On Quantity And Quality

There's a parable I discovered through Ali Abdaal's newsletter that got me thinking:

Once there was a pottery teacher named Brian. One month later, he decided to split his class into two groups. Group A had to make a pot every day for 30 days (totaling 30 pots). Group B had to work on a single pot for the entire 30 days.

At the end of the month, Brian judged the quality of the pots. Without exception, every one of the top 10 pots came from Group A, the group that made one pot per day. None came from the group that focused on perfecting their single pot.

What I gathered from this parable is that when you first start learning a new skill, focusing solely on quality doesn't make much sense. Rather, it's only by producing a large volume of work that your skills will rapidly improve. You might think that YouTubers I admire, such as Ali Abdaal, Mr. Beast, and MKBHD, were natural-born video creators. But they all put in the work. Ali has more than 650 videos, Mr. Beast has more than 700, and MK…