The Key to Higher Quality is Higher Quantity
medium.com
medium.com
For a long time I've been an opponent to this mantra and in a way I still am. This is because in my opinion a lot of people define "higher quantity" wrongly. Learning flash cards mindlessly all day will hardly help you become more fluent in a foreign language; preparing loads of meals or even the same meal very often doesn't help you become a chef if you aren't fully concentrated on what you're doing.
Lately I am of the opinion that you have to practice with a zen attitude, like it is described in "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind". And because of that I think the author of this article also gets it wrong when he says:
As Ira Glass so famously put it, the best way to refine your craft is to create a huge volume of work. Not to create the most perfect piece you can, but to create many pieces of work.
Failure is all in how you define it though.
Fail fast is a great mantra, but the fast part requires understanding that you have failed and using that failure to understand how to succeed.
People don't get great at chess by playing lots of chess, they get good by studying and learning techniques often with advice from a teacher.
They're pretty bad for language acquisition in general, though. They chop the language into decontextualized bits. Time spent doing vocab flashcards is time not spent learning how words fit together. Time spent on sentence flashcards is time not spent reading books and absorbing cultural stories and background.
tldr; use flashcards to drill the basic phonics / alphabet of a language and maybe the most common words at the beginning and then focus on extensive reading + listening and having conversations with actual people about what you're learning.
I've recorded a video about this topic before: http://toshuo.com/2012/spaced-repetition-systems-explained-i...
If you're going to "practice" guitar, then actually concentrate on what you're doing - don't just have one in your hands and fumble around with it while you're watching TV - focus and you will improve.
...which blends with another maxim I picked up:
There are some guitarists who can truthfully say they've played for 40 years - and it sounds impressive until you find out they've only played the same 9 chords the entire time.
So I can appreciate what the article is kind of pointing out in a lot of words - "Practice makes better" - it's a perfectly reasonable message to put forward. The examples are okay overall. There's a lesson in there about the ceramics class, but it seems like a setup from the beginning - a lot of varibles in the outcome depending on the professor, right? I mean, just letting the non-quantity group sit there and drool or goof off isn't maximizing the actual concept of reaching for perfection.
Oh, and I listened to a 60 minute long tape of Kanye from that prolific period. The end results are really cookie-cutter. He basically found a sample of music that somebody else wrote & recorded, stretched/looped it, added a hip-hop sounding MPC kit line under it, and called it done. It's a strong example of mechanical repetition to hone the tools of a trade (production/sound engineering). Personally I view it as the antithesis of writing original material, but like I said, personal opinion.
Do -> analyze strengths and weaknesses -> try to do better.
That middle part is way more successful with the help of a good coach. Really quick learners ("talent") can fill in that middle step on their own, but would ultimately benefit from a coach.
When your work cycle is:
do -> do again -> do again -> do again
you'll improve a bit, but pretty quickly plateau.
Now and then I see 'self-help' or motivational type pieces encouraging a type of "Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses" which can be applicable in a lot of arenas. However taking on that mentality fully strikes me as missing an important long-term perspective. I say this as a person who was really deficient in one digit's dexterity (pinkie) and instead of just kinda shrugging it off, I spent many years and sessions trying to bring it up to par. Now I'm happy to say I can really only remember it as a past weakness, due to the focus and attention to improvement!
You can either fix this by trying to copy what other people do in as many different ways as possible, or having a real expert around to say "No, try this instead."
Doing stuff over and over only helps if you're creatively blocked and are terrified of producing crap. It's a good first step towards building momentum, but it's just a beginning.
[1]http://pitchfork.com/news/56459-aphex-twin-speaks-on-his-new...
There's an important distinction between "I don't like this", and "This is not good". Most people fail to make that distinction - they think that if they don't like something, it must be bad. Taste and quality aren't particularly congruent. (As a corollary, sometimes we like things that are actually bad.)
Regarding quality, subjectively speaking individual composition/talents/efforts tend to influence one's opinion of the work seen/heard/etc. This is why music does, in some avenues, resemble a competitive avenue in the collection of skills and techniques. For a not-insignificant number of people, Kanye's music is subjectively bad in quality, which is irrespective of popularity.
It's not like he painted over the Mona Lisa. You can still go listen to the original Daft Punk song if you prefer it - it sounds just the same as it did before Kanye sampled it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampler_(musical_instrument)
It's even in the URL!
When a musician plays a "real instrument" to exactly imitate the part played by another musician, is it real music? If not, is classical or other forms of note-reading "real music"?
If you drop the prejudices and actually think about it, of course a sampler is an actual musical instrument.
My own technique hasn't improved significantly in ages, but I'm a better musician year after year. Why? Because I become more profound. I have better things to say with the technique I have.
Similarly for us engineers, a real "10xer" is not just someone that ships fast, you must ship something that is efficient with time and resources. This can be done with luck but is more often done after lots of experience and mistakes are made.
Hence, the lesson from W. Edwards Deming about how experience teaches nothing without a framework or theory of concepts and knowledge is applicable very much at the individual level as well as organizational. You can practice the same punch 1000 times but if you do not really experiment a little, never measure your punch effectiveness, or try to understand why your punches are not getting any better even though you are stronger, you will lose against someone that has carefully analyzed 1000 punches they've thrown and practiced with that knowledge to shape their efforts.
I did that routine exactly once before my right calf muscle developed strain. I've played this game before a dozen times with a dozen different activities. Every time I wind up losing focus and that's why I have a dozen of them and not three of them.
So rather than drop cardio entirely, I'm backing off to three or so sessions a week and cutting down the length to a half-hour to 45 minutes depending on how I feel. I'll pick the frequency back up as my muscles heal.
You really do have to get obsessive over little details to be able to do this. I have a fairly strict routine that I follow every single time I go out to the gym. One time my iPhone decided to start updating against my wishes just as I was about to get on the machine.
After some choice swear words, I packed it up and went back home. It wasn't worth sitting at the gym waiting for music and trying to work out without music wasn't going to give me a good workout. Focusing on quantity allows you to skip sessions knowing another one is coming.
My routine evolved slowly over time. The key is spotting and removing barriers to doing more. I put my jacket on the machine on the left, my towel goes on the right. My iPhone goes in the cup holder, my gym bag just under the cup holder. My gym bag has an organization scheme, everything in there has a place and there's a routine for putting everything there before I get in my car.
Basically, every little thing I can look at and try to improve, I do, and don't worry about the time or expense. I've gone through three pairs of sneakers to try to find the right kind that won't hurt the balls of my feet. Cheap ones don't work well, so I'm moving on to New Balance. I had minimalist shoes, those hurt my feet, but not enough to where I can't work out. The shoes have to be 8 1/2 or 9 wide, normal doesn't cut it.
My music routine has shifted over time. I used to just play anything, then I went to a specific playlist so I could try HIIT. Whenever the chorus would come on, I'd go really hard. That got unsustainable as my times on the machine went up and now I just do it flat, with my whole playlist so I don't get bored of the music. Maybe in six months to a year I'll be able to experiment with it again.
The machine itself has settings, my approach to these have refined over time as well. I used to set the incline all the way to 20 and slowly increase the resistance over time. Now I set both the incline and the resistance as I'm comfortable and just trust that over time my body will adjust and the numbers will go up.
The key to getting started, I think, is to pick something that can be "routine-ized". I use a machine instead of running because I have a lot more 'knobs' to tweak. Classes I have to take on someone else's schedule, I used to do dance classes but not anymore. I tried the bike machine when I first started going to the gym but gravitated to the Arc machine pretty quickly and fell in love with it.
At first the big battle will be just showing up. I started with the simple goal of going there once every day. Didn't matter if I actually worked out or not, or what I did, just get to the gym that day and I gave myself permission to feel like I'm accomplishing my fitness goals.
Then when it starts getting hard, I gave myself permission to fall back to earlier goals as needed / desired. I can cut workouts short, but not skip them. I always make sure I'm moving forward.
There finally comes a point where moving forward is moving backward. You don't want working out to overtake the rest of your life. But you have to cut back with purpose, not just do it because of reasons. You can put it on the back burner, but know why you're doing that and when you're ready to put it back on the front burner.
I'm injured right now, so I'm allowing other things to take priority. They may keep priority even after I heal up. But getting back in the saddle and getting back to work pushing my limits is always on my mind.
The thing to realize is your mind is just trying to trick you into getting out of something, because leg day is hard.
I want to do more cardio. Even now, I wish I could get on the machine. I've come to need it just like my morning coffee. I have to keep myself away from it so I don't get injured.
It will take me probably another year before my body adjusts to the massive amounts of cardio I want to do.
(Or are you just talking about which exercises you do?)
Eventually I will find an exercise to add onto my routine, I've experimented with kettlebells, but haven't yet committed to them. My ideal setup would be a home-built power rack so I can do basic compound lifts. For various reasons I've not taken on that project yet.
My lifting strategy is to take it very slowly, do not worry a single bit about making gains on any particular day. Injury is to be ruthlessly stamped out through borderline excessive caution and getting to know your body very, very well. I would rather skip a whole month of lifting than get a single injury, no matter how minor.
In fact, I'd rather not lift at all than have more than the remotest possibility of a lifting injury. That shit just sucks way, way too much. Once the weight on the bar gets heavy, I want to take exactly zero chances. When I get back on that particular horse, I want to still be doing it when I'm eighty years old.
The state of "many things" is irrelevant, it's the process that links those things together that makes the difference.
The ability to learn from the results of the first crap is crucial. There are too many examples of processes that result in the same crap over and over even though the process is iterative.
The "quantity vs. quality" reasoning is sort of a red herring here, the real discussion is about how to maximize learning while minimizing investment and baseless assumptions.
When I was in 6th grade, I used to shoot free throws every night for hours. Just for fun. We had a track and field day at the end of the year and I beat out two guys for first place in the free throw competition who went on to play basketball on our high school team.
I beat them at something that they cared about a great deal and I didn't care about at all, simply by inadvertently practicing a lot.
While some may argue that shooting free throws every day for hours counts as 'caring', I would argue that it was your emotional detachment from the results/outcome that made you really good.
As others have pointed out, practicing and just churning out quantity often develops habits and bad practices.
One way of combatting that seems to be switching up your routine and deliberately avoiding these habits. This article explains a little more on that: http://www.iflscience.com/brain/researchers-uncover-method-l...
But I think it's apparent all over. People who are able to produce a large quantity of new ideas/methods/etc. almost automatically are of higher quality.
Take the Beatles for example. The produced a huge amount of music in their relatively short recording history.
But they didn't just follow the same patterns, they experimented and look where they got. Writers can be the same, and athletes, and why not developers too?
When you read famous musicians' bios, for example, there always seems to be something along the lines of "I practiced 8 hours a day every day", hence lots of quantity over several years, but this is of course next to impossible to do in adulthood with all the demands on our time.
Essentially, get a good start using what's already been done then use creativity and scientific method to quickly become better. Publish lessons you learned from solving problems with certain goals and constraints. Contribute back to this overall process of learning.
Alternatively, people can try the author's advice and re-create the modern web experience from HTML, JavaScript, C, and assembler via trial-and-error, exploratory programming. I'll pass. ;)