A Case for Quantity over Quality

You’ve heard the classic advice. Probably from your mother or a friend, probably unasked for.

Quality over quantity. One good song is worth more than a mediocre album. One well-made house over several of lesser construction. A few good friends worth more than 20 colleagues. 

For the most part, I consider this to be true. Especially during the pandemic, I discovered which activities and which people brought the most joy into my life.

But on this site, I am trying to learn. Trying to grow from nothing into something, and in those two areas, the opposite may be true. The quantity of work becomes more important than the quality of it.

Let me explain by borrowing an example. In the book Art and Fear, authors David Bayles and Ted Orland tell the story of a test conducted by a certain ceramics teacher.

The ceramics teacher announced 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 pounds 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, grading time came 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 around theorising about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

I’ve come to understand that learning requires action. One could spend years watching videos, reading articles and how-to’s, but could never swing a hammer as well as someone who has done so for years.

There is a separation between the real world and our hypothetical. Between the people who design the house and the people who build it. The math is never completely accurate. The end result is never like the projections. There is always a snag in the plan, a screw in the way, a hidden trick only known to those with the experience of having done it thousands of times.

Action is not easy. It requires you to get up in the morning. To put yourself out there and be judged.

It will come with failure. Your old work will flop, make you cringe, and pray nobody was around to see it.

The failure will keep you humble, though.  It will remind you that you still have a lot to learn. But you will improve. Those who put out work a hundred times compared to ten get ten times more opportunities to critique, practice, get advice, and reiterate. So the next one is better. 

I’m writing about this because you are probably going to see some shitty writing here in the near future. I’m going to be pumping out articles, experimenting, testing, some may end up alright, some may end up...less than alright. Maybe you already have seen some less than alright writing and thought it nice to keep it to yourself. I appreciate that, but I also appreciate feedback. 

If you like something on this site, dislike it, or just find it uninteresting, let me know. I can live with shitty articles. I can handle negative feedback. Only as long as my next article is less shitty than the previous.

It’s going to take time. I fully expect to look back on my past posts (even this one, maybe especially this one) and cringe. But that’s ok. Because that means that I am getting better. Because that means I am still writing. Still doing, and still learning. (Edited in 2024 to confirm that I do in fact, find this cringe).