A few years ago, I came across a story that seems to have originally been reported in the book Art & Fear but has since been widely cited in a variety of other books and blogs. The story goes like this (my paraphrase): A pottery teacher divides his introductory pottery class into two groups. He tells the first group that for their final grade, they will need to make just one pot and it will be graded on how perfect it is, i.e. on quality. The second group he tells that he will grade them simply on the quantity of pots they make over the semester. The first group spends the course really planning out their perfect pots, thinking of how they will make something truly spectacular. The second group immediately starts cranking out pot after pot after pot. At the end of the term, the teacher in fact judges the quality of all the pots and demonstrates that the "quantity" group in fact had made better pots at the end of the term than the "quality" group. Of course the "quantity" students had spent the entire term practicing. By the end, their craftsmanship and inventiveness had naturally developed. The "quality" group on the other hand had spent all their time thinking about their great pots, but when it came time to make them, they were not that great -- after all, those were the first pots they had made...
1 Comment
Frederic Messein
6/22/2017 04:43:50 am
Any resemblance to real life experience, current or past, is purely coincidental?
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AuthorPhilip Brittan is the General Partner of Crazy Peak LLC Archives
February 2021
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