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"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint

"Quantity leads to quality." The analogy of being graded on quantity in an art class tends to make me imagine I'd just line up a ton of canvases and slop paint on them all at once to be the top of the class, or create pots in only their crudest acceptable form. That is, quantity does not lead to quality by itself. The student must be trying to learn something new with each new piece. Quantity iterates the feedback loop. The student still must be able to identify mistakes or areas where improvement is needed. Doing that means paying attention to quality. So it's not really about ignoring quantity or quality for the sake of the other, but finding a good balance.

dmos62 6y ago
That's a really good insight.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
That’s a big driver for process maturity. Mature organizations are constantly iterating their process, not just their product. The obvious issue here, is that the process becomes so important, that people forget about the output; which is really the only thing that customers care about. So balance, is, indeed, critical.
tsjq 6y ago
Reminds me of a line attributed to Bruce Lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
- weareallcowards 6y ago
  Jackie Chan had a similar attitude toward his films. He once said in an interview: >Whatever you do, do the best you can, because the film lives forever. No, "because that day it was raining and the actor don't have time." >I said, "would you go to every theater and tell the audience?" No! The audience sits in the theater: good movie? Bad movie? That's all. And he practiced what he preached, sometimes going through hundreds of takes to get a stunt just right.
  - andrewzah 6y ago
    You can see this difference in the the films produced by him and his studio versus the american-produced ones. Every Frame a Painting has a good video on this. [0] Typically for films the shooting portion takes only a few weeks to finish, so lots of retakes = money lost. Jackie Chan does a lot of random flourishes in his films that end up with him needing a lot of takes. For example, how he scales fences. [1] The way he scales the castle wall in Wheels on Meals (1984) is probably my favorite example. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOjjdttsHy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOjjdttsHy4
bluetomcat 6y ago
High quantity being "better" than low quantity is a wrong way of framing the problem. A more practical framing would be – avoid boredom, stay in flow and be fascinated with the work you do, review your work constantly and look for improvements.
smasher164 6y ago
My music teacher often reminded my of this Lombardi quote which really resonated with me: "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect."
- jonshariat 6y ago
  This. As a creative person (UX designer, cartoonist, painter), I have experienced this throughout my life, especially in drawing. As a kid I drew constantly, in school, at home, everywhere. All through my life I drew and drew. If quantity was all it took, I would be a master. But I am not. I still can't draw bodies and poses and Im not consistent at all. Quantity gets you to learn quickly to a point where you platou. I've seen this in my painting, games, and even work. You need to pause and start thinking about what you are doing, what each part means, how it works together, coming up with what you are doing wrong, what is right, and practice that. You still need to put in more work but its a dance of pause, think, do, repeat.
- filoleg 6y ago
  I would rephrase the last part of it as "Only mindful practice makes perfect." Sure, it makes the quote less catchy, but imo it makes it more accurate. I observed it myself with a lot of things, esp. when it comes to learning an instrument over the course of almost 2 decades (piano specifically, in my scenario). Sure, you can pick a few notesheets and keep practicing the entirety of them from start to finish at full speed over and over. However, the process will be extremely non-efficient and will make you take much longer to learn the song, and it won't make you take away as many lessons from it that are unrelated to that song specifically (i.e., those "unrelated" things that make you a better piano player overall). Instead, you need to be mindful of what specifically goes wrong, what goes right, and target practice those problem points specifically. Let's say you have a few bars with a syncopated rhythm in a song you are learning, and you are struggling with that section specifically, you nailed the entirety of the song otherwise. Instead of just keeping playing that entire song over and over, you should practice just those few syncopated bars by themselves at a very very slow pace with a metronome. It will feel very awkward at first and give you a feeling that you aren't progressing much. Then you start incorporating that small problematic section into the entirety of the song. Then you speed up the tempo on that specific section and practice it at that tempo over and over. If the problem is in your left hand, you practice the left hand by itself first, then graduate to both hands. Then you try to incorporate it at a higher tempo into the rest of the song. The whole process of that sounds very tedious and painful, but mostly because it actually is. However, it will lead to much better results. Not only you will learn this specific piece much quicker using such a methodical approach, you will perform it much better and way more consistently at the end. You end up dissecting that problematic point so much, whenever you see syncopated bars in the future in completely different music pieces, you will have much less problem with them. Which will allow you to spend more time improving other aspects of your play or learn other techniques. All of that learned knowledge ends up snowballing and compounding so much, over the course of a few years you end up massively outperforming someone who just blindly kept practicing pieces over and over from start to finish until they got them right.

dmos62 6y ago

That's a really good insight.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

That’s a big driver for process maturity. Mature organizations are constantly iterating their process, not just their product. The obvious issue here, is that the process becomes so important, that people forget about the output; which is really the only thing that customers care about. So balance, is, indeed, critical.

tsjq 6y ago

Reminds me of a line attributed to Bruce Lee: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."

weareallcowards 6y ago
Jackie Chan had a similar attitude toward his films. He once said in an interview: >Whatever you do, do the best you can, because the film lives forever. No, "because that day it was raining and the actor don't have time." >I said, "would you go to every theater and tell the audience?" No! The audience sits in the theater: good movie? Bad movie? That's all. And he practiced what he preached, sometimes going through hundreds of takes to get a stunt just right.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  You can see this difference in the the films produced by him and his studio versus the american-produced ones. Every Frame a Painting has a good video on this. [0] Typically for films the shooting portion takes only a few weeks to finish, so lots of retakes = money lost. Jackie Chan does a lot of random flourishes in his films that end up with him needing a lot of takes. For example, how he scales fences. [1] The way he scales the castle wall in Wheels on Meals (1984) is probably my favorite example. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1PCtIaM_GQ [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOjjdttsHy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOjjdttsHy4

bluetomcat 6y ago

High quantity being "better" than low quantity is a wrong way of framing the problem. A more practical framing would be – avoid boredom, stay in flow and be fascinated with the work you do, review your work constantly and look for improvements.

smasher164 6y ago

My music teacher often reminded my of this Lombardi quote which really resonated with me: "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect."

jonshariat 6y ago
This. As a creative person (UX designer, cartoonist, painter), I have experienced this throughout my life, especially in drawing. As a kid I drew constantly, in school, at home, everywhere. All through my life I drew and drew. If quantity was all it took, I would be a master. But I am not. I still can't draw bodies and poses and Im not consistent at all. Quantity gets you to learn quickly to a point where you platou. I've seen this in my painting, games, and even work. You need to pause and start thinking about what you are doing, what each part means, how it works together, coming up with what you are doing wrong, what is right, and practice that. You still need to put in more work but its a dance of pause, think, do, repeat.
filoleg 6y ago
I would rephrase the last part of it as "Only mindful practice makes perfect." Sure, it makes the quote less catchy, but imo it makes it more accurate. I observed it myself with a lot of things, esp. when it comes to learning an instrument over the course of almost 2 decades (piano specifically, in my scenario). Sure, you can pick a few notesheets and keep practicing the entirety of them from start to finish at full speed over and over. However, the process will be extremely non-efficient and will make you take much longer to learn the song, and it won't make you take away as many lessons from it that are unrelated to that song specifically (i.e., those "unrelated" things that make you a better piano player overall). Instead, you need to be mindful of what specifically goes wrong, what goes right, and target practice those problem points specifically. Let's say you have a few bars with a syncopated rhythm in a song you are learning, and you are struggling with that section specifically, you nailed the entirety of the song otherwise. Instead of just keeping playing that entire song over and over, you should practice just those few syncopated bars by themselves at a very very slow pace with a metronome. It will feel very awkward at first and give you a feeling that you aren't progressing much. Then you start incorporating that small problematic section into the entirety of the song. Then you speed up the tempo on that specific section and practice it at that tempo over and over. If the problem is in your left hand, you practice the left hand by itself first, then graduate to both hands. Then you try to incorporate it at a higher tempo into the rest of the song. The whole process of that sounds very tedious and painful, but mostly because it actually is. However, it will lead to much better results. Not only you will learn this specific piece much quicker using such a methodical approach, you will perform it much better and way more consistently at the end. You end up dissecting that problematic point so much, whenever you see syncopated bars in the future in completely different music pieces, you will have much less problem with them. Which will allow you to spend more time improving other aspects of your play or learn other techniques. All of that learned knowledge ends up snowballing and compounding so much, over the course of a few years you end up massively outperforming someone who just blindly kept practicing pieces over and over from start to finish until they got them right.