Quality comes from quantity

Quality comes from quantity

There’s often a tension we face when considering “quality” versus “quantity”, but I don’t think that they’re opposing forces. Years ago I shared about making more pots, where art students that created more pottery did better work than those that focused on making one perfect pot.

A recent episode of the “How to Take Over the World” podcast focused on composer John Williams and his similar approach. If you’re not familiar with his name, you’re certainly familiar with his work which has included films such as Jaws, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter and many others. Here is a quick video with some of his most famous work:

He’s considered one of the greatest film composers of all time, and his work was certainly very high quality, but it came via quantity. From the show:

Quantity versus quality is a false dichotomy. More often than not, quality comes from quantity. He talks about his score for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and his music is actually a key part of the plot in that movie. It’s a movie about aliens coming to visit Earth, and they send a message in the form of music, and it’s five notes. intriguing and mysterious. He comes up with this perfect sequence. It’s awesome. It works perfectly in the movie.

And so what was his process for coming up with this perfect five note sequence? He didn’t sit and meditate until inspiration from God struck him from heaven while he was sitting there. No, he wrote down dozens of five note sequences and then sat down and went through all of them with Steven Spielberg and picked the one that worked best. So get your reps in. Quantity leads to quality.

While “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is nearly 50 years old, it was far from being his first work as he had composed somewhere around 40 movies by that point. This wasn’t some kind messing around with ideas, this was a genius that knew that producing a ton of ideas is what would lead to the breakthrough.

That’s a big reason why I write every day. I know that most of these posts aren’t amazing (and I thank you for taking the time to read anyhow), but I know that through doing these reps I’m more likely to increase my clarity of thought and produce good content more and more often.