Quantity Beats Quality? Not So Fast.
Quantity Beats Quality? Not So Fast. The late NBA Great KOBE BRYANT was developing his jumper during the offseason, making 2,000 shots a day. NOT taking. MAKING. And this reminds me of a simple general principle to operate by, especially for those of us in a working career, that is, QUANTITY TRUMPS QUALITY. Let me qualify my thoughts here. QUANTITY should be a higher priority than QUALITY because it leads to higher QUALITY. The shorter the path to maximized QUALITY, and executing on the feedback after each finished productπππAccomplished author David Bayles shared about an experiment wherein he tested his class, with those on left side of the class, would be graded solely on the QUANTITY of work they produced while all those on the right, will be graded solely on QUALITY and his procedure was fairly simple. On the final day of the class, he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "QUANTITY" group, 50 pounds of pots rated 'A', 40 pounds a 'B' and so on. For the 'QUALITY' group, they needed to produce only one pot, albeit a perfect one, to get an 'A'πππCame grading time and a curious fact emerged. The works of the 'QUANTITY' group was busily churning out piles of work [and learning from their mistakes] while the 'QUALITY' group had sat, theorizing about PERFECTION, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clayπππA surprising but consistent finding among researchers is that the greatest innovators, artists and thinkers DON'T have a better ratio of good ideas to bad ideas than the rest of us. BUT the difference lies on the fact that they had MORE ideas. And the end result? They end up with a greater number of GOOD ideas. So, a simple way to begin to improve our creative output is to switch focus, from QUALITY to QUANTITY. Truth is, you have way MORE ideas in you than you think you do. And those EARLY ideas you need to get out of the way, as they're likely to be conventional✅✅✅Let's face it. Assuming I pick someone who's either a lemon OR mediocre but he processes 100 transactions per hour with an error rate of 1-2%. And let's assume your TOP QUALITY guy is really tops in terms of QUALITY but he processes 10 transactions per hour. Where would you bet? Hands down, QUANTITY BEATS QUALITY❗❗❗