Quality Versus Quantity

How many of you have heard the phrase quality over quantity?

If you just type quality over quantity into Google and click on images, you will see dozens of quotes that come up like focus on Quality over Quantity, let your guiding principle be not how much but how good etc. All of these are expounding the principle of how it is better to do great quality work than merely do a lot of work that is not of great or the “best” quality. They lean heavily towards the ideal of perfectionism. Perfectionism is an ideal that seems to be held in very high regard in our society. Growing up, I remember my teachers and parents stressing over and over again, the idea that one must have high standards for oneself and that they must always strive to meet those standards in any endeavour that they wish to undertake. If you do something, do it well or don’t do it at all is something I recall hearing on numerous occasions. To be honest, I used to strongly believe in this myself and I was always in love with the idea of being a perfectionist.

This principle is something that applies well to academics and helped me a great deal in doing well at school and University. Academics is an area where one can prepare and make sure that they have learnt all the answers prior to facing an examination. It is an activity where you can find all the answers before being tested or stepping into the arena to perform. However, there are many other things in life where you do not have all the answers prior to doing something. This approach of placing a lot of emphasis on quality dissuades you from ever doing something badly, it places a lot of weight on making sure that when you present your work or skill to others it is of great quality. Unfortunately, this mindset does not carry over well to the plethora of things one faces in the real world.

Therefore, I slowly began to realize that though this is a great ideal to aspire to, there were many situations where this mindset was inhibiting me to a great degree. For example, I wanted to get better at public speaking and instead of just starting on my journey by giving a small speech and then working on making improvements, I would spend days (and to be embarrassingly honest months) researching on techniques and postponing joining a course or a club like Toastmasters and giving my first speech because I wanted to ensure that when I gave my speech it would be a great first speech. While I was stuck in this mindset of obsessing over quality, I came across a great example in James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits” that completely changed my view.

The example went as follows, in the University of Florida, there was a photography course and the professor who was teaching the course divided all the students in his class into two groups. One group was told that they were going to get a grade solely based on the quantity of photos they submitted. So if they submitted a 100 photos it was an A, 80 photos it was a B and so on. The other group was told that they would be graded solely on the excellence of their work. They would only have to submit 1 photo at the end of the semester but to get an A it had to be a perfect or nearly perfect image. At the end of the semester when the professor received all the photos submitted by both the groups and examined them, he was astonished to find that the best quality pictures were all from students who were in the quantity group. The professor was surprised so he went about asking the students what they had done throughout the semester. The students in the quantity group told him that in order to submit a 100 photographs, they had taken more than a 100 pictures and had spent their entire semester taking pictures, adjusting the composition, lighting, doing research when needed and making changes. Whereas the students in the quality group told him that they had spent most of the semester thinking, speculating and researching on best practices and had actually taken far fewer photos than the ones in the quantity group and therefore had had far less experience actually taking photographs.

When I read this something clicked in me, and I thought to myself this is so true! How the hell am I supposed to become good at something unless I do it constantly? It is only through quantity i.e. by repeating the action again and again can we improve the quality of our work and level up by making changes as and when we receive feedback and assess our work. If you think about it, this is actually quite obvious! I realized that I already knew this truth but somehow never made the connection. For those of you who are into video games, think back to when you first bought a new video game. What did you do? If you are like most people, you ripped open the cover loaded the video game, just glanced at and figured out the basic controls and immediately started playing. Maybe when you started playing, you realized that it was too hard or that you did not know some additional controls which you needed to go to the next level or play better, so next time around you learnt those new things and went back to playing again. You repeated this process over and over and within a few weeks or months, you were really good at the game! You did not spend days on end watching videos of others playing the video game or reading instruction manuals, you just started immediately and then improved while continuing to play and getting better and better, the more you played. However, we somehow forget this when we decide to learn other skills in life because we attach our ego to it. We set high expectations for ourselves even before we start something new that we have no experience in.

But the problem is when we have high expectations from the beginning, we feel bad when we do not meet those expectations. For example, in terms of public speaking, if I deliver a speech and it does not go exactly as I planned it and I feel bad about it, my brain registers a simple message. GIVING A SPEECH=BAD FEELINGS. So it puts up more resistance to the idea of giving a speech next time around. So I have found that in the beginning placing very low expectations on the quality of my speeches and rewarding myself just for the act of giving a speech tricks my brain to associating giving a speech with good emotions and makes me want to give a speech again. And I know that I can always make adjustments and improve while still rewarding myself just for the act of speaking. Similarly, I think we can employ this technique in order to learn other skills as well. When we are completely new to something and feel resistance to doing the activity, the most crucial first step is to remove the resistance by massively lowering our criteria for counting something as a success. In other words, we can just reward ourselves and feel good merely for doing the activity thereby making it more likely that we repeat the activity. In other words increasing and focusing on the quantity or repetitions first and letting go of expectations when it comes to quality. This would help us do more of the desired activity, receive feedback and make course corrections and help us learn and grow faster while making the whole journey more enjoyable as it does not involve us constantly beating ourselves up for failing to match some standard that we arbitrarily set for ourselves. Therefore, if any of you are struggling to make progress in any activity or any aspect of your life due to this emphasis on quality and the notion of perfectionism, try forgetting about quality at least for a while and instead concentrate on quantity and repetitions and racking up experiences and you may find that your quality automatically goes up as you increase the repetitions. Until next time…