4 ms·

When it comes to producing amazing work, quantity beats quality. That is, it's better to produce 100 things and throw away 99 than it is to sit around a perfec

• r00fus 15y ago
  Absolutely this. The trick is to getting where people see you deliver that one out of a hundred, and assume that your quality beats others' quantity. How are Jobs' keynotes so well delivered? Repetition, iteration, practice, just like martial arts, makes perfect.
  • stdbrouw 15y ago
    Doing the same thing a hundred times until you've got it down isn't the same as doing a hundred different things and picking the best effort, though.
• kitsune_ 15y ago
  I don't buy into this. I've been producing music for over 10 years now. The "snippet" and fire and forget approach doesn't work. I'm sitting on thousands of different loops, demos, half-finished songs, and so on. Over the course of of a session, when you're jamming with your synthesizers and instruments, a project can transform from A to B to C to D to E where E ends up sounding nothing like A. You have your hard- and software synths, fantastic effect plugins and hardware, drum machines, more outboard gear. You tweak and compress, change melodies and harmonies. You press 'save as a new version' every minute. Your wandering mind be damned, if you want a great track you need to stop, sit down, and focus. All good tracks I come up with come from a focus on quality, not quantity. By the way, in my opinion, iterative refinements do not belong into the category of "quantity", I don't know how anyone could make such a statement. Of course you sometimes need the sessions to come up with some idea that resonates with you, but after that you (read: I, I'm talking about my own experience) have to force yourself to focus.
  • skb_ 15y ago
    My own work-flow is kind of a mixture of the two. I find that I have to play around with my synths a bit just to find that right sound - it might not be the right sound for the current project, but I save it just in case. Same thing with melodies, I have a ton of files with unfinished melodies that I mine ideas from. My best work is actually a culmination of these "snippets" that I build up over a few months/weeks. It's like with each mediocre/average project I produce, I'm discovering the parts of the great one not too far off. It's the same thing with code, design and all my other creative projects. I have to wade through a lot of weaker ideas and designs in order to discover the best parts. And once I figure those out, it's mostly a rewrite of all my past ideas into the one good idea.
• InclinedPlane 15y ago
  This is how you build skill and artisanship but that's not the sum total of art. Is James Patterson the best writer of our age? He wrote 10 novels just in 2011 alone. Shockingly there's more to art than a trite truism. If you want to acquire skill, go for quantity. But after that, if you want to become a master, if you want to impact people's lives in a way they appreciate and care about you'll need more than skill, you'll need inspiration.