Quantity is the goddamn engine that drives quality.
Michelangelo wasn’t born with the gift of perfect carving…
No. He learned to do that. He cut, he hacked, he made sloppy, half baked messes until…
…until he started making something worth looking at.
I love answering questions about the craft of writing and pretty much everything in the creative world and yet the best thing you can do to improve is to keep cranking out work.
I write a massive quantity of these types of emails. Sometimes they’re straight to the point or veer off on tangents or have a direct response cut to the bone style or even just random musings and ideas that come out of nowhere.
But the aim is also to be light hearted, not too serious, entertaining and at the minimum, give you something to ponder about.
And I get it.
Sometimes we end up sitting there, staring at a blank page, or canvas, or whatever, and we wait for the perfect idea. The perfect sentence. The perfect anything. Well, guess what?
Perfect is a myth. Perfect is a lie. Perfect is the reason you haven’t written, painted, coded, or created anything in weeks.
And the self help guru folk and coaches don’t want to tell you things like:
You don’t get good by thinking. You get good by doing.
You don’t improve by planning. You improve by shipping. Get that thing shipped out to the world and then repeat.
You don’t learn by theorising. You learn by failing fast and over and over and over again…
The more you create, the better you’ll get.
It’s math. It’s numbers. It’s volume.
Think about it like this from a gym analogy:
Every word you write is a punch you throw.
Every brushstroke is a rep in the gym.
Every line of code is a step on the treadmill.
You don’t get stronger by sitting on the couch thinking about lifting weights. You get stronger by lifting. And yeah, sure, some of what you make will be garbage. Most of it, even. But here’s the thing…
Garbage is fertile ground.
You can’t grow a garden without getting your hands dirty. You can’t make a masterpiece without first making a mess.
So stop waiting for the perfect idea. Stop chasing the perfect sentence. Stop worrying about what people will think.
Just… create.
So go.
Make something.
Make a lot of things.
Make so many things that you start to forget what’s good and what’s bad.
And then…
Then you’ll find your voice.
Then you’ll find your style.
Then you’ll start making things that matter.
But only if you start.
Stephen Walker
P.S. If you’re still not convinced, here’s a bonus “secret”
The only difference between you and the people you admire is volume.
They’ve just made more stuff than you have.
So go.
Catch up.