Quantity over Quality

Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay

I have always been obsessed with quality. When I was little, I took great care to arrange the Lego pieces in a symmetrical fashion. Just like a Patek Philippe watch, even the pieces inside the Lego build that weren’t visible to the eye had to be perfectly arranged. Maybe it’s not a big surprise that I chose to be an engineer and later pursued a PhD in Engineering Acoustics? Quality is important, but without Quantity, progress becomes impossible.

It wasn’t until I did my PhD thesis that it finally “clicked” for me. A PhD thesis is probably the most thorough piece of work that anyone will ever produce in a lifetime. The quality control and attention to detail is out of this world. It’s the Lego pieces all over again for me, but 10X the obsession. The truth is that very few people will ever read your thesis, even if it’s quality should rival that of a Patek. There is an important lesson to be learned from the process. By creating a piece of content that is as close to perfect as possible, the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, becomes clear as crystal. When I look back at my thesis a couple of years later, most of the work I put in did not produce much value. Whereas a small number of actions is basically the foundation of the entire thesis. So, the most important takeaway for me, was the integration of the 80/20 rule in my life.

Last year, I decided to change my perspective and focus on quantity instead. I now knew which parts of a process that are critical, and where you can cut corners. I am convinced that my shift from trying to produce a single piece of “perfect” content, to instead producing as many pieces of content as possible instead, will actually result in significantly higher quality in a shorter time. And by producing, I mean finishing and publishing. You will start to get invaluable feedback from your audience in a trial by fire. You will see what resonates (do more of that) and what no-one cares about (do less of that). Keep this process up on a daily or weekly basis – it doesn’t matter that much, as long as it is consistent – and enjoy the ride. My engineer genes ensure that even when I try my hardest to just do it, the quality will still be there. And it will be adequate.

So how much quantity should you strive for? It depends on the task at hand. Certain tasks, like blogging in the format that you are reading now, is difficult to do on a daily basis. That’s why I chose a weekly basis and publish a new blog post every Saturday. I spend an hour, or two writing and I really enjoy the process. It has become one of the highlights of the week for me now. I look forward to it a lot. Another habit of mine is vlogging, which I do on a daily basis. At least one vlog every day. To do a vlog is extremely fast, perhaps the fastest way there is to produce value adding content. To me, it resembles a funnel shape. My vlogs yield a very large body of topics. In one week, the vlogging will produce at least seven topics. People start to comment on my vlogs, and I make sure to answer every single one of them. Sometimes I enter “wall of text”-mode when answering, and that’s when I know I am on to something. The interaction with the audience gets the ball rolling and kickstarts the thought process. On Saturday morning I cherry-pick the piece of content that I have thought the most about during the week and produce a blog post on that.

In a year, this blog will have produced 52 entries. By then, my writing skills will be up to speed and it is time for me to raise the bar some more. I have been thinking about writing a book for a very long time. I suspect that the content of this blog will serve as an excellent foundation for my first book. But do not forget the lessons learned above! OK, so I want to write a book. To practice what I preach, that means I need to write at least five. Or maybe ten books. It’s actually easier to aim for ten books instead of one. If you set an extreme goal, you are forced to focus on the process, which is more important. Quantity trumps quality. Because quantity will result in quality with time.