Creativity is a volume business

 

this NYTimes profile of Matt Farley:

To Farley, creativity has always been a volume business. That, in fact, is the gist of “The Motern Method,” a 136-page manifesto on creativity that he self-published in 2021. His theory is that every idea, no matter its apparent value, must be honored and completed. An idea thwarted is an insult to the muse and is punished accordingly.

“If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop,” he said. “You just do it and do it and do it, and you sort it out later.” Or, as the case may be, you don’t, but rather send it all out into the abyss, hoping that someday, somebody, somewhere will hear it.

These days, he sets himself a relatively light goal of one 50-song album a month, recorded in a spare bedroom in his house. 

“You have to understand,” he said, apologetically. “I’ve written over 24,000 songs. I wrote 50 songs yesterday.” 

 from Kleon

One of my favorite parables about creative work comes from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book, Art & Fear: 

[A] 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.

It’s a parable about perfectionism with a clear moral: Quantity leads to quality.The parable tells us that if we worry less about making perfect work and just make a lot of work, we’ll make a lot of junk, sure, but we’re also more likely to make something great.