Quantity vs Quality

The surprising secret of high quality is high quantity

Picasso is one of the most famous and successful artists of the 20th century. How many masterpieces do you think he produced? Maybe a couple of hundred of his works of art are famous, but even if we assume that he produced more than 1000 masterpieces, that is still a tiny fraction of his total output. By the most conservative estimates, Picasso produced 20000+ paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and drawings (Wikipedia thinks 50000+).

The point is, only a tiny fraction of Picasso’s output was successful.

Yesterday, I said actions are deterministic, while success is probabilistic. Which means that if you follow the advice of the Gita (focus on your actions, let success happen as a by product, and avoid inaction), you will have a lot of failures.

This fact is actually true of most successful people, according to the research of Dean Simonton (referenced in yesterday’s post):

"Albert Einstein had around 248 publications to his credit, Charles Darwin had 119, and Sigmund Freud had 330,while Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents—still the record granted to any one person by the U.S. Patent Office. Similarly, Pablo Picasso executed more than 20,000 paintings, drawings, and pieces of sculpture, while Johann Sebastian Bach composed over 1,000 works, enough to require a lifetime of 40-hr weeks for a copyist just to write out the parts by hand."

Here is the most important part: The people who produce the best works, also produce the most works. And usually, they produce the worst works too. For example, Simonton points out, “scientists who publish the most highly cited works also publish the most poorly cited works.”

In other words, the key to producing high quality is to produce a lot of quantity.

Further Reading:

Quality, Quantity, Creativity: Jonah Lehrer (article)

Age and the Entrepreneur: Marc Andreessen (article)

Creativity in Science: Dean Simonton (book)