Prolific is better than perfect, Jared Dees:
âPerfectâ is a mirage that no one knows how to reach.
Iâm fond of restating this in terms of the quantity/quality trade-off. Itâs easy for me to fall into the temptation of creating one essay/pull request/turn-of-phrase that exhibits all of the quality that should exemplify my work. But itâs better for me to create a bunch of things that exhibit some of that quality so I can better learn what is essential to the quality and what is illusory.
To borrow Deesâ model: if I write fifty-two blog posts in a year, several of them will be Not That Great. But after the first dozen or so, Iâll start to figure out whatâs important in a story and what I thought was important but doesnât really matter much. This is quantity creating quality; not a tradeoff!
The flip side is Chidiâs dilemma: spending your whole life trying to write every single thing about your area of expertise, with nuance, and producing something so impenetrable that not even a demigod can make sense of it.
In short: quantity doesnât reduce quality. Quantity is the feedback loop that creates Quality.