How to Sidestep Perfection—And How to Use "Quantity" to Your Advantage

**Sean D'Souza** (0:00)
Hi, it's Sean and you're listening to The Three Month Vacation. Imagine that you're a songwriter and you want to write a hit song, and you are told that the 50th song you write, that's going to be a hit. Now think about it. There are 49 songs that you have to write before you get to the 50th one. But how do we operate? We look at the first song and go, well, we have to perfect that one. And then we go to the second one, and we do the same thing in the third and the fourth. And sometimes, most of the time, we get derailed. And we get derailed for this very precise reason that the 50th song is where things are going to happen, and we're focused on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth.
The reality of life is that quantity leads to quality, not the other way around. And we have been brought up to believe that quality matters.
We learned this when we did our very first test or exams. Our teachers and our parents, they looked at our report card and they go, oh, you could do better, you should do better. So they didn't look at the record that we could generate over weeks and months and years. And that put pressure on every single result. So instead of going, okay, I'll get exceedingly good by the 50th run. No, one, two, three, 41, 45, 47 They all had to count. What was worse was that when you came back with a good report card, they did their little dance. They said, oh, wow, I'm so proud of you. So we start to buy into this factor that every drawing must count, every article must count, every podcast must count. That's not the way life works. So if we turn this idea a little on its head and say, well, the 50th cartoon that you draw, that's going to be good. The 50th article that you write, that's going to be good. And then we have to fill in the blanks with average, mediocre, good, bad. It doesn't matter. The quality doesn't matter. The goal is only to get to the 50th one or the 100th one, whatever you choose.
But that's the goal. And that's how you start to get better. Somewhere out there in the distance, that's your really good article, that's your really good cartoon, that's your excellent photograph. It's not now, not today, not every cartoon, not every photograph. And this means you're going to make a lot of mistakes along the way. And that frustration is going to be brutal.
Because you don't know what mistakes you're making, you don't know how to fix them. But somewhere along the line, you get better.
And you understand this concept, especially when you're learning a language. At first, you can't understand what people are saying. You can't speak the language, you pronounce or mispronounce everything.
And yet you have to go forward. And when you do go forward, you put in the quantity of hours learning that language, and the pronunciation, and all the idioms and grammar, et cetera, you are able to speak the language. This is true for cartooning, for photography, for writing, for dancing, pretty much everything that you do. You have to have a certain amount of quantity before you get to quality.
People burn out because they look for perfection. They are at some level still living in the land where they would bring home their report card. Their father and mother would inspect it and either give them praise or tell them, this is not up to scratch. You have to do so much better.
You don't.
You're going to the 50th one, now get the other 49th done. And that's how you go about it. And you have to ask, well, does this really work? You probably know me a bit. I have done over 500 podcasts, taken in the last five years alone, about 50,000 photographs. Every day I do a watercolor. So there are over 5,000 of those. There are courses, books. And yet I seem to have enormous amounts of time to spend, to waste rather, just at the cafe. And it's not because I have some special skill that you don't have. It's because I go after quantity. Those numbers that you're hearing, 5,000 and 50,000, et cetera, that's quantity. If you look through those books and you look through those photographs, you'll know that it was about quantity.
So you've tried quality. You've tried to make every single article count, every single cartoon count, every single dish that you made count, and it hasn't worked as well as you thought. Try it the other way. Go for quantity. Put out a number out there in the distance, and then do the inbetweens and see how it works. This isn't to suggest that you have to be sloppy. It just means that your better work is always going to be the future. It doesn't matter how well you do it today. Your work in the future is going to be better. So might as well go towards that future today. And that's it from Psychotactics Land. If you haven't already read Suddenly Talented, you should, because that will give you the chance to do this 7 on 10 concept that we're talking about here, which is well enough, but not perfect. Go to psychotactics.com, Suddenly Talented, and find out for yourself. Bye bye.