Quantity leads to quality.
That’s the assertion I’ve seen outlined a few places recently, including this article from Chris Do from The Futur.
I wasn’t immediately convinced, but this story from the book Art and Fear made me give it a second thought. The story goes that:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
The story checks out with my experience. Early in my career, I was constantly trying to do as many things as I could as fast as I could.
Then recently (like last year), I had a lightbulb moment that I could focus my efforts on the more high leverage tasks and not focus as much on quantity, but instead could turn more attention to quality.
I was convinced that quality over quantity was the solution and probably something that I’d tell my younger self if I had a chance to go back and offer my younger self some advice.
But the more I thought about my own experience, the more I realized that I had to take the quantity road first in order for me to be able to take the quality road later on.
It turns out, there is no shortcut there. You just need to focus on ongoing consistency.
So what does this have to do with an “experiment”?
Well, basically, I’d like to experiment with the validity of this approach by spending as much of 2020 as I can trying maximize the volume of content I produce this year.
I want to see if my writing speed and quality actually improve over time by focusing purely on quantity.
I hope you stick around and watch.