Quantity Over Quality In Creative Work - Based On The Book Art & Fear

In the book, Art & Fear, they speak about the importance of quantity over quality in creativity. Most people focus on perfectionism, but they should be focusing on prolificness. That's where the disconnect comes in.

Transcript

Hey everyone,

I hope that you guys are doing amazing wherever you are in the world.

My name is Boomshakha and I welcome you to my channel.

As always I'm so grateful that you're subscribing,

Commenting and appreciating my work.

In this one I want to speak to you guys about a story that I read recently in a book that I love,

That I've read many times and I'm rereading it at the moment.

It's called Art and Fear and the story is about this ceramics professor.

I love the stories,

I'm going to tell the story first,

It's a little bit long.

So the ceramics professor at the beginning of a semester decided that he was going to separate the class into two groups.

One of the groups would be rated or you know given grades on how much pottery they produced during the class,

So the quantity of pottery they produce.

And the second group would be rated on or graded on the quality of the pot,

The one pot,

The one perfect pot that they produce.

And so basically when you know it came time for grading he would bring a weighing scale and he would weigh the amount of pottery that the first group created and you know 50 pounds of pottery would get grade A,

40 pounds would get grade B,

Things like that.

And for the quality group he would just you know look at the quality of the one pot that they bring in to be graded.

At the end of the semester something really interesting happened because some of the best pottery was created by the people who were in the quantity group,

Which is something that was not expected because they weren't actually asked to create beautiful pots,

They were asked to create a lot of them.

And the ones in the quality group ended up making no pots at all because a lot of them spent a lot of time theorizing and thinking about the pot that they're going to make and making strategies but not actually making any pots.

And so obviously the main tenet of this,

And you can go and read the book Art and Fear,

It's a great book,

The main idea behind this is quantity leads to quality not the other way around.

The quality is not going to lead to quantity right?

But for some reason as artists,

As writers,

As creative people we always assume the opposite is true.

We always assume that if we are able to figure out the quality of things then we can produce a lot of quantity.

So we spend time theorizing and learning and studying and going to school for the creative work,

Whatever it might be,

Writing or painting.

And we go to workshops,

We go to summits and things like that and we spend a lot of time thinking about it and not creating art.

We're spending all this time basically behaving like the quality group.

Instead what we should be doing are,

You know,

What this story tells us,

And a lot of artists and creative people will tell you the same thing,

I will tell you the same thing,

Is that you know the main thing you need to focus on is creating a lot of quantity.

Writing a lot or painting a lot or creating a lot of music,

Doing a lot of terrible work because eventually all that quantity,

All of that work,

All that practice will result in you creating something beautiful.

But if you just spend time theorizing,

You're not actually creating anything and then you're going to end up with nothing at the end,

Which is what a lot of people end up with.

And I know a lot of you guys actually struggle with this particular thing.

It's called perfectionism,

It can also be called other things,

You know,

People call it writer's block or they call it,

You know,

Not being creative.

A lot of people say I'm not creative.

There's a hundred different resistance names for it or a hundred different excuses you can use to say that this is not for you.

Even though deep down you actually want to be an artist or you want to create or you want to write or you want to do all these things,

A lot of us make up excuses to say that,

Reasons for why we can't.

Now I did this for the longest time myself,

I did it for more than a decade where I did not write anything because I was making up excuses in my head thinking all right,

You know,

I need to focus on quality,

I need to learn,

I need to read a lot of books on it,

I need to read from,

Learn from other people and then once I get the quality down,

Once I know what I'm doing,

When I have all that,

Then I can start creating quantity.

Of course,

As I said,

The other way around works better and that's what I'm focusing on right now where I spend a lot of time,

All of my time focusing on quantity,

Writing a lot,

Writing a lot,

As much as possible.

That's my focus all day long is to write,

Write,

Write or create,

Create,

Create.

And I just focus on quantity and I know that the quality will eventually automatically take care of my work.

It will automatically take care of itself.

The quality will become better and better because practice does make you better.

It's just,

It's just the basic essence of creating work of any kind.

It doesn't matter if it's creative or not,

Although I think all work is creative,

No matter what you're doing.

And so it's all about practice.

The more you practice,

The better you come at it.

I know that's true for me particularly because if you guys,

And you guys can see the evidence of it,

If you've been watching me for,

You know,

Three or four years now,

From the beginning,

You will definitely notice a major improvement in the way I speak,

In the way I articulate my thoughts,

In the way my videos look and sound.

If you go back and look at the videos that I did in the beginning,

I don't do that to myself because it's so shameful,

But when I go back,

If you do go back and you look at them and you look at how I do videos now,

And then if you keep on going and if I keep on going and then you look at it maybe six years in the future,

It's going to be an immense quality change and it's just going to be a complete dramatic change from where I was in the past to where I would be in the future because the quality changes because of the quantity,

Because of the sheer amount of work and a sheer number of videos that I've been putting out there over the last few years.

That's one of the reasons why even though sometimes it does seem like a lot of work,

And it will definitely seem like a lot of work,

Sometimes it does feel like why do I have to do a video every single day?

Why can't I just do maybe one video a week or two videos a week or three or maybe I could just do one every two weeks?

You know things like that,

Like thoughts like that will always come to my head because there are other people who are not doing a video every day and they're fine and they're still all right,

Their channel's still working fine.

But the point is I'm doing this every single day because it's practice because I do notice for myself even if I don't do a video for a few days,

I notice that my the quality of my videos goes down,

The quality of my conversations goes down,

The quality of this you know intonation,

My articulateness,

All of that stuff just completely dissipates.

Not completely,

But it does go down in value for sure.

And so the consistency matters as well,

It's over time,

A long period of time,

The amount of work that you produce matters as well.

And so all of that to say that if you are thinking about being creative in any shape or form right now,

Especially because you have the time right now maybe,

Maybe not for long but you do have the time right now and it's nice to build a habit right now while you have the time so that you can keep on going with this habit when perhaps you're back to your job or when it gets busier again once the pandemic or the lockdown or the coronavirus things ends you know if it does.

And so my suggestion to you is read the book Art and Fear if you can get a hold of it,

It's a great book,

It's very tiny,

It's really short,

Very quick read.

That one and The War of Art,

Those are the two books I recommend to all creative people.

I think they're brilliant books and will get you on that path that you're getting that you're wanting to get on.

But read the book if you have the time and if not the only thing I would really say is focus on quantity.

Whatever you're doing just focus on quantity so it doesn't matter what kind of creative work you're doing.

Recently I decided that I really love comics and I really want to make a comic of my own just a four panel small short comic because I love them and I have all these ideas in my head of I wish people would create a comic on this and I thought to myself why don't I just do it myself I'm not good at it of course of course of course but why and why not create it because it's fun and that's what life is about right to have a little bit of fun with this stuff.

And so I started creating a comic and I've been posting a little bit of it on my Instagram but I realized how quickly I've progressed since the first time I started you know just panning things out on on the iPad my sister's iPad or on my on paper and to now and it's only been I would say two weeks really since I really started working on it physically.

I've been thinking about it for a while but physically I've only been working on it two weeks and even just two two weeks because I've been doing it every single day I go and I work on it maybe half for another 45 minutes every day just in that little short period of time I've improved quite immensely because I was starting from such a terrible spot I was going from zero and of course even a little bit of improvement is great but it really it is the consistency of it and it is the quantity of it I'm not really worrying about what it looks like at the moment or if it's pretty or not I'm just worrying about making sure that I do as many of comics as possible.

If you read anything by Jay Seinfeld as well a lot of you guys probably heard of him he's a comedian and he was in that show Seinfeld he says the same thing anyone any of the comedians younger comedians new comedians if they ask him for advice what should I do if I want to get as famous or as rich or as great as you and the same thing he says to them he's like write a joke every single day and then cross it off your calendar every single day try to write a joke and make sure that you don't break that streak so you should have a bunch of x's on your calendar because you don't break the streak you keep on writing a joke every single day and eventually you're gonna write something that's really nice and really funny and then you keep on going you know you don't stop you just keep on going you keep on writing a joke every single day now if it can apply to a comedian who's writing jokes every day or a comic artist who's creating a comic every day or to a writer who's writing a thousand words every day or to anyone who's in the art industry who's painting every day you know I think I can apply to you as well whatever you're focusing on as your art as your creative work it could be knitting it could be it could be anime it could be painting mugs it could be I don't know creating baby clothes you know so whatever your thing might be the basic thing of it is to create every day create quantity not quality focus on quantity and be consistent with it and I think if you could just follow that routine and then just go with it I think you'll do much better than anyone else out there who really wants to be an artist but doesn't do anything with it I hope this makes sense I'm actually writing a book right now on writing on creative work and how to write every day and things like that so that's why I've been thinking a lot about these kind of topics and I've been you know I've been talking about it a lot more so hopefully eventually when the book comes out I will share it with you guys and you can read it and tell me what you guys think about it thank you so much for being on my channel thank you for watching if you have any questions comment below and I shall see you guys next time around bye for now

Reviews

Brilliant concept in its simplicity. I think some people can get stagnated, myself included, by trying to be completely “ready” for a project before actually starting the project - and that may do a lot to hinder the creativity rather than help it. This is a great frame of reference, to just get in there and start making things. Ready or not! 👍

This is amazing advice. As someone who gets stuck in the trap of feeling like I need to learn and know anything before actually creating (in my case drawing and painting both digitally and traditionally) it is very liberating and inspiring to consider simply making art to work towards improvement. Inaction can lead to stagnation and loss of motivation or interest entirely so this really put a lot of things into perspective for me. Thanks so much for sharing! You’ve impacted my day in such a positive way and I hope you have a great one as well. I’ll be sure to check those books out too!