Quantity is better than Quality.

A ceramics art teacher wants to conduct a little social experiment.

The teacher wanted to prove to his students that quality trumps quantity.

He said, "Today we're going to make the best ceramic pots."

He split the class into two groups. Instructed the first half that they will be marked by the quantity of pots they produced. The more you build, the better your mark. He told the second half of the class that they will be marked on the quality of the pot they make. The students had an hour and a half to complete their pots. When the students finished their pieces, the teacher lined them up to compare.

To the teacher's surprise, his social experiment did not turn out the way he assumed. He had assumed that the students who had focused on the quality of their one pot, would have had the best pieces. But the results showed that the group who had focused on the quantity created the better pots.

Dumbfounded he asked his students, "Wait, how did that even happen?"

One of the students replied "well… the more pots I created, the better I got at creating pots. So I made my mistakes in the first few, but got better by the time I made the final one."

Meanwhile, the students who focused on quality spent all their time trying to fix the first poor pot they made.

We hold the assumption that quality trumps quantity. Even more, that they are tradeoffs, where we sacrifice one for the other. But what if they were more connected?

As we can see, in creativity and leadership, quantity leads to quality.

So when we embrace the quantity of our failures and start looking at them as attempts, we can begin to be confident that we're on the journey of quality and success.


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Transcript:
So tell me, what do you think's more important?
Quality or quantity?
So this is a question a lot of us have tackled on.
Is it better to focus on quality
or should I produce more and create more quantity?
And there's this great author, David Bayles
who wrote this book Art & Fear.
He talks about this ceramics teacher,
ceramics teacher who wanted to demonstrate
to his students on the differences between
quality and quantity and the relationship
between quantity and quality.
And so he had this ceramics class,
they were all creating pottery.
And so he split the class into two,
he took one group of the class and he said
you guys are focused on creating as many pots as possible.
And that's what you're gonna be marked on.
You're gonna be marked on the number
of pots that you create.
And then he went to the second group and he said
you guys are gonna be marked
on the quality of pot that you made.
And he wanted to show how quality trumps quantity.
When we focus on this, trumps.
And so he gave them about an hour.
And they got a chance to create all their pots,
and they got a chance to make 'em and have fun with it.
And then he got them to line them up.
One side we had quality, the other side we had quantity.
And when he looked at the pots he was surprised,
he was a bit dumbfounded.
He saw that on average all the pots on the quantity side
were better than the ones on the quality.
Kind of confused, he asked one of his students,
he said why is this the case?
Why are your pots better?
One of the students put his hand up and said
well sir, the first three pots I made were absolute garbage.
But then the fourth one and the fifth one got a lot better.
And he looked at the other group and they said
well, we've just been focusing on making this same one.
We haven't been able to create multiple iterations.
And so a lot of us put quality and quantity
and see them as opposing forces
that you have to have one not the other,
and you have to focus on one and not the other.
But really, their relationship is a bit different.
In creativity, and in problem solving, and in leadership,
quantity leads us to quality.
(upbeat electronic music)