If you're a regular reader of the Seven Deadly Sins Homepage, you may have noticed that the site has undergone substantial cosmetic surgery recently. It was long overdue. When I first decided to mix up my avocation and vocation and become a website designer, the Homepage served as a convenient example for potential clients. It appears as one of the "examples" on the webpage of my new consulting business. The site was notable to potential clients not because it was particularly well-designed, but because it receives around 1,500 visitors every week and has received mentions in Entertainment Weekly online magazine and the web edition of the London Telegraph. It pays for its own administrative costs (and my Internet access) through book marketing and banner ads, which should suggest to clients that we know a bit about successfully marketing the sites we build. But in terms of design, it was impressive only to the uninitiated surfer. I started the site back when I was learning HTML, and some parts of it showed off my early lack of expertise in stunning detail.

It's not easy showing professional colleagues and potential consulting employers a website which serves as a public ventilation valve for embarrassing revelations and incendiary statements. I've been bridling at the sensation that the attention has partially squelched the freedom of expression that should be the standard here. It's true that some friends and family are regular readers -- I've had conversations and emails that demonstrate they haven't always been happy with what they read. I generally put aside the idea that they might read a particular entry as I write it, then slap the Tale up on the page before the implications can really be considered. But knowing your next boss might be reading about your first sexual encounter, or discovering that what you most fear is changing into an animal, is another thing entirely. If piss off your family, and you still have a family. Piss off your new boss and you might end up sucking down Ramen noodles to make next month's rent.

Knowing that potential clients were coming to the Seven Deadly Sins, I'd already planned to do a little makeover. Hopefully, the style would be sufficiently impressive that they wouldn't find their way into any damaging substances. But what really prompted the update was a totally unrelated event: I received my first genuine bad review.

I get a lot of email from yokels and zealots telling me what a shitty human being I am for mocking god-given truths, but no one had ever suggested that I was shitty and untalented. Then a friend of my business partner wrote her to say that he didn't think much of thought the websites I had done, including this site and the business site. What he actually said was something about quality that could be expected from Kinko's employees, or by a 14 year-old girl. That was the most vicious critique: I didn't even reach the level of a techno-savvy 14 year-old boy.

I have on my side three facts, in increasing order of significance: 1) I've received quite positive reviews on the sites, 2) some people have been sufficiently impressed to hire me to design their websites, and 3) this guy may hate my guts because I'm dating his best friend's soon-to-be-ex wife.

Yet despite these perfectly logical rebuttals and explanations for this fellow's words, I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time redoing the site's graphics, redesigning the front page, restructuring pages on each of the sins, and just generally buffing things up. The result isn't exactly state-of-the-art, but it's pleasing to the eye, and it makes me feel my first virtual child has made it successfully from diapers through potty training. As I worked, I found myself thinking: what is it about criticism that energizes me so much? Why is it so motivating to have some Silicon Valley digerato with a chip on his shoulder give me the finger?

When I was an art student, I had to show my works-in-progress to a group of professors and students every week. I always got more from a bad critique than an approving one. A positive critique left me somewhat paralyzed; it was so much easier to respond when they disliked what I was working on. Either I admitted that they were right, or was reminded that they were a bunch of cretins whose opinions were to be quietly but actively ignored. In art and life, it's harder to know what to do with love than with hate. You rarely hear people say, "Jim really hates me, but I don't know how I feel about him."

Hate is just a far simpler emotion than its more delicate cousins. We come to know ourselves not only by forming beliefs, but by rejecting others. Whether you are a member of the Bar Association, a citizen of the City of Atlanta, a supporter of the Hezbolah, or a gay white male, it is often as important to know what you reject as it is to embrace where you belong. To most of us, the adolescent act of rejection stays forever the simpler and more comfortable means of knowing ourselves. It certainly worked for me: getting mad at my invisible critic pushed me to do more work on the website than the insistent pressure to please other viewers ever had. Maybe someday I'll fully know the motivational power of love, but in the meantime, I owe my critic a sincere thanks.