Merry Christmas all. Here’s an excerpt from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s Art & Fear: 

“[A] 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 theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

From my experience blogging, quantity, or the frequency of writing, matters far more than the quality of any individual post. When I began posting three times a week instead of just once, my writing became noticeably quicker and smoother and my ideas came out more clearly. There is something powerful to be gained by constant repetition and incremental improvements across time.

I’m sure that this also applies to other domains. Ali Abdaal has said that the first 50 YouTube videos you create will be terrible, and this is part of the process; the Beatles famously performed over 1000 times on stage before their first great success; and the generally accepted 10,000 hour rule, popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, is testament to the power of showing up. Small things every day lead to something big.

Quantity leads to quality.