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I am reminded of the story about ceramics students being told that half would be graded on quantity and half would be graded on the quality of a single piece of

I am reminded of the story about ceramics students being told that half would be graded on quantity and half would be graded on the quality of a single piece of work. https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramics-class-and-quantity-before-quality/ https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramic... It turns out that the students who were just churning out pots ended up making the pots that were ultimately better. I think there's probably something to be said for constantly creating.

e1g 6y ago
Just FYI this story originally was about photography as clarified by the author at https://jamesclear.com/repetitions https://jamesclear.com/repetitions In photography, you can get lucky. When I come back from holidays and review a thousand of random snapshots, a couple of them look great. Take 200 shots of a single thing, and one of them might be pro-level due to pure chance. Yet I'm not sure how well this "randomly great" percentage would translate to me playing the violin, dancing ballet, or writing a song.
- JAlexoid 6y ago
  It definitely works for the "writing a song" bit. A lot of things can be said and some expressions of the same thing are just better...
- guyzero 6y ago
  I am not a musician but my guess is that they don't sit down and say "I'm going to record an album with 9 bad songs and one good one." They do their best on every song and that's just how it turns out.
wwweston 6y ago
After hearing this story for years and finally trying to source it, as far as I can tell it's not entirely clear this experiment was ever actually run -- and in fact is sourced in the link behind your link as a "parable." I can imagine it's true that churning out quantity is its own education but I can also imagine there's a plateau past which deliberate practice and polish matter quite a bit.
- guyzero 6y ago
  Well t's a better parable than the one about boiling a frog, so I guess it got that at least.

e1g 6y ago

Just FYI this story originally was about photography as clarified by the author at https://jamesclear.com/repetitions https://jamesclear.com/repetitions In photography, you can get lucky. When I come back from holidays and review a thousand of random snapshots, a couple of them look great. Take 200 shots of a single thing, and one of them might be pro-level due to pure chance. Yet I'm not sure how well this "randomly great" percentage would translate to me playing the violin, dancing ballet, or writing a song.

JAlexoid 6y ago
It definitely works for the "writing a song" bit. A lot of things can be said and some expressions of the same thing are just better...
guyzero 6y ago
I am not a musician but my guess is that they don't sit down and say "I'm going to record an album with 9 bad songs and one good one." They do their best on every song and that's just how it turns out.

wwweston 6y ago

After hearing this story for years and finally trying to source it, as far as I can tell it's not entirely clear this experiment was ever actually run -- and in fact is sourced in the link behind your link as a "parable." I can imagine it's true that churning out quantity is its own education but I can also imagine there's a plateau past which deliberate practice and polish matter quite a bit.

guyzero 6y ago
Well t's a better parable than the one about boiling a frog, so I guess it got that at least.