Often I see people emphasize quality, which is great. Yet I think people are confused about how quality is created. People emphasize quality over quantity. “I’ll won’t spend a lot of time with my kids. I’ll just make sure the time I do spend is quality time.” “We don’t want to spend time rewriting or software, so we want to make sure that it’s quality code out of the gate.”
A Tale of Pots
There was an experiment done in a pottery class. Half of the students were told that their grade depended on the quality of a clay pot they made. They only had to make one pot, and their grade rested on how good that pot was. The other half of the class was told that their grade depended only on how many pots they made. It didn’t matter how good they were, as long as there were lots of pots, they would get a good grade.
During the semester the first half students spent lots of time studying great pots, and they labored over the aesthetic and practical qualities they wanted in their pot. Meanwhile the second half students just cranked out lots of clay pots.
At the end of the semester, the quality of all the pots was examined – those from the first half students as well as the second. Now you might think that the first half students would have dominated the lineup of great pots, but that didn’t happen. You might even think then that at least it’d be an even mix of quality from the first group and the second. But that didn’t happen either. It wasn’t even close. The best pots, hands down, came from the second group – the group that just made lots and lots of pots.
Sure, the second group’s first pots were pretty terrible. But as they made more and more pots, the pots just kept getting better. (source)
The Quantity Effect
Quality isn’t something you create aside from quantity. Instead quality is arrived at through quantity.
This means that you can’t have quality time with your kids other than spending lots of time with your kids. Great products are created through iteration and lots of rework. Quality is created by doing lots of it through practice, trial and error, and with people, taking lots of time to connect.
Our Impact
This also applies to the impact we want to make in the world. We’re so afraid of failure. We want it to be perfect out of the gate. But making it perfect out of the gate doesn’t work.
Failure isn’t a problem you may face that you’ll have to deal with, failure is how you get to the awesome impact you want to create.
Make an attempt at impact. Evaluate the results. Tweak your approach. Do it again. Do it again. And do it again. Until one day you’ll look up and realize you’re making a freaky, miraculous, deep, transformational impacts every day.
