The Philosophical Cowboy (whose blog I should really be checking out more often) quotes this passage (via Tim Oren, via Kevin Kelly) from a book on "artmaking":
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.
That's too funny. Just two days ago I was talking to my dad who recently wrote a song. This is the first song he's written in about 12 or 13 years. So, he was telling me how he's a little worried about it and doesn't know if he'll be able to make it turn out the way he envisioned it. He asked me how I write so many songs, so quickly, and of decent quality. I had almost the exact same answer. You just keep writing song after song, remembering what works and what doesn't, and within the mess of work, there are one or two good ones, and a lot of failed attempts. I told him he has to be more stubborn and have foolish determination to write "the song".
Posted by: Amy 80 at December 27, 2003 05:16 PMI love it. makes a great point, I never thought of it like that.
Posted by: Matt Morris at December 27, 2003 05:17 PMYou can't skip over all the mistakes you're supposed to make, you have to work through them.
It works that way in design, too. I start on a project thinking my initial ideas are solid and will definitely work, but it's almost always the 6th or 7th prototype that ends up being the usable one.
The example given seems more metaphorical than actual to me, though. I have a hard time believing that people wouldn't just make one or two 40 pound pots wasting as much clay as they could. Give most an objective method of grading not related to subjective quality and they'll find a way to get a good grade without learning.
It's why any "survival of the fittest" attempts to grade programmers on lines of code produced, pay writers on a per word basis, or pay musicians on per measure of music produced will eventually fail, leading to masses of low quality crap, rewarding people for figuring out the system instead of for achieving the company/teacher/customer's goals.
Posted by: Dave Bug at December 27, 2003 08:01 PMYeah, Dave the story sounds made up to me, too. But it's a nice little parable.
Posted by: Dr. Frank at December 28, 2003 03:19 PMIn the "real" world, that also goes by the name of OJT = On the Job Training. Apprenticeships were/are based on the same concept, and have a lot to recommend them.
Please can io write a song
Posted by: Nina at May 4, 2004 09:33 PM