Playing the numbers game
When quantity is better than quality.
There’s this famous anecdote from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland. In the book he talks about a pottery class that split the students in half. Some focused on quality to make a single excellent piece. Others focused on quantity to make as many as possible. The students focused on quantity learned faster than the ones focused on quality.
Even though this is an anecdote, research supports the idea. There are research studies looking at quantity versus quality in learning and creativity (see list below).
The general consensus is that quantity outperforms.
Quantity yields greater diversity of output and promotes divergent thinking. From a pure chance view, you’re more likely to create something great if you create more things.
Quantity gives you more fresh attempts to learn from. It creates fast feedback loops and gives you chances to compare and contrast. You get more experiments in.
More anecdotally there are design methods that rely on this reality. There’s the Crazy Eights and thumbnail sketch exercises try to cover more ideas. Parallel prototyping and A/B testing evaluate multiple solutions to a problem.
Quantity is effective for generating ideas and learning quickly.
People, especially perfectionists, will get hung up on needing to research and study before starting something new. But, the best answer is to just start and do a lot of it. Don’t worry about messing up and failing because you need those experiences.
I’ve unstuck myself this way a few times.
Some years ago I wanted to learn to paint. I found myself watching videos and reading books on how to get started. Eventually I said, “fuck it” and decided to just do at least one drawing or painting every day until I hit 1,000.
I’d just read Art & Fear.
Anyway, I tried a bunch of approaches and techniques. I worked through some courses but always hit the very low bar I set for myself. Some of the things I did were total garbage. Probably most of it.
But in the end I started doing plein air style paintings from video games and ended up being part of an art exhibit on the subject.
Currently I’m doing a daily article on Substack because I wanted to get better at writing. The goal isn’t as aggressive, only for the month of May. This is the fifteenth article.
Going forward I’m planning to do one of these monthly for different outputs.
Reframing a goal to be about quantity instead of quality changes the way you approach it.
In The Score, C. Thi Nguyen describes how collapsing goals to numbers can lead to value capture. That is, instead of focusing on the values behind the goal, you start valuing whatever hits the target. Those values may be misaligned. Much of the book is about how this is a problem.
That misalignment is a feature here because our values weren’t quite right. If we overvalue quality we get stuck just trying to understand what that means. And in reality quality is subjective. It’s hard to even understand it without an interactive feedback loop of experimentation.
Setting numerical goals for output makes them easy to gamify.
Nguyen also discusses how games use numerical goals but they feel different from metrics. Games let you try values you may not otherwise have. They can also help you engage in “striving play.” Instead of trying to win like an “achievement player,” a striving player adopts the rules of the game to enjoy the struggle, challenge, and joy of the pursuit.
By gamifying your learning goals through numerical targets you can build an appreciation for the feel of the endeavor itself.
For example, let’s say you want to learn to paint. You can do 5 paintings like Bob Ross. You can do 10 like Andrew Wyeth or J. M. W. Turner. You can try painting scenes from 20 games. I ended up setting challenges like this and learning a lot from each one.
These challenges help you learn directionally. You won’t go from amateur to master through a single set. You won’t find your own unique voice or style immediately. But by trying different things you find what you like and don’t like. You build your taste and your skills.
This is the part that truly matters.
Your vision of perfection will shift through time but your knowledge only grows through experience.
Research papers on quantity over quality: