Comment by dgreensp
10 years ago
There are actually three lessons here:
* Momentum - To stick with something and finish it, you need to use momentum. Lacking momentum, projects languish. Quoting author Steven Pressfield: "Second only to habit, momentum is a writer’s (or artist’s or entrepreneur’s) mightiest ally in the struggle against Resistance."
* Waiting is painful. That's the point behind the examples in the middle section (waiting for an email reply, waiting for Google, waiting for an employee to finish a task). One thing this article makes me more aware of is the concept of getting impatient with yourself. Part of you is the boss or client that wants things accomplished, and it is sizing up the worker part of you, wondering if it assigns a task whether that task will get done quickly or require a lot of waiting, and there's a relationship to manage there. (Perhaps this dynamic underpins the phenomenon of momentum?)
* Quantity Always Trumps Quality - There's a blog post by Jeff Atwood with this title. The point is, if you want to get better at something, do a lot, and don't worry about quality while you're practicing.
Focusing on "speed" is probably a good mental trick for a couple reasons. First, it validates and acknowledges that we hate to wait. Second, it helps overcome perfectionism and the tendency to think and judge instead of doing and creating, by giving us something to measure that is not about quality but is instead correlated with action and progress.
> Quantity Always Trumps Quality - There's a blog post by Jeff Atwood with this title. The point is, if you want to get better at something, do a lot, and don't worry about quality while you're practicing.
I wholeheartedly disagree. My martial arts instructor had a saying: "Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect." I've found that to be true. After all, if you practice bad technique, how do think you're going to perform in real situations?
Not to mention, you usually practice things in a controlled environment where you are evaluating your own technique. That's often not true in real situations, where your focus needs to be split on many different things. If you want to execute well in a real environment, good technique needs to be second nature so you don't have to think about it. You just do it. Being able to do that requires a large amount of good practice.
"Quality" here means the quality of your result. If you are learning to paint/sing/code, it means how good the painting/singing/code is. The advice is to not "worry" about the quality, in the sense that if you are not producing good quality output, that does not mean you are doing anything wrong. When you are just learning something, the output will not be good quality! You need to produce a lot of crap results, and that makes most people uncomfortable.
I can relate what you're saying to my experience taking singing lessons, though even there, I find that making progress is all about turning off the inner judge while you practice. All you need to practice something is a bit of intent and a bit of awareness; it's not important that you "worry" about the quality of what you are doing, per se.
I dont want you "practising" with my product, i'll take quality over quantity any day. If i want crap i'll outsource it.
That's why this point isn't so related to the other two, because it's specific to the goal of getting better at something.