Quantity As The Path To Great Work

Your great taste makes you highly selective. In your eyes, excellence is rare. So you seek it relentlessly. It almost feels like a calling to create something that’s aesthetically and emotionally evocative. This pursuit ignores the value of quantity over quality.

My crippling perfectionism wouldn’t let me post any of my work because they were “just bad”. I would produce once, and stop for months only to find my craft has barely improved. Choosing to produce daily was a struggle, let alone posting it.

You see, practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes better. Better precedes excellence. It prefaces your Great Work. To practice is to iterate over and over until mastery – being comfortable enough to make (or break) rules within your craft – becomes apparent.

Producing larger quantities of work can make it easy to overlook the hints of Great Work you leave behind during each iteration. These hints guide your next steps. It’s important find and preserve them as you refine your craft.

When you’re stuck, remain consistent with your efforts, fearless with your iterations, and mindful of the hints your work gives you. Do the work every day, as many times as you can, and preserve hints to your next iteration. That’s the path to Great Work.