This story comes from the book Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland and has been used to educate and train workplace employees for the past decade. It’s an important analogy, and helps us determine what are the most efficient and best ways for practicing, learning, and delivering quality solutions to problems.
A ceramics teacher announces on opening day that he’ll divide the class into two groups – on the left side, students would be graded solely on the quantity of the work, and on the right they would be solely graded on the quality of a single piece of work.
For the quality group, students would only need to produce one pot, a perfect pot, to earn an A. For the quantity group, students would have to create 50 pounds of pot for an A, 40 for a B, and so on.
Can you guess which group created a higher quality pot?
It seems intuitive that the quality group would make a higher quality pot – after all, they had all that time to theorize and craft the perfect pot. The quality group had to make so many pounds of pot to earn an A.
Well, on grading day, a curious fact emerged – the highest quality works were created by the group graded for quantity.
Instead of sitting around theorizing what would go into a perfect quality pot, and spending hours working on just one pot, they had the hands-on experience of making dozens of pots. They learned what worked and what didn’t through their personal experience, and eventually mastered the art of crafting pots.
We’re often trained to believe that quality is far superior to quantity – what’s the point of doing a lot if none of it is good? We’re also trained to believe that perfectionists have the right mindset – it’s always good to strive for the highest quality of something – and pointing out faults is just being meticulous with your work.
But in fact, several times the opposite will be true – those who are willing to work past imperfections and continue their work will learn what works and what doesn’t work for them. They’ll eventually get to the point where they have perfected their craft – whatever that craft may be – and then they’ll work with far more efficiency and quality than those perfectionists who are spending their time focusing on mistakes rather than learning from them.
Now try applying this anecdote and advice to whatever craft you’re developing yourself. What’s your craft? Is it cooking? Baking? Cleaning? Coding and programming? Parenting skills? Driving? Writing stories? Writing blogs? Rock climbing? Running?
Whatever it is – try doing it more often. Focus less on doing it perfectly and focus more on the journey to perfection – learning from each minute and each mistake. Hopefully, you’ll master both within time – both quantity and quality.
Best of luck, and hope this was helpful!
Naman
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