I've been struggling with this a lot recently, but what I've been trying to do lately is dissect that exact question and sort of question the axioms it's based on:

- is it actually impossible for me to critique myself and enjoy the things I've made, or is that a restriction that I've just made up in my mind?

- is it actually necessary for me to think something is high quality to enjoy it? Is it OK for me to enjoy something even if the flaws are obvious to me?

- is there a process here that's enjoyable independent of the output, regardless of whether or not what I make is good?

- is my 'cringe' about the things I make primarily motivated by my internal taste, or about my worry that the things I make won't meet other people's expectations? Is my desire to create things that look good to other people different from my internal pride about my own work, and should I treat them differently?

- is there an enjoyable aspect to stretching myself even if that means I fail more often? If I put a game to a higher difficulty, do I have less fun just because I'm being challenged more and die more often? So similarly, if I explore a medium or try a programming task that I'm not great at, should I be getting so discouraged about occasionally "failing" at it?

----

I think that it's not necessarily the case that enjoying something needs to be linked to its overall quality. And especially with creative work, I've been trying recently to get better about releasing things that I think are explicitly bad, and saying, "okay, I stink at this and the end result is terrible, but that doesn't necessarily mean I should feel bad looking at it or showing it to other people." And I'm not sure that getting rid of all the criticism centers of my brain or convincing myself that I'm a genius is necessary to get to that state. I think it's possible (albeit very difficult) for me to look at something I've made and see 100 flaws and still say, "I like the parts of it that aren't flaws, and I think those parts are cool."

I'm not sure that it's healthy as an artist to even focus at all on whether or not you're good at something, just focus on getting better regardless of what your current skill level is. "Good" is kind of a wishy-washy term anyway. And I'm not sure it's healthy (at least for the way I work) to couple my enjoyment of the things I do to whether or not I think I'm good at them.

But :shrug: I'm not sure. I do think that the original quote is less about "here's how you should think of your work, and is more about "you probably already have a tendency to think about your work this way, so don't feel so isolated about that or get too discouraged." Because it is discouraging and I think a lot of artists and creators struggle with the fact that they can see very clearly where they want to be and where they are, and they're not where they want to be -- and speaking personally, it's not something I had ever really vocalized to myself before originally hearing that quote, and I remember it being very cathartic to realize, "actually yeah, this is why I'm frustrated about everything I'm doing -- because my ability to critique my work is more developed than my ability to make it." It's not really saying that's the ideal, it's just describing a thing that happens to a lot of people.

The original quote I heard was in a slightly different context: it was a game dev who brought up the same idea and then cautioned that the way a lot of developers internalize that mental conflict is that they never implement ideas or finish projects, because thinking about the theoretically perfect version of the thing in their head is always easier than looking at the objectively less perfect, sometimes kind of terrible thing they've made. His advice was, if you're in that position, recognize it and try to take steps to get more comfortable with messiness and imperfections, because it can be a huge barrier to ever actually implementing and practicing ideas.