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”
A story by Dr. Wayne Dyer
In a mother’s womb were two babies.
One asked the other:
“Do you believe in life after delivery?”
The other replied:
“Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”
“Nonsense” said the first.
“There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”
The second said:
“I don’t know, but there will be more light than here.
Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”
The first replied:
“That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”
The second insisted:
“Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here.
Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”
The first replied:
“Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”
The first replied:
“Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”
The second said:
“She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”
Said the first:
“Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”
To which the second replied:
“Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”
Happy Monday 🙂
T
P.S. Something new…
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.
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Stephen Walker
Unit 146317
PO Box 7169
Poole
BH15 9EL
United Kingdom