Lead Sheet to my Life

memoirs-of-a-slumdog:

-Ira Glass

I find this really interesting. Last semester I took a 1-credit crash-course 8-hour seminar all about innovation. It was awesome. The best piece of information I took away from the whole thing came from a classroom experiment. A manufacturing teacher instructed one group of half the class the manufacture some arbitrary item (like a t-shirt) and just crank out as many as possible. Their objective was quantity. The other half of the class was instructed to do the same, except they were instructed to make the best quality t-shirts possible with no consideration to number produced. Their objective was quality. At the end of the experiment, the first team focused on quantity not only made many more t-shirts than the other group, but they were also better quality. The quality-focused group spend so much time nit-picking over the details, they never progressed as far as the first group. Meanwhile, the quantity-focused group made so many t-shirts, they just naturally got a lot better at making t-shirts than the second group. Quantity isn’t a sad alternative to quality. On the contrary, over time quantity enhances quality. And I am of the opinion that when it comes to the creative arts - whether it be a screenwriter writing a script, a musician composing a piece of music, or an actor developing back-story for a character - quantity means quality.

(Source: alijayy, via memoirs-of-a-slumdog-deactivate)