Don't be perfect, be prolific.

If you’ve been been around on the internet long, you’ve likely read the lesson about the pottery instructor that split her class into two groups. Whether you heard it from a chain email, a viral facebook post or a twitter thread. But if you haven’t it goes something like this:

A pottery instructor their class into two groups of students. One group would be graded on the quality of the pieces and the other group graded on the number of pieces. But by the end of the year, the students in the group graded on volume were producing pieces of higher quality than the first group.

Whether this is true or apocryphal, your guess is as good as mine. But it’s a good summation of my mantra: don’t be perfect, be prolific.

Maximizing practice

The key to improving is practice. Making mistakes, learning from them, and iterating. By focusing on volume, you maximize your at bats. You’ll run into dead ends. You’ll make mistakes you need to correct. You’ll experiment. And each of these will lead to improvement.

The problem with quality

The problem with focusing on quality is that you can get too attached. Attached to a particular path. You can be too committed to explore different options. And you can be afraid to take risks.

If you’re turning a piece of pottery, you’ll be more willing to take risks if it’s one of three dozen than if it’s one of one.

Putting this into goals

For this reason, I almost always make quantitative and not qualitative goals. Post 100 photos this year. Commit code every day. Turn 20 bowls on the lathe. Build 5 pieces of furniture. By the end of the process, I will have learned even more than I could’ve foreseen.