I heard a story last year about two groups of students in a photography course. One group was taught every lesson and asked to apply it to a single photo that would be their only deliverable.
The other group was taught every lesson but had to turn in several images every week.
As the course came to an end, all the photos were reviewed and the best were selected from the bunch.
Can you guess where they came from? That’s right – the group that turned in a bunch of photos.
We like to think of quality and quantity at opposite sides of the spectrum. Don’t write daily posts, they say, write weekly or monthly ones but make them really good.
But what if we have it all wrong? What if the quantity is exactly what shapes and develops the quality.
I knew a pianist once who, as a child, wasn’t growing fast enough for her hands to grow to the size she needed them to be for the songs she was ready to play. So instead of trying to keep pace with her skill development despite how short her fingers were, her instructor took another path.
He brought a huge stack of piano books that were below her playing level. She’d never seen them before. And he asked her to open each up and just play it – full speed, without practice. She’d be working not on the mechanics of playing, and not challenging her skill level – instead she’d be developing her capacity for sight reading.
Sight reading is all about playing unfamiliar music at the right pace. And she spent months doing it. Over and over. A ridiculous amount of quantity.
And an amazing thing happened. Her fingers grew – but that was expected. What happened was that quantity turned into quality. She became a much better pianist.
Sometimes the best thing we can do is crank out a lot of work – quantity. And we need to recognize that it’s not the opposite of quality. It may be its precursor.