Quantity over Quality
If you always prioritize quality over quantity, it is easy to spend your whole life never doing much of anything.
The irony in success is it is never known what will be successful, and thus the best quality is to try to increase the quantity to see what could hit. Life rewards repetition.
Zara Larsson is a Swedish songwriter who has released five albums and 37 singles. She is best known for her hits “Never Forget You”, “Ain’t My Fault”, and “Lush Life”, but some of these hits almost didn’t happen. She talked on The Diary Of A CEO about how nobody on her team wanted to release “Lush Life”. They thought it wasn’t good enough. Today, the song is her most popular on Spotify with 1,763,093,015 streams.
She continues in the interview and shares similar sentiments about “Never Forget You”, saying “it wasn’t that exciting” and “they didn’t really like that one.” It has a mere 1,052,689,276 streams. Two songs thought to not be good enough turned out to be certified hits. On some of her best work, she was hesitant about how well they might do. If she listened to the critics who expected perfection and the utmost quality, they would have never been released.
It is a great metaphor for how people tend to treat their work, pursuits, or creative endeavors. The idea is our work will never be good enough. It is subject to increased scrutiny behind our tendencies to judge every inch of the creation. Only when it meets the highest standards is another soul allowed to see a peep. However, how am I to know when my work is good enough? Who am I to say that the work I believe is near perfect will be a smashing success? Zara Larsson, a musical award recipient and an artist with 26 million monthly listeners on Spotify, doesn’t even know what some of her most smashing hits will be, but she gets there through sheer quantity. The quantity produces the quality.
It’s pretty obvious in writing. I stare at a blank screen, stuck in a daze with my mind oscillating back and forth between ways to start. I may start a piece only to destroy it all and revert back to zero because it isn’t perfect. Soon, I am stuck with nothing because I can’t meet my standard of perfection. However, it never works. It’s unproductive. Everything I spill out onto the page will never come with zero blemishes. If I forever operate this way, I will make nothing. I like how Jason Zweig lays out the keys to starting in “On Writing Better: Getting Started”,
“What is the single most basic fact about my topic… Now look at that blank screen, that empty Word file or Google doc, or that virginal piece of paper, and type or write whatever that first simplest possible thing is”
That helps me get something on the page, giving me something to work from. No longer am I intimidated by my empty screen. Once the juices are rolling and the words are firing, he offers sage advice on how to keep going,
“Once you pop the cork out of the bottle, keep pouring as fast and as long as you can. Do not — I repeat, do not — revise or edit the sentences you’ve already written. Keep rolling forward, and don’t look back at what you’ve done, or you will lose your momentum.”
This isn’t a fixation on producing an immediate work of perfection. It prioritizes the quantity. Maybe I begin constructing a piece and let the words gush out of me. I end with 10 defective paragraphs. Only when I begin editing does my piece begin to become decent. My seventh paragraph might become my opening as I reconstruct the piece in its entirety. However, I am only able to do this thanks to the quantity of words and ideas I have on my page. I let the words spill out of me, no matter how imperfect they are. The quantity allows me to construct a quality piece.
Let me explain with sports. Often, the best players in a sport are those who have the most championships. The Tom Bradys, the Lebron James, and the Serena Williams of the world. They are some of the most decorative athletes in their respective pursuits. However, Tom Brady has lost in the Super Bowl three times. Lebron James has lost in the NBA finals six times. Serena Williams lost ten major finals. Katie Ledecky has four silver medals and one bronze. Tiger Woods has played in 90 majors, but only won 15 of them. However, the reason they are such decorated athletes despite these losses was because of the quantity of work they put forth. Tom Brady might have lost three Super Bowls, but he has won seven of them. Serena Williams might have lost ten major finals, but she has won 23 of them.
Say Serena Williams only decides to participate in major tennis tournaments that she thinks she can win. She optimizes for the perfect draw of opponents she matches up well against, she ensures the tournament is played on her preferred surface, and of course, she must always optimize for weather to limit the uncontrollable elements. But Serena Williams never did this. It would be goofy. If she did, we wouldn’t be calling her the greatest tennis player of all time. It would have limited the number of tournaments she played in. She wouldn’t have sniffed 23 major tournament wins because the quantity of attempts wouldn’t even be there. It is the quantity and the inevitable failures from which the quality grows.
And if the idea has imperfections or the pursuit is a failure and doesn’t land? That is okay too. Zara Larsson was promoting her new single “Can’t Tame Her” when going on The Diary Of A CEO. She said the single would be considered a hit if it amassed 400 million streams within two years. Well, the song has been out for over two years with 201 million streams on Spotify. Sure, it didn’t meet her standards of being a hit single, but it is still a solid song. If she always waited to release only her most perfect, optimized songs, she would have never produced the hits she has now.
Sometimes, you have to live with the imperfections and build on the quantity because you never know what will be successful. It leads to good outputs and other times, it may fall short of the goal but it is better than not producing anything. Chasing quantity, while not abandoning the quality, allows you to produce something. If you always prioritize quality over quantity, it is easy to spend your whole life never creating and doing much of anything.
Appreciate you being here.
-Scantron
I’m a (retired) college professor. Writing is a metric of understanding. I frequently explained to my students that if they could not explain a concept in writing then they really didn’t understand it. Thus “Write to Understand” is a good motto. As a grad student I would think up questions and write one page explanations as a study technique. This notion makes learning active, which is more work but I contend more productive. Write a lot!
I find myself looking forward to Wednesdays because of your writing. Appreciate you being here!