Quantity Before Quality

Technically, this phrase is really about practise. When you write your first essay, neither the penmanship nor the argumentation can be compared to your 100th.

That said, I feel like "practise"often evokes the image of doing drills. The kind where instead of actually playing tunes on the piano, you restrict yourself to nothing but scales until you've mastered that, or, say, infinitely filling out grammar exercises because speaking requires more competence than you feel you have. This is why I've trashed the ol' practice makes perfect and came up with quantity before quality. I feel like it captures the essence of learning better. Hang this motto on your wall, folks.

I should probably point out that I am not against drills. Exercises and drills do have their place. You're just better off knowing precisely why you're doing them. For example, you've made several attempts at, say, drawing a cat, and you realize that paws are very difficult for you to draw, despite evenly progressing on other cat body part drawing skills. You then set out to draw a variety of just paws so that your cat pictures can have believable appendages. However, if, like many other people, you're doing drills "because you're supposed to, I guess," they won't do you much good.

This goes for anything we do in life, including mundane activities like navigating, speaking, and housework. When you're used to being competent, it can be quite difficult to feel incompetent again. Young children have great ambiguity tolerance (ie. tolerance for their own incompetence due to a lack of understanding) because they have no frame of reference for how they're supposed to do things, so they fail, get frustrated, and then go right back to doing whatever it is again until they succeed. Older folks, on the other hand, have had many years of feeling competent, so their ambiguity tolerance is very low. Lots of us don't factor this in and grow disenchanted when we don't get high-level results in a short amount of time, then give up because we don't believe we have the talent (how I hate that word).

What's to be done? We really need to shift our perspective on failure. We can't keep coveting perfect results the way we currently do. It's unrealistic and counterproductive. Instead, I propose to see the process itself as a challenge. Rephrase it the following way: WHAT can I do given my current level of skill, tool set, etc? Be open to whatever comes out of it. Find something to enjoy about the process. Keep on trucking till you look back at a recent success and realize you're finally starting to enjoy the results as well. Here's a great video from Extra Credits about the same idea through the lens of developing video games.

The trick is to keep reflecting on what we've made, regardless of what emotion it evokes, to understand what exactly you'd like to do differently. What makes you cringe? "It's bad, I hate my performance" is too vague, but "I said 'um' every other word and repeated myself a lot" is precise enough to know where to start polishing. That's the kind of reflection that allows you to build on what's already there instead of tearing yourself down and throwing in the towel.

You'll probably hear me repeat "quantity before quality" often in this blog. Honestly, I do still struggle with it at times, but overall it really helps stretch your limits and prevents your imagination from freaking you out with instant worst case scenarios of failure. It really sunk in for me when my art teacher told me the following advice after another unsuccessful attempt to put my stuff in a gallery:

"The problem is exactly as they said. You don't have your own style. Draw 300 landscapes, and you'll have a style. The 301st painting will be considered. The 500th one will be accepted along with maybe 10 others, because out of 500 pieces with a recognizable style, there's definitely going to be 10 good ones. The rest will still probably be crap but some will find their own appreciators too. And that's ok. It's ok to make something you consider crap for a while. You just need to figure out how to enjoy making this crap. And that's just landscapes. You wanna sell portraits too, you'll have to make twice as much crap at first."

He has a point.