If you care about creative work then you must reject quality. Abandon it completely in favour of sheer, over-the-top volume of output.
This seems crazy. After all, what’s the point of going into creative work in the first place unless you care about quality? If you’re not that bothered, just be a craftsman. Turn your back on taking risks with something new — and churn stuff out to a proven template instead. Your results will be gloriously average. But that’s totally fine.
If you’re interested in being creative, though, then you’re not content to follow the crowd.
You want to have new ideas. To bring forth something the world has never seen before — and that you had no idea was waiting inside you. To bask in that delightful feeling of “how did I create this?” when the Muse’s glorious and unpredictable magic has been channelled through you.
Flagrantly disregarding your inherent desire for quality is hard, though. So why must you abandon quality at this point and splurge out huge amounts of quantity in its place?
The best way to have great ideas is to have lots of ’em.
Don’t aim to hang tight onto one idea and eventually perfect it. Instead, the path to genius-level output is to let the new ideas flow freely — and grab the ones that arrive almost perfectly formed.
Understand this: there is no ceiling on the power of a creative idea. The best ones are many orders of magnitude better than the mediocre. The gap is so big that they might as well be inhabiting different universes.
So you’re taking a huge risk when you fix on one initial idea and put all your effort into making it the best it can be.
Unless you’ve hit the jackpot straight away then you have much better quality available to you by simply brainstorming another hundred or so ideas. Chances are, one of those hundred will be outstanding. And even the roughest version of it will be many times better than the most polished version of your first idea.
Plus, ideas change and grow over time.
Sometimes the most promising starts lead rapidly to intractable dead-ends. While those initially lackluster ideas sometimes erupt into glorious possibilities after lying dormant for most of their life.
At this point you might very reasonably ask: “Can’t I aim for both quantity AND quality?”.
The problem is that the requirement for quality will act to block you from producing a suitably high-quantity of outputs. Even if you feel you’re churning things out at a rapid pace, you’d be going much faster if the requirement for quality was lifted.
So you need to turn your back on the desire for quality and simply vomit out huge amounts of stuff. You’re not in any way forcing what you create to be low quality. You’re simply freeing it from the need to be high quality (plenty of it will turn out that way by accident).
Do this at every step of the way: initial seed idea; first rough shaping; editing; etc. Not only does it allow some of those ugly ducklings to later turn into swans. It also frees you up to be fearlessly creative.
Aiming for quality can cause the best of us to tense up rather than play/write/paint/whatever freely. Every single attempt will now be defined for posterity as a success or a failure. How could the stakes be any higher?
When you abandon any requirement for quality, then you give yourself a free pass to try out lots of different stuff. It’s a physical reflection of the conceptual reality that not everything has to be perfect. Look at the great painters who moved through many earlier (often half-finished) versions before producing one final great work that hangs in the gallery.
This abandonment of quality in favour of quantity doesn’t merely free you up to “go for it” and let the art go without constriction from the ego. As you try stuff and see what works, this instructs future attempts you make.
You’re (hopefully) not aiming to produce the best work of art you can now. Rather, to become the best artist you can be in the future.
When you produce huge quantity with no respect for quality you’re getting loads of reps in. Loads of feedback. So your skills naturally grow quickly over time.
Whereas the person who’s focused on making one great thing right now will, indeed, produce a slightly better result this time… But at the cost of sacrificing a huge chunk of their potential future progress.
In a year’s time the same two people taking the same approach will be in very different places. Your skills will have advanced way ahead. Now, your “low quality” outputs will be way better than their highest quality attempts.
Of course, this doesn’t stop you polishing your work at the end. There’s no harm in directly chasing a little quality at that point.
But you’ve got to be clear that you get most of the progress by seeming to disdain quality. By going the indirect, high-quantity route instead. And that means you’ve got to be a finisher at your core — when that final polishing slows you down too much then it clogs the whole system and all your creativity grinds to a halt.