For Any Creative Project, Volume Beats Perfection
17 Mar 2025 #miscVolume always wins.
When we start a new creative project (writing, coding, or painting), we aim to create something “perfect” on our first attempts. And we wait for perfection before we share our work with the world.
The truth is, those first attempts will be crap. Our first posts, programs, and paintings will be crap. Well, 90% of everything is crap.
But the more we practice, the better we become, and the closer to “perfect” we get.
That’s a lesson I learned when binge-reading Herbert Lui’s blog the other day. I read about the pottery class experiment. One half of a pottery class was graded on quality and the other half on quantity. At the end of the course, the half who went for quantity did better and got better grades. They focused on experimenting, learning, and improving along the way.
The more tries we do:
- We experiment more
- We become more confident
- We collect more data points
- We build a larger body of work
- We have more chances to succeed
- We understand our audience better
- We develop less aversion to failure
- We have more material to repurpose
- We gather more opportunities for feedback
- We create more points of contact with our audience
For your next creative project, go for volume: write 100 blog posts, write 100 short programs, or do 100 paintings. And don’t be afraid of showing your work. The more you create, the closer you get to “perfect.” Volume always wins.