Quantity and quality are not opposing forces. You don’t have to sacrifice one to get more of the other.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about those words when I heard them in this podcast episode.
A part of me was aligned with this concept, of quantity improving quality. Writing regularly did improved my writing. But on the other hand, as a product guy, I’m constantly rejecting good ideas to keep the team focused – protecting quality by limiting quantity.
After some considerations, I’ve come to the conclusion that wheter quality and quantity are correlated actually depends on what mode we are operating on: project mode vs art mode.
Project mode
In project mode, you have an objective, and you have constraints. The project management triangle, famous enough to have its own Wikipedia page, reminds us that “Quality is constrained by cost, scope and time”.
I use in a lot in product discussion. So, you want this fancy new feature? Sure. But remember, the size of our team is fixed. And, we won’t lower our quality standards. So, adding this feature, will delay the release. Are you sure this is what you want? Really, really want?
Of course, reality is more nuanced. For example, raising the cost (by hiring new team members) won’t make a feature ready faster. You can’t conceive a baby in one month with 9 women, Mythical Man-Month, you know…
But still, in our daily-life, we spend a lot of time in project mode, and in project mode, quantity has a negative impact on quality. When we’re doing dishes, or peeling vegetables: going faster won’t make it better.
Art mode
But there is more in life than deadlines and objectives. Art for example. Creativity. When you’re creating, something counter-intuitive happens: quantity has a positive impact on quality.
As Rick Rubin puts it in The Creative Act, making art is connecting to the endless creativity of the universe. In that sense, creativity is like a river: once it flows, it keeps flowing. But if it stalls, sediments start to accumulate, and flow diminishes.
This is why when we’re creating, the most important thing is to keep our creativity flowing. The moment we feel a slowdown, we should redirect our creativity somewhere else, anywhere it doesn’t matter. It just has to keep flowing. Like rivers creating new meanders.
Ancient Courses of Fictional Rivers #941
From this story, we know than Seth Godin lives in art mode:
Someone asked me where I get all my good ideas, explaining that it takes him a month or two to come up with one and I seem to have more than that. I asked him how many bad ideas he has every month. He paused and said, “none.”
In art mode, our goal is to produce as much art as possible, keep the creativity flowing. For the hope that sometimes we will create something brilliant. Or maybe because it is the only way to do that.
Cherry picked empirical evidence:
This text is 0