
Stop trying to ‘be original’ and be prolific instead (2016) - bcl
http://prolifiko.com/prolific/
======
nether
I stopped caring about this type of ambition porn in my late twenties, and I'm
a lot happier for it. I'm a lazy, average guy who will probably have a pretty
average life. When I stopped being so "hungry," it opened up a world of
tranquility and joy that had always been there.

~~~
nxsynonym
There's a weird mentality in America (assuming that's where you are located)
that average is bad.

Average is just average. There's no reason you need to be a multi-millionaire
with 6 houses, 12 cars, and endless spending cash.

I also think that there should be more emphasis on separating
personal/professional ambition from how much you earn. When people talk about
career goals, they usually only mean "money making goals".

There's nothing wrong with working just enough to survive and finding
satisfaction outside of spending money on crap you don't need. There's nothing
"lazy" about making a living (even if its bare minimum to pay the essential
bills).

What's the point in working 80 hour weeks for a set number of years, spending
money excessively, and having a heart attack by age 50 from being over worked?
Personally I'd rather be dead broke and happy then over worked and stressed
about un-important crap.

That's not to say you shouldn't work hard towards your goals, they should just
be defined out side of "make more money so I can impress my friends with a new
car"

~~~
ShannonAlther
Hyperbole about stress-induced medical problems aside, money is quantifiably
good. A man who makes 10x your salary can take 10x more vacations to the south
of France, justify taking more time off work to spend with his family, doesn't
have to worry as much about monetary concerns like loan payments or health
problems, and so on. It's not just "impressing your friends", having a nice
car can be a joy in and of itself, but I'm always weirded out by people who
say they don't want social status.

~~~
skynode
I don't understand it either. I can't begin to list the comforts and options
that come from being rich. Guess we all know. There's really no alternate
reality where it's much better to be average and have little or no options.

I usually take the view that I'd listen more to you if, to prove your point
more empirically, you got reasonably rich and then just decided to give away
all your wealth and resign to some lonely cabin in Maine.

~~~
jdietrich
>I can't begin to list the comforts and options that come from being rich.

I can't either, but for a rather different reason. What exactly does being
rich get you these days?

You get to sit in a slightly nicer seat on an aeroplane. You get to drive a
car that has vastly more power than any sane person needs, rather than one
that merely has substantially more power than any sane person needs. You get
to own a house with a lot of surplus rooms to fill up with stuff that has no
discernible impact on your standard of living.

Rich people don't get access to a super-duper internet, they don't get to
watch better movies or listen to better music, they don't really get to make
better friends. Most material comforts are perfectly accessible to someone on
an ordinary middle-class income.

Never having to work again is cool, but most people are unlikely to reach that
point. Your probability of accumulating that level of wealth before retirement
age is remote, the hedonic treadmill is a powerful trap and most people find
meaning and value in work anyway.

Being average isn't better than being rich, but it isn't much worse either, at
least not in a country with a sane government. The stuff that makes a real
difference is mostly a matter of public policy - Germans and Scandinavians
don't live in fear of a medical bankruptcy or an at-will dismissal, nor do
they desperately want to own a home to escape shady landlords and rising
rents.

~~~
ShannonAlther
But wealthy people DO have access to better internet (speed and quantity) and
have more leisure time to enjoy media. Also you can do other neat things, like
pay for your childrens' education. THAT is a list that goes on for a while.

And the statistically average American is barely treading water. I realize
that the average European is better off, but that's not relevant to America
right now.

~~~
jdietrich
Again, it's mostly public policy. I can get unmetered 100Mb/s broadband for
$42 a month, because the broadband market in my country is competitive and
well-regulated. Paying for your childrens' education is a completely alien
concept in many countries, because public primary and secondary education is
uniformly excellent and university is state-funded for all.

Financially, the average European is a fair bit worse off than the average
American. Gross median household incomes in Germany are about 25% lower than
in the US; America has the sixth highest median household income in the world.
GDP per capita tells a similar story. This simply isn't a question of money.

Americans don't need to get rich, they need to vote for someone who gives a
damn.

------
ThrustVectoring
There was an interesting study I remember reading along these lines.

They took two equivalent classes of pottery students. Group A was told that
they'd be graded based on the number of pieces made, while group B was based
off the quality of a single submitted piece. Following the given incentives
involved, group A made a bunch of pottery, while group B tried really hard at
making good pottery.

What's interesting is at the end of the class, group A's pottery was better
than group B's. Making a lot of pottery without caring about the quality of
any individual piece is _better_ at making high quality pottery.

The key takeaway I got is that you're generally able to magically become
better at things you do a lot of. So if you want to get good at something,
just do it more, and results will generally follow.

~~~
gens
My 2 moneys.

I worked in construction a while ago. I was always slow, pedantic, and the
work i did usually reflected that (usually, some things benefit from being
done fast). Everybody kept telling me that i was slow so one day i said "f it"
and started working faster. The quality of work went down, for obvious
reasons, and never got to the quality that was before (for most of it, some
work like cutting things to size stayed precise). But if you, for example,
paint a hundred windows really fast, you will probably not find many windows
painted nicely. (mind you that nobody notices the little imperfections in
construction, like, for example, a drop of white wall paint on the white
radiator pipe)

Of course doing more means learning more, but so does thinking and
experimenting.

Pottery, i never tried, but i assume it is more about the "feel" then anything
else. While programming benefits a lot more from learning random stuff. It's
easier to write a huge mess of code that works fine then it is to make a huge
pot that doesn't fall apart.

All in all, why not bout ? Hack some 100 programs quickly, and write a couple
programs with lots of preparation and research.

~~~
vosper
Do you think there was any change in quality from the first window you painted
after you decided to start going fast, versus the last one? Like, did you get
better at painting windows quickly, even if they weren't up to the quality of
the pedantic, slow one?

~~~
gens
It was a long time ago and i did do more of the heavier construction then
stuff like painting.

Biggest thing i learned from doing things quickly is where precision matters
and where not. For example if i'm painting the ceiling it doesn't matter if i
touch a wall as i will paint that wall later (unless i splat a bunch of it,
ofc), but it does matter if i touch the ceiling when i'm paining the wall. Of
course painting things quickly brings the risk of spraying paint around,
especially when using a roller. Painting things too slowly can also be bad if
the paint is highly viscous, like with the paint for outside metal surfaces
(railings) as it ends up being obvious where you stopped to detail something
else. Or wall paint if you cba to do it in two layers so you mix thicker paint
and do it in one.

With windows specifically (and doors and such) you would put the.. paper tape
(idk how to translate it) (edit: masking tape) some 2 or more cm wide on the
edges so you would have a nice margin of error. With paining fast there is a
bigger risk of going over it, and that can be bad (oil based window paint on a
wall is really bad, wall paint on a window easily goes away with a wet rag).

In most construction it doesn't matter if you are little off, it was just me
being anal.

TL;DR I learned where it matters to go a bit slower and where i can go fast
without consequences.

edit: Forgot to answer the question. Yes, i did get better. Mostly because i
learned where i _can_ go fast and where i need to pay more attention. Learning
to not wave brushes full of paint around like a figure skater also had a bit
to do with it. I did also learn that some things come out better by default if
you do them fast.

~~~
bcook
As someone who spent ~10 years in construction (log homes mostly), only
newbies and weekend warriors seem to have this mentality. Yeah, always do
quality work, but unless you are an artist, you've gotta get shit done
quickly.

I've tried to paint my own house and my professional painter friends can
absolutely destroy me in both speed & skill. A major problem I have is smooth
caulking. It takes me forever to shittily caulk a window while a pro can make
a few quick swipes and be done.

------
ideonexus
My wife is a 3D print-designer, who takes her prints to craft shows. We've
quickly learned that the best way to increase sales is to have a large variety
of designs rather than a smaller selection of high-quality designs. She can
make $30 selling one high-quality replica of a historic landmark that took her
weeks of painstaking modeling time, but she has to find the one person who
wants that print. Alternatively, she can mass-produce refrigerator magnets of
birds, flowers, and animals that take just a few hours of modeling time and
output them in such a variety that she can easily sell dozens in a day at $5
each.

It's what makes Amazon so profitable and AliBaba such a threat. It's the
"longtail" business model, but for ideas. Like Linus Pauling said, "The best
way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."

------
pnathan
I've seen this advice repeated elsewhere, with more academic analysis. And
also repeated in terms of startup advice.

patio11 has a phrase: "increase the luck surface", and it is kin to this as
well. If % of Making It is 1 in 500, then it's much more straightforward to
increase the number of dice rolls than to attempt the perfection of your roll.

This also ties into the findings about _grit_ , or perseverance through rough
patches. Grit and trying over and over, learning each time, is a pretty good
predictor of some decent success.

In my _own_ career, I've found that being aggressively prolific is key to
getting better. Careful tweaking so as not doing the same thing over and over
is hugely important as well: searching the learning hillclimb for improvement.

~~~
patio11
That phrase comes from the TechZing podcast ("increase one's luck surface
area") and is a really valuable insight (surface area = depth of value created
times breadth of people who see it), so all the credit to them.

~~~
rizwank
Can you share which podcast it was?

Nvm. Reference : [http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-
surf...](http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area)

------
scandox
Winston Churchill produced 51 volumes of history and is generally regarded, in
this pursuit, as having drank a cup and pissed an Ocean. I doubt they will
continue to be read much once his personal historical aura has sufficiently
faded.

Gibbon on the other hand in 6 volumes wrote a work that will probably be in
print until Western Civilisation sinks into the dust.

So - kinda depends I would say.

~~~
munificent
> having drank a cup and pissed an Ocean

I've never heard this figure of speech and Google isn't turning anything up.
What does it mean?

~~~
obastani
From the context, I think it means that the 51 volumes (the ocean) contains
very little content (the cup). I also don't think the grandparent comment
reflects the intent of the original post -- prolificness is the number of
attempted works, not the length of any single work.

~~~
maldusiecle
Churchill didn't write 51 volumes as one work; he was very prolific in the
sense of many attempted works. Gibbon's six volumes were in a single work, and
he wrote a few other shorter works. By the standard of number of attempted
works, Churchill and Gibbon are good examples.

------
TheHideout
One of my favorite HN posts [1] relates directly to this. It was called
"Prolific Engineers Take Small Bites". The big idea was to 1. take small
bites, 2. make meaningful change, and 3. commit often. In the original article
commit refers to committing to a repo. However, I treat it as commitment in a
general sense. This mindset has considerably helped me keep on track with all
my projects from game development, aerospace engineering day job, software
contracting, learning to play music instruments, learning to draw, physical
fitness, etc.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167421](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167421)

------
theprop
YES YES YES!! More support for this!

That said, be prolific and deep...try not to repeat yourself depending on what
you're doing but go deeper...

Aaron Levie of box.com I believe started 10 different websites and box.com was
the one that took off.

A friend of mine in Japan started 3 companies...and only 1 took
off...initially all 3 looked equally promising. Imagine if he took 2 years per
experiment and gave up after 2 of the 3.

The hit rate of Beethoven between masterpiece and so-so piece was relatively
steady in his middle and late periods.

Often works that are pre-planned "masterpieces" slaved over fail to engage,
while some things made quickly live forever...think of Leonardo's drawing the
Vitruvian Man, a quick sketch that's one of the most famous drawings in the
world vs. his destroyed or not-made (I forget) statue of a horse (it is being
re-built by someone and the world is still not taking much notice).

Google, Amazon, etc...how many failures do they have, if you look at that list
they'd look like giant failures...remember Google Knol? The wikipedia killer.
Or Amazon Fire Phone? Really embarrassing...do they care? Not at all! They
simply don't care...but it's a little bit because despite a hundred failures,
two of the more experimental things they did become $100 billion dollar
businesses namely Android and AWS.

------
sideshowb
I find the polarization of this debate a bit bizarre. While the article may
have a point, I don't think anyone believes in pushing it to the absurdity of
its logical extreme which would be to write terabytes of output using a pseudo
random algorithm (plus a little learning from audience feedback).

So we see there should be a minimal acceptable quality for whatever you're
doing, and if this is exceeded then by all means push out the volume.

The question then becomes, how to tell whether you're meeting the quality
threshold?

I do agree that trying to be original is a red herring though. In a sea of
mediocrity, being good _is_ an original outcome in its own right.

------
obastani
I think this article is being somewhat selective in it's evidence. Several
great mathematicians were highly selective in what they published, e.g., Gauss
and Riemann. I don't think Einstein published that many papers. Though it
might be the case that gauging quality is easier in math and physics, so being
prolific is less important.

~~~
jjaredsimpson
Gauss and Riemann may have been selective publishers, but they produced and
thought about topics constantly. We can see this in their correspondence and
private notes.

They probably weren't making lists of topics they wanted to study one day and
getting stuck not even starting.

~~~
mangodrunk
>They probably weren't making lists of topics they wanted to study one day and
getting stuck not even starting.

Is that common? I have this problem of making lists of things that I want to
do, but typically it doesn't get much further than that. I feel like a
constantly plan, but never do anything.

Also, I agree regarding those that may have selectively published, it doesn't
mean that they weren't incredibly prolific.

------
vijayr
_Alexander Dumas wrote a total of 277 novels over his lifetime – six every
year of his working life_

Woah, that is _insane_.

~~~
gommm
It's also stretching the truth a little bit. Dumas had 45 employees who worked
with him to write the novels. So, he was more running a studio with a process
to create great novels rather than actually writing each novel.

~~~
reddit_clone
Ah. So James Patterson didn't invent the fiction sweatshops?

Are all Dumas novels written this way? Even the 'big' ones like Count of MC
and Three musketeers?

~~~
gommm
Hi, sorry, didn't see your comment before. Yes, even the big ones. A big part
of the research and writing of the Count of Monte Cristo was done by Auguste
Maquet who was one of his main ghostwriter. August Maquet also worked on all
the sequels from the Three Musketeers but not the first novel.

------
anigbrowl
This is basically an ad for their course. I'm not very impresseed with the
article.

Writing comes really easily to me (many of you would say a bit too easily,
considering my tendency to drop 1000 word comments on HN). I really don't
think the route to quality is just churning out as much as possible; if
anything, you run the risk of getting some small success and then churning out
that lowish-level of quality for as long as the money keeps flowing. It's very
obvious from a day reading blogs or magazines that there is a flourishing
market for bad writing. In my view, the best way to improve your writing is to
read. Read a lot, be snobbish about the quality of what you read, invest
effort in reading stuff you find difficult to understand. Many people pursue
style at the expense of learning how to write substantively; this is the
literary equivalent of painting pictures with glitter. You might produce a
masterpiece after a while, but more likely whatever you do is going to look
really tacky.

It's easier to get paid if you're prolific and can churn out lots of material
on demand. But you're also putting a ceiling on the quality of your output and
probably your earning power. If you want to go good work, learn to work slowly
and without the validation (and dopamine hit) that comes from a quick
turnaround. I paint now and have a mix of simple things that I know out
quickly and large difficult pieces that I labor over for months at a time and
that are likely not that interesting or easy to appreciate to the casual
glance. I like both kinds, but guess which ones have priority if the house
catches fire.

------
unabst
If you get really really good at something, original is automatic. And if you
practice really really hard at something, getting good is automatic.

Passion is a simple advantage because it gives you the focus, the persistence,
and the satisfaction needed to keep practicing efficiently.

Maybe it'll take 10 years to do what a genius could accomplish in 1, but if
the genius is working on something else, it's all you. But even if not, your
body of work will be different.

------
crawfordcomeaux
Depth-first search through a concept space doesn't lead to originality as
quickly as performing a breadth-first search at each new level of depth.

The shortest path to an idea may require disparate ideas.

I know I'm only rephrasing the headline, but the article's point follows
easily from this model of how thoughts are structured in Memory Evolutive
Neural Systems.

[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004)

(to read for free, go to [https://sci-hub.bz](https://sci-hub.bz) and search
for 10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.004)

EDIT: To be clear, the point follows easily from the model, which says nothing
about what's required to understand the model.

------
sndean
I wonder if this has something to do with why certain comedians are so good
(e.g., Carlin and Louis CK).

"...[Louis] wished he could be like Carlin and do new albums and specials
every year — all of them brilliant. It wasn’t until much later in his career
that C.K. would get the important advice from Carlin to throw out all of his
material every year and start fresh..."

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/louis-ck-honors-
geo...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/louis-ck-honors-george-
carlin-video_n_950134.html)

------
melling
Quantity trumps quality.

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-
quality...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality/)

------
code777777
Adam Grant whose book "Originals" is a main topic in this this article gave a
great Ted Talk on "Originals" here:

"The surprising habits of original thinkers"

[https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_o...](https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers)

------
CM30
Yeah, I have to say I agree with this article for the most part.

For example, I've spent most of my time recently as a writer, and found that
it's been almost impossible to tell what works will become popular and what
won't. You can throw something out in minutes and have tons of people sharing
it and liking it, or spend months researching a piece and find that no one
gives a toss.

But (somewhat sadly), I'm not sure I'd agree with the article that:

> being prolific doesn’t give you an excuse to get sloppy and start blurting
> out half formed ideas – that’s just going to piss off everyone apart from
> your mum. Your work still needs to be the very best you can do.

Because somewhat unfortunately, that's exactly what search engines and social
networks kind of want now. They want quick responses to breaking news and
trends, not well thought out pieces that take all the facts and views into
consideration.

Look at YouTube for example. Many popular channels there basically cash in on
whatever the latest controversy or drama is, usually within about a day of it
occurring. A lot of popular games and apps are ones that literally just cash
in on a recent trend, quality be kind of damned (see that Mega Man Xover 'fan
game' which showed you could copy Capcom's product by spending 5 minutes in
Flash or various game mods and stuff which stick Donald Trump into existing
games). And when news is concerned... well, the most successful papers and
sites (as far as traffic is concerned) are those that rush out stories as
quickly as possible. Someone who watched yesterday's Pokemon themed Nintendo
Direct would get a lot more clicks if they capitalised on the typo that said
it'd released for the Switch rather than if they waited for more facts before
proceeding.

So being prolific definitely helps more than trying to be 'original' and
focusing too much on any one piece. But I'd also say the setup on a lot of
modern internet sites actually goes further and kind of advantages people who
can just get stuff done quickly in general, quality be damned.

------
DamonHD
Well, being prolific OR a genius would be fine by me.

In the absence of either I do think it's valuable to try more things in
parallel to see what works, and not get put off by 'failures' (experience you
gained just after you needed it), or not being 'perfect' (since there rarely
is such a thing, objectively).

------
kwoff
Exploiting a power law. Search it with content marketing. The article, like
others on that site, also has a listicle, which you might also search with
content marketing.

------
bluGill
When you are making rough drafts I agree. However once a rough draft has
promise you need to spend a lot of time on it to make it good.

I have observed that authors tend to go downhill once they are known. The
pressure to publish (more money I guess), along with name recognition meaning
they don't have to put out quality work is my theory.

------
cubano
Songwriters have realized this a long time ago. Most successful bands write
between 80-100 songs per album release.

Hard work and practice pretty much always makes one better.

------
jackwest
Appreciate the simple distillation of a useful analysis.

------
BatFastard
I was an intellectual whore for 25 years. Personally there is more joy and
satisfaction in being original than there is in the money that results in
being prolific.

I would rather make less and be happy.

~~~
mi100hael
Easy to say after 25 years of making money ;)

~~~
BatFastard
Would you rather find that out in 20 more years or now?

