press­field called it “Resis­tance,” writ­ing that it is “the most tox­ic force on the plan­et” and that it is “a mon­ster.”

 

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One touch of a red-hot stove is usu­al­ly all we need to avoid that kind of dis­com­fort in the future. The same is true as we expe­ri­ence the emo­tion­al sen­sa­tion of stress from our first instances of social rejec­tion or ridicule. We quick­ly learn to fear and thus auto­mat­i­cal­ly avoid poten­tial­ly stress­ful sit­u­a­tions of all kinds, includ­ing the most com­mon of all: mak­ing mis­takes. Researchers Robert Rein­hart and Geof­frey Wood­man of Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty refer to this phe­nom­e­non as the “Oops! Response,” which is the prod­uct of the adren­a­line-fueled, threat-pro­tec­tion sys­tem in our brain that not only gov­erns our fight-flight-sur­ren­der response, but that also enables us to learn from our mis­takes. This response is impor­tant for our abil­i­ty to learn from mis­takes, but it also gives rise to self-crit­i­cism, because it is part of the threat-pro­tec­tion sys­tem. In oth­er words, what keeps us safe can go too far, and keep us too safe. In fact, it can trig­ger self-cen­sor­ing.

This response is impor­tant for our abil­i­ty to learn from mis­takes, but it also gives rise to self-crit­i­cism, because it is part of the threat-pro­tec­tion sys­tem. In oth­er words, what keeps us safe can go too far, and keep us too safe. In fact, it can trig­ger self-cen­sor­ing.

Our great­est weak­ness lies in giv­ing up. The most cer­tain way to suc­ceed is always to try just one more time.

That imme­di­ate­ly brought to mind one of my fond­est mem­o­ries, involv­ing my daugh­ter when she was just a tod­dler of one: tak­ing her with me on the short walk to check the mail. I live in a small enclave of homes in which all the mail­box­es are togeth­er in a cen­tral loca­tion, less than a minute’s walk from my front door…when I walk alone, that is. When I would take my daugh­ter with me it was eas­i­ly 20 min­utes. Every­thing along the way, to and from, fas­ci­nat­ed her: every peb­ble, ant, stick, leaf, blade of grass, and crack in the side­walk was some­thing to be picked up, looked at, tast­ed, smelled, and shak­en. Every­thing was inter­est­ing to her. She knew noth­ing. I knew everything…been there, done that. She was in the moment, I was in the past. She was mind­ful. I was mind­less.

Default­ing to Mind­ful­ness: The Third Per­son Effect

Part of the answer is some­thing psy­chol­o­gists refer to it as self-dis­tanc­ing, a term coined by researchers Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk. What spurred Ethan Kross to inves­ti­gate the con­cept in the first place was an act of mind­less­ness: He acci­den­tal­ly ran a red light. He scold­ed him­self by say­ing out loud, “Ethan, you idiot!” Refer­ring to him­self in the third per­son made him won­der if there might be some­thing more to this quirk of speech, and if it might rep­re­sent a method for chang­ing one’s per­spec­tive.

The short answer is yes. Accord­ing to Kross, when you think of your­self as anoth­er per­son, it allows you give your­self more objec­tive, help­ful feed­back.

Both of these assump­tions, of course, could be entire­ly false. Self-cen­sor­ing is firm­ly root­ed in our expe­ri­ences with mis­takes in the past and not the present. The brain mes­sages aris­ing from those expe­ri­ences can be decep­tive. And if what our cen­sor­ing self thinks it “knows” may in fact not be true, then auto­mat­i­cal­ly accept­ing it as some sort of inert truth is indeed mind­less and self-defeat­ing. Langer agrees: “When you think ‘I know’ and ‘it is,’ you have the illu­sion of know­ing, the illu­sion of cer­tain­ty, and then you’re mind­less.” Langer argues that we must learn to look at the world in a more con­di­tion­al way, ver­sus an absolute way. Under­stand­ing that the way we are look­ing at things is mere­ly one among many dif­fer­ent ways of look­ing at them requires us to embrace uncer­tain­ty.

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