Quantity is better than quality - really now
Stop trying to make perfect decisions, the best decision is making more of them
We can deliberate before taking action. Seeking the ‘perfect’ decision causes us to hesitate.
I know plenty of people who want to start a business but are waiting for the perfect billion dollar idea. I know would be writers waiting for the perfect thing to write about.
We don’t realise that if we get into a practice of putting ourselves out there and accepting the failures we unlock a much bigger upside.
To be lucky you need to be consistent, and to be creative you need to be consistent.
Prevention and Promotion mindsets are really important drivers of success in this:
Prevention - You are trying not to fail, you fret about things and over think.
Promotion - You see the upside of trying, you just do it and don’t worry.
Quantity vs Quality - Student study
Students for a photography class were split into two groups:
Group A - Tested on the volume of work - 100 photos
Group B - Tested on the quality - 1 perfect photo
Surprisingly the Group A students (volume) produced much better quality photos. They just started straight away and tried lots of different things. It was an art class so they still wanted to make something good. Anything that might be worth a photo they tried.
Group B (quality) spent a lot of time thinking about things. They only wanted to do something that would be perfect so they didn’t take chances. Without the consistency they didn’t accidentally learn new things.
The more you expose yourself and try things the more likely something will go well. You try things without expectation and learn from the failures.
A nice way to look at choice
Promotion and prevention mindsets around our choices also impact with things we consume as well as create.
Low repetition —> decision frustration
If you don’t eat out often or you barely watch movies (Say once a month or less). You can worry about picking the right one. With any choice that you do make, you can worry about what you are missing out on .
You feel you might let a friend down if you don’t follow their recommendation. If the restaurant is full that day. You feel like you are losing something. You are in prevention trying not to lose.
High repetition —> decision flow
If you eat out everyday or watch a movie everyday. Choosing is very easy. You just want to try new things. You hear about a few great restaurants, you add them to the list. You watch a few adverts for films that excite you. You add them to the list.
You know you will reach the important ones and you don’t worry at all. You can make a list of all the classics and slowly crack through them.
You are in a promotion mindset looking for the wins.
Upside opportunities
When you focus on consistency and quantity you know you will experience all the best options. You will also discover a lot of gems you could have never experienced when you were stuck fretting about the few referrals you had to decide between.
There will also be some terrible experiences. You don’t worry about those so much. That’s the cost of discovering the great. It’s part of it and you get to learn something from the experience.
I am not about to start watching movies or eating out everyday. I enjoy this example because it shows the best things come from not worrying about failing.
It feels so obvious in our consumption choices that we need to expose ourself to more to hit more wins, yet we don’t notice that it’s the same for the things we choose to create.
A writing habit becomes easy with consistency
If you write everyday or every week it becomes pretty easy to just write stuff. I tried writing everyday this week.
In any day I pick up lots of ideas to write about. I get two or three ideas from a book I’m reading. More ideas from a podcast. More ideas from issues we faced as a team in my company. Random things will hit me when I’m running. Don’t get me started on relationships and “emotional availability”...
Decision through motivation
There is so much to write about that I don’t worry about what to write about in the slightest. I just write the thing that forces itself to the top of the pile of ideas in my mind each day. I let my motivation drive what I write about, it’s nice.
Creativity through activity
The best thing once you start writing is that new things come up as you write. You realise where you don’t agree with yourself or new things you’d never seen till you put words on the page.
I can start a piece I expect to be great and just confuse myself and make a mess. I can start something that seems more average but give a new analogy and hit on a real insight.
Reduced judgements
I am seeing first hand that I don’t know how well an idea I have will convert into writing. I am less judgemental and I have lower expectations from any single piece of writing and higher expectations of myself as a writer. I can’t make a perfect decision about what to write about before I start. I can choose what to publish if I write a lot.
When I wanted to write once a month I wouldn’t know what to write. I felt like I had no ideas that were “good enough”.
Quantity leads to better quality.
Summary - Find the threshold
I have concluded that there is a threshold level of regularity for an activity where you need to decide what to do (whether you are consuming or creating).
When you do something often enough it stops you worrying about missing any single shot or making a bad choice.
When you achieve the threshold of regularity you go into a promotion mindset. Below the threshold you are in prevention.
For any activity and each individual person, this threshold is unique, so whatever you’re doing experiment and find where your mindset shifts.
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Some further examples because it’s Christmas
I think the above explanation has made the point already. I went for some deliberately different ideas to show that it’s not confined to one topic.
Now that I’ve thought about it I’m seeing it everywhere. Relationships, art, cooking, travel, VC investing, YouTube, music listening, music writing...
If you’re enjoying this theme of quantity and consistency you might like these short ideas specifically relevant for me for some added inspiration.
Startups
If you accept that you are always going to start companies you will inevitably start one that succeeds. If you feel like you are only ever going to start one company you will be too worried that the idea isn’t perfect and might fail.
Nearly every startup pivots a lot from its first idea to find success. It turns out people don’t have perfect ideas strait away.
💰 Coinbase didn’t have a way to buy Bitcoin when it was started. It was just a wallet to hold cryptocurrencies. After they left YCombinator they still didn’t have product market fit. They realised new users were opening accounts but didn’t know how to buy Bitcoin.
The founder thought blockchain was the future. He started a stupid idea building a wallet for crypto currencies that hardly anyone had. Doing this silly idea he realised there was huge demand for creating a way to buy cryptocurrencies.
Some people have an idea and don’t want to share it because they worry it will get copied. Little do they know that it would change so much before the idea ever makes it. They don’t start it waiting till they have the perfect amount of experience or money to do the idea correctly.
Just start ideas when you have them. Not doing the idea is already a failure.
Long games with podcasting (and learning)
I noticed this effect with the Wiser Than Yesterday Podcast.
It is a book review podcast that I run with my friend Nicolas Vereecke.
When we started the podcast, I wasn’t sure if we would keep it up as a long term thing. I was concerned to review only the best books. Making a decision for which specific book to read next was hard. Who got to decide? Do we review ones we have read? Do we only pick new ones? What if the book isn’t good?
We randomly went from book to book, it felt chaotic and hard to see the long term direction.
My thinking was more short term and it gave me a prevention mindset around book choices. Always trying not to lose.
Shifting to quantity
After reading the Nassim Taleb books in a series we swapped to seasons on a topic. We really enjoyed diving deeper into a specific topic together. The breadth of insight from reading in quantity in an area was really useful. Instead of trying to pick the ‘best’ book on stoic philosophy, we decided to just read most of the stoic philosophy books.
Seasons were born, and now for each topic we pick a bunch of books that are in that category. We usually make a list of twenty or so books and try and cut it down to ten.
The other topics we’ve covered so far include;
Racism and Equality
Body and Health
Money and investing.
We stopped worrying about who picked what or if one of us had read it. We don’t even care if we think it will be popular (the episodes which take off also seems to be completely impossible to guess).
There’d be some difficult books and some brilliant books. Not only do we learn a lot more about the topic we also learn about writing styles and what makes a book good.
How quantity creates long term thinking
I have developed a long term mindset because I know we are both enjoying it and will carry on. We’ll read a lot of the well known “best books”. We’ll discover some gems. We will also read some terrible books. That’s fine.
Currently there are a list of 15 topics I really want us to cover. Often we will finish a season and choose a completely new topic that wasn’t even on my list because it became relevant to us (our next topic is Neurodiversity).
Every book will teach us something new. Talking through the concepts together we give each other new insights on the book and about each other.
Infinite Games
An early book we read was “Finite and Infinite Games” - It taught us the importance of playing infinite games for the love of playing, and to play them with long-term minded people.
It’s nice to end this blog about a different approach that reaches the same conclusion in my conclusion.
Yours merrily,
Sam
Important Note
Quantity is good in the amount of decisions you make and things you create. The actual things don’t need to be long. This was way too long I’m just being shitty about decisions and cutting it down.
An 8 hour film is just stupid as is a blog post that is actually a short book.
So if you made it this far, thank you now please go back to enjoying your holidays.
Excuse typos