We’ve internalised the idea of quality over quantity. You hear and read that often. We understand that if we don’t make anything of quality, the world will reject it.
Quality becomes a filter through which you view your tasks, small or big. It turns into a self-limiting factor preventing you from trying things.
New ideas and shoots of optimism die at the altar of quality. The Quality monster looks for any sign of weakness in an idea, chomps it up and spits it out. All you end up with are a pile of dead ideas that never see the light of day.
If you achieved quality in your first attempt at something, that’s mostly down to luck. It’s not repeatable or scalable—a one-hit-wonder.
However, if you arrived at quality through experiments and failures, tweaked and improved your method along the way to finally produce a quality outcome, then you can systemise that process. And then scale it.
Quality is a by-product of a process. You can’t start with quality. It’s what you end up with. You measure the outcome, not what you start with.
No one remembers the bad stuff. Unless it’s so spectacularly bad that it turns into a meme.
To create quality you need quantity.
Quantity is the precondition to quality. Quantity is the precursor to quality.
Investors hedge their bets. They don’t make a single bet and go all-in on it. That is extremely risky. They make many investments. The success ratio is small, but those that succeed make up for all the bad investments—the 80/20 principle.
How does this impact our work? One big project, that one big campaign or that mega launch. It’s tempting.
Our work experience shows that a quality website is an end product of an iterative process. A process that involves many experiments done over a period of time. And it’s an ongoing journey.
You run many marketing experiments; some succeed, some don’t. But you keep tweaking. You write many blog posts or YouTube videos; some do well, others don’t.
You keep composing songs; some turn out great, others are average. But do it for long consistently enough, and people appreciate the body of work along with the few great ones you produced during that process.
Creativity is often associated with quality. Something ethereal. Unexplainable beauty created through a moment of inspiration and magic.
As Steve Jobs once said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”, you can argue nothing is original. But also the notion that creativity happens during certain moments, and you need to wait for it.
Here’s a good article that busts that myth and suggests how you can program creativity.
Some of the myths around it include drugs, alcohol and other intoxicants or that one must have deep sadness and sorrow to produce art which is considered great. Many great artists were tormented souls, but it shouldn’t be a condition to produce great content.
As Elizabeth Gilbert suggests, ancient philosophies treated genius and, therefore, creativity as external. Something that you were not responsible for. Creativity is not internal but external.
When someone is in ‘flow’ and producing their best work, you say they’re in a trance or possessed. So your work of art is not because of you, but an external force, and you’re just a vessel.
The later centuries created this idea of the artist and the genius being one, which meant the ownership and responsibility of creativity were on the individual. She says this is too much of a burden to put oneself under, and it is rather easier for the mind to consider “genius” as an external source. And to tap into it means to be diligent in your work, show up every day, and produce, even when you don’t feel up to it.
