In his 2018 book, Atomic Habits, James Clear tells a story about a photography teacher that holds a useful lesson for creative types.
Clear had come by the story in another book, called Art & Fear, which was published in 1985. The authors of that work had — for not especially interesting reasons — obscured the truth of the tale by omitting the name of the teacher in question and changing the locale to a ceramics class. But after Clear got in touch with them — and then spoke with some of the teacher’s former students — he learned the facts behind the fable, and this is apparently how it really happened.
Jerry Uelsmann was a successful artist who taught a film photography class at the University of Florida. On the first day of class one year, Uelsmann divided his students into two groups. He told the first group that they would be the ‘quantity’ group, and he would grade them on how many photos they submitted by the end of term. The other group, he said, was the ‘quality’ group, and they only had to produce one photograph all semester, but it had to be near-perfect to earn an A.
When it came time for Uelsmann to review his students’ photographs, he saw that the best compositions almost all came from the quantity group. While the students in the quality group had fussed over one or a few pictures, the quantity group were clicking away like an arthritic ankle in winter, and apparently became better photographers for it.
Former psychology professor Dean Keith Simonton spent decades studying human greatness in art and science, and he also found that, when it comes to creative endeavours, there is great value in volume.
After researching the lives of more than 2,000 eminent scientists, Simonton told the LA Times in 1988 that the single most important quality these great thinkers shared was probably ‘the willingness to produce a tremendous amount of work — often on seemingly trivial or useless projects — without fear of failure.’
In 1997 Simonton published a paper that articulated this finding as the ‘equal-odds rule’, which states that ‘the relationship between the number of hits (ie, creative successes) and the total number of works produced in a given time period is positive, linear, stochastic, and stable.’
The relationship between quality and quantity is not written in stone. A 2008 paper by Aaron Kozbelt, for example, found that classical composers produced their greatest concentration of hit songs around five years after their productivity peak, which suggests things like experience and expertise have a role to play. And common sense would suggest that you have to pay at least some attention to the quality of your ideas and compositions to eventually hit paydirt.
Still, it’s a fairly reliable rule of thumb that you need to have a lot of ideas to have great ones.
