
The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity - 0x54MUR41
https://medium.com/the-business-of-living/why-quantity-should-be-your-priority-3bc2b16fe3f5#.71nkro3k4
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cJ0th
This kind of advice is a double-edged sword. It does point you in the right
direction but when you meditate shortly on the meaning of the words "quality"
and "quantity" I think you're likely to conclude that the thesis "The Key to
Higher Quality is Higher Quantity" can imply almost anything.

For a long time I've been an opponent to this mantra and in a way I still am.
This is because in my opinion a lot of people define "higher quantity"
wrongly. Learning flash cards mindlessly all day will hardly help you become
more fluent in a foreign language; preparing loads of meals or even the same
meal very often doesn't help you become a chef if you aren't fully
concentrated on what you're doing.

Lately I am of the opinion that you have to practice with a zen attitude, like
it is described in "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind". And because of that I think
the author of this article also gets it wrong when he says:

    
    
      As Ira Glass so famously put it, the best way to refine your craft is to create a huge volume of work. Not to create the most perfect piece you can, but to create many pieces of work.
    

I guess what Mr. Glass hints at is that you shouldn't become paralyzed by
being caught up in thoughts. That is: It is useless to think "Oh this needs to
be perfect" or "Oh this needn't be perfect because some clever guy said so"
because in that instance you've already lost concentration and you are not
really stretching your skills. You certainly have to TRY your best every time.
In other words: Strive for perfection but don't get distracted by having
dualistic thoughts about your practice.

~~~
EthanHeilman
Practicing is not the same thing as doing something many times _. Refinement
requires identifying failure and the causes of that failure.

Fail fast is a great mantra, but the fast part requires understanding that you
have failed and using that failure to understand how to succeed.

_ People don't get great at chess by playing lots of chess, they get good by
studying and learning techniques often with advice from a teacher.

~~~
jholman
And yet the quantity-over-quality potters were not making any effort to
identify the failure and the causes of that failure.

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6stringmerc
A wise lesson once given to me by a person I can't recall:

 _If you 're going to "practice" guitar, then actually concentrate on what
you're doing - don't just have one in your hands and fumble around with it
while you're watching TV - focus and you will improve._

...which blends with another maxim I picked up:

 _There are some guitarists who can truthfully say they 've played for 40
years - and it sounds impressive until you find out they've only played the
same 9 chords the entire time._

So I can appreciate what the article is kind of pointing out in a lot of words
- "Practice makes better" \- it's a perfectly reasonable message to put
forward. The examples are okay overall. There's a lesson in there about the
ceramics class, but it seems like a setup from the beginning - a lot of
varibles in the outcome depending on the professor, right? I mean, just
letting the non-quantity group sit there and drool or goof off isn't
maximizing the actual concept of reaching for perfection.

Oh, and I listened to a 60 minute long tape of Kanye from that prolific
period. The end results are really cookie-cutter. He basically found a sample
of music that somebody else wrote & recorded, stretched/looped it, added a
hip-hop sounding MPC kit line under it, and called it done. It's a strong
example of mechanical repetition to hone the tools of a trade
(production/sound engineering). Personally I view it as the antithesis of
writing original material, but like I said, personal opinion.

~~~
beat
I should add too, that as someone who has personally played guitar for 30+
years, "the same 9 chords" is a good route to extraordinary musical depth.
Music isn't just technique - it's expressiveness. Knowing more chords won't
necessarily make you a better musician, or even a good one.

My own technique hasn't improved significantly in ages, but I'm a better
musician year after year. Why? Because I become more profound. I have better
things to say with the technique I have.

~~~
devonkim
This is pretty similar to how Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath has described how
he tried for a while to play real fast like a lot of the younger guys and
focused instead on playing what does do well with better understanding and
execution than those with less experience but more technical skill could
manage.

Similarly for us engineers, a real "10xer" is not just someone that ships
fast, you must ship something that is efficient with time and resources. This
can be done with luck but is more often done after lots of experience and
mistakes are made.

Hence, the lesson from W. Edwards Deming about how experience teaches nothing
without a framework or theory of concepts and knowledge is applicable very
much at the individual level as well as organizational. You can practice the
same punch 1000 times but if you do not really experiment a little, never
measure your punch effectiveness, or try to understand why your punches are
not getting any better even though you are stronger, you will lose against
someone that has carefully analyzed 1000 punches they've thrown and practiced
with that knowledge to shape their efforts.

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vinceguidry
Eventually you run into limits, that's when the real work begins. It took me
3-4 months to work up to where I could do cardio 3 times a day for an hour a
pop. I use a hybrid cardio machine called the Arc trainer at Planet Fitness.

I did that routine exactly once before my right calf muscle developed strain.
I've played this game before a dozen times with a dozen different activities.
Every time I wind up losing focus and that's why I have a dozen of them and
not three of them.

So rather than drop cardio entirely, I'm backing off to three or so sessions a
week and cutting down the length to a half-hour to 45 minutes depending on how
I feel. I'll pick the frequency back up as my muscles heal.

You really do have to get obsessive over little details to be able to do this.
I have a fairly strict routine that I follow every single time I go out to the
gym. One time my iPhone decided to start updating against my wishes just as I
was about to get on the machine.

After some choice swear words, I packed it up and went back home. It wasn't
worth sitting at the gym waiting for music and trying to work out without
music wasn't going to give me a good workout. Focusing on quantity allows you
to skip sessions knowing another one is coming.

~~~
omalleyt
I'd disagree that giving up on that workout was a good idea. I'm heavily
involved in the powerlifting community, and there's a well-known phenomenon
where people try and talk themselves into taking an extra rest day or two
before "leg day" because leg day is so important that they absolutely have to
feel 100% when they do it...problem is they do this every week, so instead of
doing 100 leg workouts a year at 95%, they end up doing 70 leg workouts at
100%. And trust me, that's not a good trade-off.

The thing to realize is your mind is just trying to trick you into getting out
of something, because leg day is hard.

~~~
vinceguidry
Cardio isn't powerlifting. Every single workout is more or less the same. I
worked out three times a day on cardio because the balls of my feet would get
irritated after about 45 minutes, so I couldn't just do 3 hours in one
sitting. The calculus changes when you're doing 14-21 workouts a week.

I _want_ to do more cardio. Even now, I wish I could get on the machine. I've
come to need it just like my morning coffee. I have to keep myself away from
it so I don't get injured.

It will take me probably another year before my body adjusts to the massive
amounts of cardio I want to do.

~~~
eru
If every single workout is the same, where is the progress?

(Or are you just talking about which exercises you do?)

~~~
vinceguidry
I talk more about it in the comment below, but the latter is correct.
Everything around the workout can be heavily refined because I do the same
exercise every time. I vary time, intensity, range of motion, and sometimes
even the basic approach I take towards performing the exercise, but my gym
sessions have revolved around my arc trainer session for a few months now.

Eventually I will find an exercise to add onto my routine, I've experimented
with kettlebells, but haven't yet committed to them. My ideal setup would be a
home-built power rack so I can do basic compound lifts. For various reasons
I've not taken on that project yet.

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fnordsensei
Producing many of the same crap won't increase quality. Producing one crap,
testing it, and improving it will. This is almost definitional.

The state of "many things" is irrelevant, it's the process that links those
things together that makes the difference.

The ability to learn from the results of the first crap is crucial. There are
too many examples of processes that result in the same crap over and over even
though the process is iterative.

The "quantity vs. quality" reasoning is sort of a red herring here, the real
discussion is about how to maximize learning while minimizing investment and
baseless assumptions.

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ranko
Quantity, as someone once said, has a quality all of its own. That said,
practice doesn't always make perfect; it forms habits. It's easy to form bad
habits, and reflective practice, mindfulness, etc, are only partial solutions
to that problem.

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halis
This is absolutely true. Stephen King said that if you want to be a writer
then write a lot. 2,000 words a day.

When I was in 6th grade, I used to shoot free throws every night for hours.
Just for fun. We had a track and field day at the end of the year and I beat
out two guys for first place in the free throw competition who went on to play
basketball on our high school team.

I beat them at something that they cared about a great deal and I didn't care
about at all, simply by inadvertently practicing a lot.

~~~
wallflower
> I beat them at something that they cared about a great deal and I didn't
> care about at all, simply by inadvertently practicing a lot.

While some may argue that shooting free throws every day for hours counts as
'caring', I would argue that it was your emotional detachment from the
results/outcome that made you really good.

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elliotec
I love this concept, and think the premise is absolutely true.

As others have pointed out, practicing and just churning out quantity often
develops habits and bad practices.

One way of combatting that seems to be switching up your routine and
deliberately avoiding these habits. This article explains a little more on
that: [http://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-uncover-
method-l...](http://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-uncover-method-learn-
new-skills-twice-fast)

But I think it's apparent all over. People who are able to produce a large
quantity of new ideas/methods/etc. almost automatically are of higher quality.

Take the Beatles for example. The produced a huge amount of music in their
relatively short recording history.

But they didn't just follow the same patterns, they experimented and look
where they got. Writers can be the same, and athletes, and why not developers
too?

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tetraodonpuffer
makes me wonder if the reason why it is a lot harder to pick things up when
one is older is primarily the lack of large blocks of available time as
opposed to the brain being less "plastic" or adaptable as one sometimes reads.

When you read famous musicians' bios, for example, there always seems to be
something along the lines of "I practiced 8 hours a day every day", hence lots
of quantity over several years, but this is of course next to impossible to do
in adulthood with all the demands on our time.

~~~
EC1
I manage to practice 6-8 hours a day and I work full time. Just leaves me with
absolutely no time for anything else once chores are taken care of. Can't wait
to buy a tiny remote cottage so I can practice full time with minimal bills.

~~~
anonymousDan
What do you practice?

~~~
EC1
Theory and history, then technical training (scales, chords, arpeggios, ear
training, sight reading, and etudes), then my repertoire which currently
consists of Bach's BWV 903, LVB's op. 13, Brahms op. 118 no. 1 & op. 118 no.
2, Gershwin's three preludes, Berg's Sonata op. 1, and Webern's Variations.

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nickpsecurity
I'm not a writer or web designer. Have no opinion on that aspect. For IT and
QA, this is terrible advice. You shouldn't just try random stuff over and
over. Instead, you should first look for people who get the job done on a
regular basis. Look for what principles or techniques they used to do that.
Start there. Observe in your own work or field reports what problems people
run into with what solutions were tried. Reuse what worked, experiment with
what didn't in new contexts, and so on.

Essentially, get a good start using what's already been done then use
creativity and scientific method to quickly become better. Publish lessons you
learned from solving problems with certain goals and constraints. Contribute
back to this overall process of learning.

Alternatively, people can try the author's advice and re-create the modern web
experience from HTML, JavaScript, C, and assembler via trial-and-error,
exploratory programming. I'll pass. ;)

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overcast
I (sort of) adopted this philosophy in December of last year. Instead of
toiling away on a single project for months on end, attempting to perfect
every last inch of it. I've decided that I'm going to release a project every
month, for a year. Get all my ideas out there, and just see what happens. I've
gained way more experience switching gears between projects, than I would have
sitting, staring at the same code day in and day out. The third project
launched yesterday, and starting the fourth this weekend!

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fsiefken
Almost 20y earlier Eric S. Raymond wrote that famous line in his essay 'The
Cathedral and the Bazaar': "Release early, release often".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often)

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brenschluss
Analogy: The larger your training set, the better your neural net. Of course,
having a good quality training set is important as well. But with enough data,
even not-so-great-data at huge quantities helps generate a well-performing
neural net.

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swehner
As in Greasing the Groove, GTG

