The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity

https://medium.com/the-business-of-living/why-quantity-should-be-your-priority-3bc2b16fe3f5#.71nkro3k4

by 0x54MUR41 • 10 years ago

99 56 10 years ago

makes me wonder if the reason why it is a lot harder to pick things up when one is older is primarily the lack of large blocks of available time as opposed to the brain being less "plastic" or adaptable as one sometimes reads.

When you read famous musicians' bios, for example, there always seems to be something along the lines of "I practiced 8 hours a day every day", hence lots of quantity over several years, but this is of course next to impossible to do in adulthood with all the demands on our time.

EC12• 10 years ago

I manage to practice 6-8 hours a day and I work full time. Just leaves me with absolutely no time for anything else once chores are taken care of. Can't wait to buy a tiny remote cottage so I can practice full time with minimal bills.

anonymousDan• 10 years ago

What do you practice?

vinceguidry5• 10 years ago

Eventually you run into limits, that's when the real work begins. It took me 3-4 months to work up to where I could do cardio 3 times a day for an hour a pop. I use a hybrid cardio machine called the Arc trainer at Planet Fitness.

I did that routine exactly once before my right calf muscle developed strain. I've played this game before a dozen times with a dozen different activities. Every time I wind up losing focus and that's why I have a dozen of them and not three of them.

So rather than drop cardio entirely, I'm backing off to three or so sessions a week and cutting down the length to a half-hour to 45 minutes depending on how I feel. I'll pick the frequency back up as my muscles heal.

You really do have to get obsessive over little details to be able to do this. I have a fairly strict routine that I follow every single time I go out to the gym. One time my iPhone decided to start updating against my wishes just as I was about to get on the machine.

After some choice swear words, I packed it up and went back home. It wasn't worth sitting at the gym waiting for music and trying to work out without music wasn't going to give me a good workout. Focusing on quantity allows you to skip sessions knowing another one is coming.

SyneRyder2• 10 years ago

I'd be curious to hear more about this, both why you were wanting to train 3 hours a day and how you approached refining your routine. Any chance you've blogged about this somewhere? (The idea of building a precise routine so your music trigger lands at the right moment resonates with me.)

vinceguidry5• 10 years ago

I trained three times a day because my body can't handle doing one 3 hour session. When I started really going heavy, I was going through a heartbreak and wanted to throw my efforts into something other than wallowing in self-misery. I kept it up even after I pulled out of it. Never let a good heartbreak go to waste.

My routine evolved slowly over time. The key is spotting and removing barriers to doing more. I put my jacket on the machine on the left, my towel goes on the right. My iPhone goes in the cup holder, my gym bag just under the cup holder. My gym bag has an organization scheme, everything in there has a place and there's a routine for putting everything there before I get in my car.

Basically, every little thing I can look at and try to improve, I do, and don't worry about the time or expense. I've gone through three pairs of sneakers to try to find the right kind that won't hurt the balls of my feet. Cheap ones don't work well, so I'm moving on to New Balance. I had minimalist shoes, those hurt my feet, but not enough to where I can't work out. The shoes have to be 8 1/2 or 9 wide, normal doesn't cut it.

My music routine has shifted over time. I used to just play anything, then I went to a specific playlist so I could try HIIT. Whenever the chorus would come on, I'd go really hard. That got unsustainable as my times on the machine went up and now I just do it flat, with my whole playlist so I don't get bored of the music. Maybe in six months to a year I'll be able to experiment with it again.

The machine itself has settings, my approach to these have refined over time as well. I used to set the incline all the way to 20 and slowly increase the resistance over time. Now I set both the incline and the resistance as I'm comfortable and just trust that over time my body will adjust and the numbers will go up.

The key to getting started, I think, is to pick something that can be "routine-ized". I use a machine instead of running because I have a lot more 'knobs' to tweak. Classes I have to take on someone else's schedule, I used to do dance classes but not anymore. I tried the bike machine when I first started going to the gym but gravitated to the Arc machine pretty quickly and fell in love with it.

At first the big battle will be just showing up. I started with the simple goal of going there once every day. Didn't matter if I actually worked out or not, or what I did, just get to the gym that day and I gave myself permission to feel like I'm accomplishing my fitness goals.

Then when it starts getting hard, I gave myself permission to fall back to earlier goals as needed / desired. I can cut workouts short, but not skip them. I always make sure I'm moving forward.

There finally comes a point where moving forward is moving backward. You don't want working out to overtake the rest of your life. But you have to cut back with purpose, not just do it because of reasons. You can put it on the back burner, but know why you're doing that and when you're ready to put it back on the front burner.

I'm injured right now, so I'm allowing other things to take priority. They may keep priority even after I heal up. But getting back in the saddle and getting back to work pushing my limits is always on my mind.

fapjacks• 10 years ago

I agree and would go further by saying that improvement only happens with quantity at the interface between your normal output and your limitations. So those times of uncomfortable struggle against great personal odds... That is where you begin to improve. And like you mention, this is the case with just about everything.

omalleyt• 10 years ago

I'd disagree that giving up on that workout was a good idea. I'm heavily involved in the powerlifting community, and there's a well-known phenomenon where people try and talk themselves into taking an extra rest day or two before "leg day" because leg day is so important that they absolutely have to feel 100% when they do it...problem is they do this every week, so instead of doing 100 leg workouts a year at 95%, they end up doing 70 leg workouts at 100%. And trust me, that's not a good trade-off.

The thing to realize is your mind is just trying to trick you into getting out of something, because leg day is hard.

vinceguidry5• 10 years ago

Cardio isn't powerlifting. Every single workout is more or less the same. I worked out three times a day on cardio because the balls of my feet would get irritated after about 45 minutes, so I couldn't just do 3 hours in one sitting. The calculus changes when you're doing 14-21 workouts a week.

I want to do more cardio. Even now, I wish I could get on the machine. I've come to need it just like my morning coffee. I have to keep myself away from it so I don't get injured.

It will take me probably another year before my body adjusts to the massive amounts of cardio I want to do.

mikeskim• 10 years ago

Tommy Kono would disagree with you. Albeit he was a weightlifter.

vinceguidry5• 10 years ago

Also, I used to lift. Many times, I wished I would have bailed on an ineffective workout rather than push through. If I'm not feeling right, I'm prone to getting injured. I will not work out with a trainer again for this reason. I want a strict routine, doing the same build up every time will allow me both to refine in the direction of greater comfort, and to allow me to sense when something's off.

My lifting strategy is to take it very slowly, do not worry a single bit about making gains on any particular day. Injury is to be ruthlessly stamped out through borderline excessive caution and getting to know your body very, very well. I would rather skip a whole month of lifting than get a single injury, no matter how minor.

In fact, I'd rather not lift at all than have more than the remotest possibility of a lifting injury. That shit just sucks way, way too much. Once the weight on the bar gets heavy, I want to take exactly zero chances. When I get back on that particular horse, I want to still be doing it when I'm eighty years old.

ranko• 10 years ago

Quantity, as someone once said, has a quality all of its own. That said, practice doesn't always make perfect; it forms habits. It's easy to form bad habits, and reflective practice, mindfulness, etc, are only partial solutions to that problem.

elliotec• 10 years ago

I love this concept, and think the premise is absolutely true.

As others have pointed out, practicing and just churning out quantity often develops habits and bad practices.

One way of combatting that seems to be switching up your routine and deliberately avoiding these habits. This article explains a little more on that: http://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-uncover-method-l...

But I think it's apparent all over. People who are able to produce a large quantity of new ideas/methods/etc. almost automatically are of higher quality.

Take the Beatles for example. The produced a huge amount of music in their relatively short recording history.

But they didn't just follow the same patterns, they experimented and look where they got. Writers can be the same, and athletes, and why not developers too?

6stringmerc5• 10 years ago

A wise lesson once given to me by a person I can't recall:

If you're going to "practice" guitar, then actually concentrate on what you're doing - don't just have one in your hands and fumble around with it while you're watching TV - focus and you will improve.

...which blends with another maxim I picked up:

There are some guitarists who can truthfully say they've played for 40 years - and it sounds impressive until you find out they've only played the same 9 chords the entire time.

So I can appreciate what the article is kind of pointing out in a lot of words - "Practice makes better" - it's a perfectly reasonable message to put forward. The examples are okay overall. There's a lesson in there about the ceramics class, but it seems like a setup from the beginning - a lot of varibles in the outcome depending on the professor, right? I mean, just letting the non-quantity group sit there and drool or goof off isn't maximizing the actual concept of reaching for perfection.

Oh, and I listened to a 60 minute long tape of Kanye from that prolific period. The end results are really cookie-cutter. He basically found a sample of music that somebody else wrote & recorded, stretched/looped it, added a hip-hop sounding MPC kit line under it, and called it done. It's a strong example of mechanical repetition to hone the tools of a trade (production/sound engineering). Personally I view it as the antithesis of writing original material, but like I said, personal opinion.

Jormundir• 10 years ago

I think your analysis is spot on. Improving is a slightly more complex cycle. Improvement looks something like this:

Do -> analyze strengths and weaknesses -> try to do better.

That middle part is way more successful with the help of a good coach. Really quick learners ("talent") can fill in that middle step on their own, but would ultimately benefit from a coach.

When your work cycle is:

do -> do again -> do again -> do again

you'll improve a bit, but pretty quickly plateau.

6stringmerc5• 10 years ago

Nicely laid out in the flow chart style. I agree that the middle part is essential in the conversation. Also on the point a good coach should show value!

Now and then I see 'self-help' or motivational type pieces encouraging a type of "Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses" which can be applicable in a lot of arenas. However taking on that mentality fully strikes me as missing an important long-term perspective. I say this as a person who was really deficient in one digit's dexterity (pinkie) and instead of just kinda shrugging it off, I spent many years and sessions trying to bring it up to par. Now I'm happy to say I can really only remember it as a past weakness, due to the focus and attention to improvement!

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

Analysing your own strengths and weakness is a classic Dunning-Kruger problem - you don't know what you don't know, so you can't assess your work accurately.

You can either fix this by trying to copy what other people do in as many different ways as possible, or having a real expert around to say "No, try this instead."

Doing stuff over and over only helps if you're creatively blocked and are terrified of producing crap. It's a good first step towards building momentum, but it's just a beginning.

beat4• 10 years ago

Eventually, Kanye went on to craft some astoundingly original sounds and beats. We don't all just appear like Athena bursting full-grown from the head of Zeus. Kanye would never have become the incredibly successful musician he is today without going through that period of mediocre practice.

sehr3• 10 years ago

'Lock yourself in a room doing 5 beats a day for 3 summers'

6stringmerc5• 10 years ago

In some circles, sure, but in other circles he's known as the guy who tried to unapologetically rip off Aphex Twin[1], ruined a perfectly good Daft Punk song, and is pretty much a punchline. As in, I don't think he ever got beyond mediocre. Mediocrity and accessibility are significant elements to success in popular music; kind of like the other side of the coin to Max Martin's genius when it comes to the perfect song formula which is complexity posing as simplicity.

[1]http://pitchfork.com/news/56459-aphex-twin-speaks-on-his-new...

gnaritas3• 10 years ago

I wouldn't really call Kanye a musician; he's a rapper/hip hop artist/producer. Musicians are people who play musical instruments. Sampling other people's music and rapping over it isn't being a musician, it's being a producer.

beat4• 10 years ago

I should add too, that as someone who has personally played guitar for 30+ years, "the same 9 chords" is a good route to extraordinary musical depth. Music isn't just technique - it's expressiveness. Knowing more chords won't necessarily make you a better musician, or even a good one.

My own technique hasn't improved significantly in ages, but I'm a better musician year after year. Why? Because I become more profound. I have better things to say with the technique I have.

devonkim2• 10 years ago

This is pretty similar to how Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath has described how he tried for a while to play real fast like a lot of the younger guys and focused instead on playing what does do well with better understanding and execution than those with less experience but more technical skill could manage.

Similarly for us engineers, a real "10xer" is not just someone that ships fast, you must ship something that is efficient with time and resources. This can be done with luck but is more often done after lots of experience and mistakes are made.

Hence, the lesson from W. Edwards Deming about how experience teaches nothing without a framework or theory of concepts and knowledge is applicable very much at the individual level as well as organizational. You can practice the same punch 1000 times but if you do not really experiment a little, never measure your punch effectiveness, or try to understand why your punches are not getting any better even though you are stronger, you will lose against someone that has carefully analyzed 1000 punches they've thrown and practiced with that knowledge to shape their efforts.

ChemicalWarfare• 10 years ago

probably depends on the style of music you play. music I listen to/play is an "athletic event" (in addition to the actual "music" part lol) where technique is a crucial part of the execution. for me personally just to stay at the level I'm at I need to practice every day for about an hour.

6stringmerc5• 10 years ago

True; vocabulary isn't just about knowing words, it's about knowing the right words. That applies to playing an instrument as well, especially soloing. I'm glad I spent a half-dozen years wanting to be a shredder, because learning the speed and stamina is extremely useful later on when playing slower and more contemplative. It's back to the vocabulary thing though, in that having the choice of what to use tends to come along with having the prowess to afford the choice.

devonkim2• 10 years ago

Hip hop and rap creative processes bear much more resemblance to a combination of poets and musical arrangers that historically haven't gotten much wide appeal critical acclaim or anything (who the heck knows about Sammy Nestico except jazz students that read his charts?). Everything else is about finding something catchy enough to loop together as support, but that is something that does require some form of pop taste intuition to be successful where this is done in a lot of electronic music far outside pop (power noise, ambient, and even dubstep do an awful lot of samples and looping of one lick or two and transpose or invert chords or something as tricks).

halis• 10 years ago

This is absolutely true. Stephen King said that if you want to be a writer then write a lot. 2,000 words a day.

When I was in 6th grade, I used to shoot free throws every night for hours. Just for fun. We had a track and field day at the end of the year and I beat out two guys for first place in the free throw competition who went on to play basketball on our high school team.

I beat them at something that they cared about a great deal and I didn't care about at all, simply by inadvertently practicing a lot.

wallflower• 10 years ago

I beat them at something that they cared about a great deal and I didn't care about at all, simply by inadvertently practicing a lot.

While some may argue that shooting free throws every day for hours counts as 'caring', I would argue that it was your emotional detachment from the results/outcome that made you really good.

nickpsecurity• 10 years ago

I'm not a writer or web designer. Have no opinion on that aspect. For IT and QA, this is terrible advice. You shouldn't just try random stuff over and over. Instead, you should first look for people who get the job done on a regular basis. Look for what principles or techniques they used to do that. Start there. Observe in your own work or field reports what problems people run into with what solutions were tried. Reuse what worked, experiment with what didn't in new contexts, and so on.

Essentially, get a good start using what's already been done then use creativity and scientific method to quickly become better. Publish lessons you learned from solving problems with certain goals and constraints. Contribute back to this overall process of learning.

Alternatively, people can try the author's advice and re-create the modern web experience from HTML, JavaScript, C, and assembler via trial-and-error, exploratory programming. I'll pass. ;)

brenschluss• 10 years ago

Analogy: The larger your training set, the better your neural net. Of course, having a good quality training set is important as well. But with enough data, even not-so-great-data at huge quantities helps generate a well-performing neural net.

cJ0th• 10 years ago

This kind of advice is a double-edged sword. It does point you in the right direction but when you meditate shortly on the meaning of the words "quality" and "quantity" I think you're likely to conclude that the thesis "The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity" can imply almost anything.

For a long time I've been an opponent to this mantra and in a way I still am. This is because in my opinion a lot of people define "higher quantity" wrongly. Learning flash cards mindlessly all day will hardly help you become more fluent in a foreign language; preparing loads of meals or even the same meal very often doesn't help you become a chef if you aren't fully concentrated on what you're doing.

Lately I am of the opinion that you have to practice with a zen attitude, like it is described in "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind". And because of that I think the author of this article also gets it wrong when he says:

  As Ira Glass so famously put it, the best way to refine your craft is to create a huge volume of work. Not to create the most perfect piece you can, but to create many pieces of work.

I guess what Mr. Glass hints at is that you shouldn't become paralyzed by being caught up in thoughts. That is: It is useless to think "Oh this needs to be perfect" or "Oh this needn't be perfect because some clever guy said so" because in that instance you've already lost concentration and you are not really stretching your skills. You certainly have to TRY your best every time. In other words: Strive for perfection but don't get distracted by having dualistic thoughts about your practice.

iolothebard• 10 years ago

The Ira quote reminds me of my opinion on startups, fail early and fail often. Maybe you'll get lucky and one won't fail.

Failure is all in how you define it though.

EthanHeilman• 10 years ago

Practicing is not the same thing as doing something many times. Refinement requires identifying failure and the causes of that failure.

Fail fast is a great mantra, but the fast part requires understanding that you have failed and using that failure to understand how to succeed.

People don't get great at chess by playing lots of chess, they get good by studying and learning techniques often with advice from a teacher.

jholman• 10 years ago

And yet the quantity-over-quality potters were not making any effort to identify the failure and the causes of that failure.

gavazzy• 10 years ago

Except that flash cards DO improve language acquisition skills!

http://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/

xiaoma• 10 years ago

They do and they don't. Flashcards and SRS are great for very discrete bits of information. They're a pretty good for things like getting a faster start with the most commonly used 500 nouns, remembering verb tables or memorizing Chinese characters.

They're pretty bad for language acquisition in general, though. They chop the language into decontextualized bits. Time spent doing vocab flashcards is time not spent learning how words fit together. Time spent on sentence flashcards is time not spent reading books and absorbing cultural stories and background.

tldr; use flashcards to drill the basic phonics / alphabet of a language and maybe the most common words at the beginning and then focus on extensive reading + listening and having conversations with actual people about what you're learning.

I've recorded a video about this topic before: http://toshuo.com/2012/spaced-repetition-systems-explained-i...

volaski• 10 years ago

Mr. Miyagi wouldn't agree! Wax on wax off training turns Karate kid into a master martial artist. One neglected factor is you're most creative when you're engaging in extremely routine (read "boring") tasks, which means by preparing loads of meals you train your skills but also--with the right mindset--have plenty of opportunities to come up with creative ideas. The important part is "the right mindset". If you're just a lazy guy who does work just to get by and not care about creating something of "quality", then it won't help no matter how many years you do it. Karate kid became good because he was motivated to become good. Otherwise he would have ended up becoming just a damn good car washer.

overcast• 10 years ago

I (sort of) adopted this philosophy in December of last year. Instead of toiling away on a single project for months on end, attempting to perfect every last inch of it. I've decided that I'm going to release a project every month, for a year. Get all my ideas out there, and just see what happens. I've gained way more experience switching gears between projects, than I would have sitting, staring at the same code day in and day out. The third project launched yesterday, and starting the fourth this weekend!

fnordsensei• 10 years ago

Producing many of the same crap won't increase quality. Producing one crap, testing it, and improving it will. This is almost definitional.

The state of "many things" is irrelevant, it's the process that links those things together that makes the difference.

The ability to learn from the results of the first crap is crucial. There are too many examples of processes that result in the same crap over and over even though the process is iterative.

The "quantity vs. quality" reasoning is sort of a red herring here, the real discussion is about how to maximize learning while minimizing investment and baseless assumptions.

fsiefken• 10 years ago

Almost 20y earlier Eric S. Raymond wrote that famous line in his essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar': "Release early, release often". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often

swehner• 10 years ago

As in Greasing the Groove, GTG

The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity

Related Stories