Quantity📚 over Quality📙?

Quantity over quality. Yes, you read that right Quantity over quality. 

Even when you search the internet for why quantity is better than quality, the first result is why quality is better than quantity.

I came across this idea while reading Ali Abdaal’s Sunday Snippets newsletter.

 At first, even I was shocked. I thought to myself,

Wait this needs to be corrected. Did Ali Adbaal make a mistake? How can it be right? I gave myself some room and space to think it through. If he had written an article, it must be for a reason. There must be some truth to this and I started reading this article and researching it for a while. 

All or at least most of our lives, we have been mentored and it has been drilled into our skulls by our parents and even teachers that quality is more important than quantity.

But give this a thought and read my article below…

Here’s the classic Parable of the Pottery Class (adapted from the book Art & Fear) that illustrates this: 

• There was once a pottery teacher called Brian. One day, he decided to split his class into two groups. 

Group A - had to make a pot daily for 30 days (so 30 pots in total).

Group B - had to work on a single pot for the whole 30 days.

• At the end of the month, Brian judged the quality of the pots. Without exception, every one of the top 10 pots came from Group A, the guys that made one pot per day. None came from the group that focused on perfecting their single pot.

Furthermore, Ali says that when it comes to YouTube videos, his mantra has always been

“Your first 100 videos are going to suck. So get through those as quickly as possible, and then you will start making good stuff.  

Jef Quin says that 

1. The Math Is On Our Side 

We’re playing a numbers game here.

Bell curves and the law of averages support our scheme

Basic math tells us that the more samples we have, the more likely that one or more of them will be objectively better.

2. It’s skill building 

• When we focus on quantity over quality, we’re focusing on practicing

• As you know, practice makes perfect (well, makes better, at least) 

I’m writing this because it’s advice that I need to take myself. I have been wanting to learn how to write blogs, publish, and voice my thoughts. But what’s holding me back is a sense of “I don’t know to do this”. 

Now, I realize that I should just aim to practice summarising 100 thoughts, writing 100 blogs, and figuring the rest out along the way. The sense of perfectionism was always holding me from creating. Blog after Blog, I know that I will always improve by learning from each mistake I make and perfecting it in the next blog.

So, my kind advice is that, whenever you are beginning something, it is best to focus on quantity over quality. If you are interested in drawing, just draw 100 pictures, from picture to picture, and you will learn how to improve the contours, the shading, and the colour selection one by one. This would bring more fruit to your journey instead of just perfecting a single drawing. 

After you have reached a comfortable position where you get the idea of how it works, then focus on quality over quantity. 

So in the beginning, it is always quantity over quality, then only quality over quantity.