The tussle between quality and quantity
#132 - clean your room, it makes life better
Hi there,
The dark month of November is upon us on the stroke of Halloween. I naively feel that I don’t need to wear my coat when walking out of the accommodation and BAM! The cold hits me harder than a 6-minute wait for the Tube.
This was the first of a few more ‘normal’ weeks, with a regular timetable of lectures and problem classes in 5 modules, as we move past the intro module. I’ve also been more conscious about balancing my choices between different events, one of the reflections on my train journey home last weekend.
Highlight of the week: our Wind Band (pub-style) quiz night. It was a good chance to meet some new people from the band, and some very funny acting when we had a Charades-type round 🎭.
I haven’t known exactly what to write about for a few weeks; at last, I got an idea during the week which we will expand on - here goes!
A busy roster of societies and studies has left little time for me to go to the gym so far; therefore, when I’ve made the time, I’ve found it important to get the most out of the sessions.
In my session yesterday, I made a conscious effort to have high-quality repetitions - slow and controlled, both on the way up and the way down (the concentric and eccentric, to use the fancier terms). It meant that even the lower weights resulted in a good stretch and even though it was a shorter session, I felt like I’d worked hard (and had a decent pump 💪)
Now, consider the common advice when you’ve got smaller dumbells (at home) - focus on volume (perhaps 3 sets of 20 reps) to tire out/strengthen the muscle, as a replacement for lifting heavy weights. This principle of ‘quantity when you start out, quality comes next’ can be seen in 4 other examples:
I. Making videos - one of the best ‘how to succeed on YouTube’ gurus is Ali Abdaal. In a video about starting up a channel, he refers to ‘The Parable of the Pottery Class’1, from Art & Fear.
A ceramics teacher divided his class into two groups, one which focuses on quantity and the other on quality.
The quantity group participants would be graded by the teacher measuring how heavy the work produced was using his bathroom scales
The quality group only needed to produce one pot, which had to be perfect, to get 'an ‘A’.
Here were the results:
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of [the] 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.
It is clear here that the frequency led to natural small gains, and these compounded to improve their overall skill.
II. Blogging - the same is true with my experience with blogs. Compare #32 with this week’s #132 and you will definitely find areas of improvement (for instance, I’m a lot more concise now)
III. Studying - this is my answer to the age-old question by younger years of “how many hours should you study a week?” That is the easier question, it’s like checking a box. To be fair to them, I do talk about controlling the inputs instead of worrying about the outputs.
But we should think about the progress made, instead of strictly the quantity of hours spent at the desk. Whatever time we spend concentrating and studying should be productive and ‘move the needle’ - 2 hours on a past paper is worth a lot more than 2 hours making notes.
IV. 1st year internship applications - known as ‘Spring Weeks’, they are the talk of the town amongst the career-switched-on people here at Imperial.
I have probably been bound by some paralysis of “I need to craft the best answer there is to the three written questions in the application”, when, actually, the quantity of applications matters too (given the competition and time-sensitivity of a ‘rolling’ application process).
I am only going to get better by putting myself forward, jumping through the hoops of the application processes, inevitably not getting every single offer, and learning from them.
When we’re starting out, we should crank out as much as we can so we get from 0 to 50 in the skill mastery quicker, failing faster and learning faster. Obsessing over quality and perfectionism will only delay our growth and hold us back.
Podcast of the week🎙️
The Tim Ferriss Show: #775 Jon Batiste - The Quest for Originality and How to Get Unstuck
Full transparency - I made myself listen to a podcast whilst working through the week’s ironing, so I had something to write about. Luckily, this was a lovely conversation (with music!) and I loved the mantras Jon shared.
What I’m grateful for this week 🙏
My blender (and Mum for buying it) - smoothies making consuming fruit, thus being healthy, sooo much easier! 🙌
Quote of the week 💬
Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing. Denis Waitley
I look forward to the week ahead, the halftime of Term 1 (I resist the urge to say it has flown by), hope it goes well for you too 👍
Adi