#parable #productivity #misc

There's a common parable / business school story that goes something like this:

A ceramics teacher announced on the first day of class that he was dividing the class into two groups.

All those on the left side of the studio (group A), he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, that is the sheer number of pots they make, while all those on the right solely on quality. Those on the right side (group B) only had to produce one single pot.

At the end of the semester, the pots were ordered by quality and it turned out that all the best pots came from group A, the ones tasked with making as many pots as possible.

Group A spent all of their time making pots, and learning from their mistakes, while group B spent their time theorizing and being paralyzed by the need for perfection.

Just Do It.

The best way to improve is to make a lot of mistakes.

I'm being a little flippant with the title, but I just want to hit this note again: perfect is the enemy of good. Get SOMETHING down and iterate on it.

If Sleazebaggano is good enough for George Lucas, I guarantee whatever you have down is good enough for a first draft.

See Also

Painting

The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint. The greats were great because they'd paint a lot.

  • Macklemore & Ryan Lewis — Ten Thousand Hours lyrics

Perfect is the enemy of good

It's better to finish something than to endlessly re-arrange the punctuation until it's perfect.

Some people refer to this tenant as "anything worth doing is worth doing poorly", but that phrasing never resonated with me. In fact, I find it quite jarring, though I do think the sentiment is intended to be similar.

Related: The best way to increase your chance of rolling a 20 is to roll a lot of dice.