Comment by Ma8ee
6 years ago
I don't find it now, but I've read that anecdote is made up. And I don't think it make sense. Except for when you are an absolute beginner, you won't improve if you don't put in any effort in the quality of your work. See deliberate practice etc..
I think you are missing the forest for the trees.
The point is to get over that mental hurdle of achieving perfection, which blocks a lot of people from getting started.
No, the point of this anecdote is that you get good at quality by pursuing quantity.
It's an appealing idea because it's counterintuitive, and here on HN were are absolute suckers for contrarian ways to outsmart the herd. But we have been given no reason to think it actually works.
Well, in writing terms, it seems to have worked for Ray Bradbury:
> The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
From: https://lithub.com/ray-bradburys-greatest-writing-advice/
... incidentally, also Neil Gaiman's advice in the Masterclass lectures.
The reason it works so well for writing is, as Neil Gaiman points out, that if you work for a year on one story, you've probably practised starting a story 52 times. But you've still only practised finishing a story once. And getting into the habit of finishing things is one of the most important habits to get into.
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I understand the point they are trying to make, but I still think the anecdote is harmful. It gives the impression that it is more important to put in the work than any real effort. The only thing you’ll be good at after producing 1000 crappy pots is producing crappy pots.
I think you are over-simplifying the situation. Malcom Gladwell's book Outliers popularized the notion that a person needs on average 10,000 hours of practice to truly master a given task. A lot of people took this to mean, "if you put in 10,000 hours of practice, you will become a master." This is not true. The 10,000 hours of practice is necessary, but not sufficient. The practice has to be _intentional_, guided, goal-oriented practice. Not just playing the same song or making the same shot over and over.
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It's also tinted by the fact that learning a skill is usually logarithmic. If you are a student with no pot-making skills, those first few pots are gonna give a lot of XP. I think it'd be a different outcome if done with more experienced potters.
High quality crappy pots.