19-02-2025
Why Quantity Beats Quality in Mastering Any Skill
Price's Law was first observed by Derek Price.
He noted that half of academic publications came from the square root of the total participants. You'll see Price's Law in many offices, where many people slouch in their chairs, cracking jokes in the coffee room, taking their sweet time to actually begin working.
Meanwhile, others work with desperate urgency, as if defusing a bomb with every minute of their day.
You see it with online dating. Researchers found that on Hinge, the top 1% of men got 16% of the likes. What does this even tell us? We know that some men are more attractive. We know some employees work harder and faster. We get closer to the answer when we look at classical composers.
Four dominate the radio waves: Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. The catch is that you only hear 5% of the songs they wrote. Through implication, they are writing 20ish songs for each of the most commonly being played.
Beethoven, for example, wrote 722 pieces. Mozart wrote 600, despite dying at 35. Michael Jackson wrote roughly 100 songs for every album he published, which leaves about 80% of those songs unpublished.
He nearly cut one of his greatest hits, Smooth Criminal, from the final list. Volume and focused output matter in a big way.
This is an extension of preferential attachment, the scientific phenomenon where things are distributed according to how much something already has. The number of hit songs these artists produced was related to them writing lots of songs (and also having obvious and prodigious talent).
And yet I ask, what can be gleaned from this? Most of us aren't virtuoso musicians. Years ago, a ceramics teacher ran a learning experiment. He divided the class into two groups. Group A was the quantity group. He told them to make as much pottery as possible.
Group B was the quality group. He told them to create a single, great piece of pottery. On the final day of class, when it was time to grade the pottery, he noticed the quantity group was significantly better.
Deep within this experiment, is the code mastery and talent.
A learning curve is less like a curve and more like a mysterious trail. In the pottery experiment, the quantity group wandered down that trail, stepping in holes, hitting their head on branches — learning from mistakes.
The quality group stood near the entrance, contemplating the best route, worrying about tripping and looking stupid. Quantity is unfairly stigmatized, seen only as a way of leeching off quality — which it surely can in the absence of discipline.
Quality matters but it's subjective. Quantity can be measured. It's a number that can be compared to other numbers. When we dive in and start doing things, we are wired to uphold some level of quality. We have internalized standards for effort.
Creative block is when your expectations rise above a reasonable standard. Procrastination is not born of laziness but of perfectionism. Ray Bradbury famously told struggling wPrice's Law was first observed by Derek Price.
He noted that half of academic publications came from the square root of the total participants. More plaintly, among 100 academics, 10 were writing half the publications. You'll see Price's Law in many offices, where many people slouch in their chairs, cracking jokes in the coffee room, taking their sweet time to actually begin working.
Meanwhile, others work with desperate urgency, as if defusing a bomb with every minute of their day.
You see it with online dating. Researchers found that on Hinge, the top 1% of men got 16% of the likes. What does this even tell us? We know that some men are more attractive. We know some employees work harder and faster. We get closer to the answer when we look at classical composers.
Four dominate the radio waves: Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. The catch is that you only hear 5% of the songs they ever wrote. Through implication, they are writing about 20 songs for each of the most commonly being played.
Beethoven, for example, wrote 722 pieces. Mozart wrote 600, despite dying at 35. Michael Jackson wrote roughly 100 songs for every album he published, which leaves about 80% of those songs unpublished.
He nearly cut one of his greatest hits, Smooth Criminal, from the final list. Volume and focused output matter in a big way.
This is an extension of preferential attachment, the scientific phenomenon where things are distributed according to how much something already has. The number of hit songs these artists produced was related to them writing lots of songs (and also having obvious and prodigious talent).
So, what can be gleaned from this? Most of us aren't virtuoso musicians. Years ago, a ceramics teacher ran a learning experiment. He divided the class into two groups. Group A was the quantity group. He told them to make as much pottery as possible.
Group B was the quality group. He told them to create a single, great piece of pottery. On the final day of class, when it was time to grade the pottery, he noticed the quantity group was significantly better.
Deep within this experiment, is the code mastery and talent.
A learning curve is less like a curve and more like a mysterious trail. In the pottery experiment, the quantity group wandered down that trail, stepping in holes, hitting their head on branches — and learning from mistakes.
The quality group stood near the entrance, contemplating the best route, worrying about tripping and looking stupid. Quantity is unfairly stigmatized, seen only as a way of leeching off quality — which it surely can in the absence of discipline.
Quality matters but it's subjective. Quantity can be measured. It's a number that can be compared to other numbers. When we dive in and start doing things, we are wired to uphold some level of quality. We have internalized standards of effort.
Creative block is when your expectations rise above a reasonable standard. Procrastination is born not of laziness but of perfectionism. Ray Bradbury famously told struggling writers to do one short story per week. If they wrote 52 in a row, it was highly unlikely all 52 would be to do one short story per week. If they wrote 52 in a row, it was highly unlikely all 52 would be bad.
Whether you are learning to code, speak a new language, or bark like a psychotic chihuahua — approach the skill with curiosity, a willingness to 'wander the mysterious path' rather than create a perfect map beforehand.
What's remarkable is how powerfully correlated quantity is to success in every domain. In Academia, the researchers who published the most tend to have the most overall success: more notoriety, higher paychecks, and more promotions.
UC professor, Frank Baron, noted of top academics, 'Voluminous productivity is the rule and not the exception.'
In debate, presenting a higher volume of arguments for your position is more effective when convincing a neutral person. Conversely, with a stubborn person, flip it and use a smaller set of high-quality arguments — or better yet— don't argue with them at all.
Stephen King sets a rule of 2000 words a day until he's done.
He says he loses the feel for his story if he doesn't maintain this steady writing cadence.
On writing platforms, the writers with the most hit articles (20,000+ claps/likes) are almost entirely the writers who publish 15-20+ articles a month and have done so for many months and years.
Even on the roiling drama pit known as X, 10% of users are responsible for roughly 80% of tweets.
When we simply put in the reps, our brain defaults to a level of effort that helps us grow. The time we put in begins to reflect in the quality of our work. This isn't to say that we shouldn't stop, get feedback, or look for ways to improve. Far from it. But on a pound for pound basis, taking action is far more important than contemplation.
Being creative is hard. I've learned this firsthand in my writing career. In this world, it's easy to beat yourself up o ver how bad your 'stuff' is, especially when you look back over your older work.
Consider this: every creative I've spoken with — be it artists, musicians, writers, or YouTubers — are frequently surprised by their hits. In fact, there is a long and illustrious list of musicians who think their most popular songs are trash. So don't be too hard on yourself.
Kurt Cobain hated Smells Like Teen Spirit, saying, 'I can barely — especially on a bad night, get through 'Teen Spirit.' I literally want to throw my guitar down and walk away.'
The lead singer of Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant, dismissed his iconic song, Stairway to Heaven, referring it to as 'that annoying wedding song'.
This poisonous hatred for one's own work extends into every creative realm.
It is oddly encouraging when you know how many geniuses hated their work.
Michelangelo famously attacked his renowned sculpture, the Florentine Pieta. Though the exact cause is not known, one speculation is that his frustration with the work itself, caused his temper to boil over.
I've found that, with productivity and creativity, there's an element of gambling. You never know how something is going to turn out when you start. But you need to be 'pulling the lever' frequently to have a chance.
Your results can be illogical — 1+1 doesn't always equal 2. Sometimes it equals 1. Others time, it equals 100. I've found that creativity and skills are like a pyramid. The wider the base. The taller it gets. And the more your math starts to check out.
In the beginner's pottery class, the 'quantity' students didn't worry about putting on an art show. They kept it simple and learned the feel of the clay in their hands.
They practiced spinning the clay at different speeds. They dropped pots. They overcooked and cracked them.
These mistakes mutated into skill. Why? Because they were able to expose their own flaws and weaknesses through this iterative process, and then correct for them. If they'd sat and worried about what mistakes they would make, they may have never begun. In fact, they typically wouldn't have even predicted the mistake that snuck up on them.
When properly governed, quantity is its own virtue. It can become the brick of habit from which our abilities emerge.
If you aren't sure of where to start on your business, song, art project, or book, start somewhere, anywhere. Then figure out the rest later.
When I'm feeling frozen, I often say, "Just shut up and do it already.'
Make the pottery. Make it ugly. Make lots of it.
