Why Quantity Is More Important than Quality

The most successful people focus on quantity, not quality. Here are three reasons why

Image via: Vanity Fair

A few years ago, I wrote about how people’s work gets better as they focus on making more stuff. That is, they improve their work’s quality by making a great quantity of things. For example, every moment of Aziz Ansari’s nine minute monologue on Saturday Night Live was built on a foundation of a 100 sets worth of practice. Quantity matters.

Over the past few years, I’ve found more examples, and factors, as to why making and regularly releasing a lot of stuff is a tried-and-true strategy:

Quantity loosens you up

You might’ve seen this saying somewhere before: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”

The part you might not have heard, though, is just as important. Tina Fey writes in her book, Bossypants:

This is something Lorne has said often about Saturday Night Live, but I think it’s a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute. (And I’m from a generation where a lot of people died on waterslides, so this was an important lesson for me to learn.) You have to let people see what you wrote. It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live TV.

The more time we spend on something, the more invested we become in it. The more we want it to be perfect.

But the problem is, perfect doesn’t exist. And even though we want our work to be perfect — maybe because we want to be seen as perfect — our obsession with making something perfect actually holds us back. We may occasionally hear about the people who have released “perfect” things, but we don’t hear from the hordes of people who didn’t release their “perfect” thing because it was just, “good.” Yet they could have released good things and made an impact. Nobody will ever know.

Quantity also provides creativity with fertile, loamy, soil. Truly creative work needs to be fun. And an obsession with perfection doesn’t provide much fertile ground for fun. In his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Nobel-prize winning physicist Richard Feynman recalls a time when he was instructed to draw without looking at the paper. He noticed a “funny, semi-Picasso like strength” in his work, but also had a theory as to why not looking worked out:

“The reason I felt good about that drawing was, I knew it was impossible to draw well that way, and therefore it didn’t have to be good — and that’s really what the loosening up was all about. I had thought that ‘loosen up’ meant ‘make sloppy drawings,’ but it really meant to relax and not worry about how the drawing is going to come out.”

In its foundation, the principle is not too dissimilar from artist Krsto Hegedušić’s advice, who said to Marina Abramović, “that if you get so good at drawing with your right hand that you can even make a beautiful sketch with your eyes closed, you should immediately change to your left hand to avoid repeating yourself.”

Quantity gives you energy

Shortly after he released his fourth studio album, recording artist Gucci Mane knew it didn’t make the impact he had wanted it to. He recalls a moment when he and his friends were playing Lil’ Wayne’s music instead of his own, not because they liked Wayne more, but simply because they’d listened through all of Gucci Mane’s tracks. Lil’ Wayne had a larger body of work to go through.

“The disappointment of Back to the Trap House already had me feeling like I had something to prove,” Gucci Mane writes in his autobiography. “So I made up my mind. I would flood the streets with music too.”

Taking a page out of Lil’ Wayne’s book, Gucci Mane focused simply on making a lot of songs. Instead of writing songs down on paper, he would have to freestyle in order to meet this aggressive quota. He writes, “So that’s what I started doing and I did so relentlessly. I became a machine. I would record six or seven songs a day. Easily.”

It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine ourselves in Gucci Mane’s shoes. To have spent the past year recording music, only to have the release not resonate with fans or critics, is completely discouraging. A reasonable, natural, reaction could have been to take time off, but instead, Gucci Mane focused on multiplying his output.

A critic could say that Gucci Mane’s body of work is diluted by this quantity, or that he oversaturated the market, or that he could’ve made an even greater impact if he focused on quality. I’d argue that our hypothetical critic completely misses the point — Gucci Mane chose the path that would give him more energy, so he could generate more creative energy and keep persisting. Just a little over a decade since that decision, Gucci Mane has broken through to the mainstream.

If you’re anything like Gucci Mane, chances are you don’t get energy from sitting around and polishing the same piece, 100 times. Instead, your approach might more closely resemble Seth Godin’s blog posts, Maria Popova’s curation, or Scott Adams’s Periscopes. The daily practice of creating, and releasing, keeps you moving.

Don’t be scared of writing about the same idea, in a different way. If it’s important enough, you should say it more than once. And for no good reason other than luck and timing and the fact I put it out and didn’t stop publishing, it’ll just take off. That’s also the added benefit of Gary Vaynerchuk talking about at-bats. Sometimes, luck is just a numbers game —trying more often makes it easier for luck to find you.

Quantity keeps you making

As the less famous, but vitally important, half of one of the most successful music production groups (24 Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits during the late 1990s and 2000s as The Neptunes), Chad Hugo has made a drastic impact in the world of music. His approach in the studio is driven by making something tangible, every day:

“But the most important thing is to have the, ‘Okay, I’m gonna make a beat today’ mind state when you enter the studio,” Chad Hugo says in Paul Lester’s biography on Hugo’s collaborator Pharrell Williams.

He continues on a similar note to Feynman’s observation on loosening up: “We never think too deeply. We just start playing the metronome and record all kinds of patterns. While doing that we come up with a dope pattern. If you have an open mind to music genres, you can experiment with a lot of things in hip hop.”

We’ve all faced a version of the creative block, or what Steven Pressfield calls the Resistance. Chad Hugo embraces the opposite mindset, to make something that day. Whether it gets edited, changed, or updated is not important. You will make those things happen later, as you want to improve the quality. The act of actually making something is the key.

This image is from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography Total Recall, where he writes, “Each stick at the top of the page represents one time I rehearsed delivering the speech. Whether you’re doing a bicep curl in a chilly gym or talking to world leaders, there are no shortcuts — everything is reps, reps, reps.…No matter what you do in life, its either reps or mileage.”

If you ever feel stuck, just make something. Make something silly. Make something without looking. Make something for yourself, that you’ll never show anyone else. Practice something, again, and again. Don’t wait for “Someday.” Make it today.

And if you’re stuck in your head about it, just remember Goethe’s adage (as quoted by psychologist Timothy D. Wilson), “He who deliberates lengthily will not always choose the best.”

Thanks for reading! My name’s Herbert, and I run an editorial studio called Wonder Shuttle. I used to be a staff writer for Lifehacker, and my writing has appeared at TIME, Fast Company, and The Globe and Mail. I write a monthly newsletter where I share books and quotes to make you happier, more creative, and more productive.