Mar 7, 2009
Now It Begins
i’ve started and dropped a number of blogs over the past several years. With Franklyanything I’m going to take another stab at it. I’m feeling optimistic about this time as I’m nearly finished with my MBA and there’s a lot of stuff happening worth writing about.
In the spirit of kicking this off in the right way I’ll start by quoting something I found earlier this evening that seems apropos:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot—albeit a perfect one—to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work—and learning from their mistakes—the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
-Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles, Ted Orland
Here’s to quality via quantity.
