I’ve been thinking a lot recently about quantity and quality. ​“Quality is better than quantity,” they always say. But is that true in practice?
Are the perfectionists really doing better work than the people who launch things frequently?
Michael Jackson wrote hundreds of songs — some counts go over 500 — before selecting the handful that appeared on Thriller. Stephen King has written dozens of books, but we only ignore his lesser material in favour of his classics. It took Edison over 1,000 attempts to invent the lightbulb.
At some point, experience breeds perfectionism.
Yesterday, I didn’t get my newsletter out in time. I’m a day late writing than this. I was waiting for the perfect idea, and had been stumped for days. But if I had a habit of writing more frequently, the ideas would have flowed more freely, and I would have made my own self-imposed deadline.
Would it have been perfect? No.
But that’s okay.
Nothing is.