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Why Doing Things Over and Over Won’t Make You Better
We’re Missing the Point of That Stupid Clay Pot Story
If you want to get better, you’ve got to produce. Again and again. That’s the argument in The Clay Pot Story. If you haven’t heard it: “A teacher divides a class into two groups. Group A only has to produce one clay pot. Group B has to make as many clay pots as possible. In the end, not only did Group B make more clay pots, but their final pots were better than the ones made by Group A. Quantity leads to quality.”
Whenever people tell this story, it usually gets boiled down to a Very Simple Lesson: you don’t get better by sitting around theorizing: you get better by doing something over and over and over.
I was reminded of this story from Austin Kleon’s blog, but I’ve also seen it repeated by all kinds of marketing gurus like Seth Godin. It’s the idea “because of the power law, you have to publish 1,000 articles and then maybe one of them will go viral.” Like most simple pieces of advice, it’s missing a huge component.
The Real Clay Pot Story
From Art & Fear:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
The real message of the clay pot story isn’t just do a lot of things — it’s to engage in the full learning cycle.
