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If You're Failing You're Growing - Quantity = Quality - Future IQ

7,501 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jun 20, 2025
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Slog Reference: Quantity is Quality

Description

We often believe that legends like Picasso, Beethoven, or even great entrepreneurs became great because they focused on quality. But the truth is the opposite; what made them great was quantity. These legends produced hundreds, even thousands of mediocre or outright bad works. Picasso made over 50,000 pieces of art, most of which you've never heard of. Beethoven composed dozens of forgettable pieces before hitting the timeless ones. Why? Because the only way to get to the masterpiece is to make a mountain of mess first.

In this episode of Future IQ, we break the myth that “quality over quantity” leads to greatness. Whether you're writing code, running a business, building habits, or just trying to improve a skill, the people who succeed aren't the ones who wait for perfect ideas; they're the ones who keep showing up. We show how producing more — even if it’s bad — is the only path to consistently producing anything great.

You'll learn why quantity leads to progress, how legendary creators built success through relentless output, and how this lesson applies directly to your own life. If you've been stuck waiting for the "right time" or for your work to be "good enough," this episode will give you the permission and push to just hit publish, ship, or start.

Books For You:
Principia Mathematica: https://tapthe.link/PrincipiaMathematica
Atomic Habits: https://tapthe.link/AtomicHabitsBook
Hooked: https://tapthe.link/Hooked

More Videos:
How to Become an Expert in Anything:https://youtu.be/tysT6DMFGH4
10X Your Memory The Easy Way: https://youtu.be/tysT6DMFGH4
Why Less Time Equals Better Work?: https://youtu.be/wx9qSiIigIw
#FutureIQ #perfection

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

Listen it on the podcast provider of your choice: https://tapthe.link/FutureIQRSS

Sources:
Age and Outstanding Achievement: What Do We Know After a Century of Research? by Dean Simonton: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/20101281_Age_and_Outstanding_Achievement_What_Do_We_Know_After_a_Century_of_Research
Marc Andreessen, Age and the entrepreneur: https://pmarchive.com/age_and_the_entrepreneur.html
Naval Ravikant, The Aging Entrepreneur: https://nav.al/the-aging-entrepreneur
User auriee on Tumbler, on Knowledge vs Skill https://auriee.tumblr.com/post/139955231381/how-to-improve-understanding-knowledge-skill
User marcdalessio on reddit: The Learning Process: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnart/comments/1zizip/a_graph_i_made_describing_the_learning_process_in/

Editing Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Uelsmann
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica
https://www.google.co.in/books/edition/Atomic_Habits_An_Easy_Proven_Way_to_Buil/fo5REQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

00:00 The Surprising Secret to Success
02:14 The Hard Data on Creativity
04:41 The Golden Rule of Geniuses
07:20 Why Your Own Work Always Sucks
10:05 How to Build Unbreakable Consistency
12:46 The Battle Inside Your Brain
15:20 The Simple "If-Then" Trick for Success
17:45 Hacking Your Motivation with Temptation
19:30 The #1 Enemy of Your Habits

#FutureIQ #perfection

Related Slog Matches

Quantity is Quality

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61.00

Transcript

Did you know that producing lots of bad quality output increases your chances of success rather than trying to produce just good quality? That makes no sense. I will prove it. I am not kidding. I have data that producing bad quality gives you better quality output than trying to produce only good quality. Okay. Okay. Let's start with an example. Okay. Jerry Wolzman. Okay. a professor at University of Florida teaches a photography class. Okay. In one of his classes, what he did was he split the class into two groups. For one group, he told them, "Work on getting just one good quality photograph and you will be judged on the quality of that photograph." Okay? The other group, he
said, "Forget about quality. I want you to submit as many photographs as you can and I will grade you on the number. 100 is an A, 90 is a AB and so on. Okay. At the end of class, he discovered that the best photos came from the quantity group, not from the quality group. What? Yes. And this has been discovered multiple times by people trying such experiments. Okay, hold on. If the students were basically told to submit 100 photographs, then what's the guarantee that they took any effort?
Because Goodatch's law comes into the picture. The moment you're given a number, you try and achieve that number. Yeah. So the assumption here is that the students were actually trying to learn photography and not just submitting like random steps. Okay. Fair. But these students were not focused on just producing one great masterpiece. They were like just let me take as many decent photographs as I can and it just so turns out that one of those decent photographs turned out to be high quality. Whereas the students who were trying to produce a masterpiece spent too much time theorizing, thinking this that angle and all of that and then finally when they whatever they picked turned out to be not as good as what the
others produced. Fair enough. Fair enough. I I accept the results of this. But it still is just one anecdote. Yes, I have data like I said. Okay. There's a guy Dean Simon. He's been doing research on quality m since the 1970s. Okay. Okay. What he did was he researched the top geniuses in many different fields. Okay. Science, literature, music, chess, film, politics, military, combat. And for each one, what he did was he looked at the creative output of these people. Okay? He looked at the age at which each output was created. And then he looked at the quality and the quantity. Okay, quality means that somebody made a landmark discovery in their field or wrote a paper that is highly cited, very
influential or they got prestigious awards or honors. Okay. Quantity just means number of publications or number of patents or minor works which didn't get an award and so on. Okay. Yeah. Okay. After doing all of the analysis, a bunch of very interesting results came out. Okay, let me explain those please. First result, productivity peak. Okay. Okay. That at the beginning of your career, of course, you have very low quality and then your productivity goes up. 20s, 30s, 40s, you are very productive and then after that the productivity goes down. Okay, you must have heard this, right? The greatest discoveries happen when people are young. Newton's Principia came out in when he was 20s right and so on and this
is true the data shows that in poetry maths theoretical physics most of the greatest discoveries were when the people were in the 20s or 30s in most other fields it is 40s maximum 50s after that there is a drop off okay except for this channel you can see it is an exception yes it's an outlier yes because I paid attention to this okay there we Okay. So this is interesting. Yeah. Okay. Second result. Okay. The most productive people are the ones with the longest career. Okay. These are the people who started early and they ended late and they were producing something or the other throughout their career are the people who also have some of the
most and the best top discoveries of the field. So this is like you know Sachin Tendulkar exactly what I was thinking man we are seeing. Yeah. Third result and this is the interesting one. Okay. Normally we are all under the impression that at the beginning of your career you don't know how to produce the best quality. You're still learning. Mhm. At some point you have now become good. You have the experience and the skill. So now you are able to produce high quality. Yeah. Right. And then you only produce that highquality stuff. Okay.
And then the assumption is that there is a drop off after your 40s because your brain deteriorates. That seems reasonable. It does. Yeah. But that is not what the data shows. Oh, what the data shows is this. For every person he plotted how many quality works came out and how many quantity works came out by age. Okay. Obviously like I said there is a rise in the beginning and a drop off. Correct. That is true of the quality work. The thing is that is true of the quantity work also. Oh, okay. The quality work and the quantity fluctuate together. They go up and they come down together. Okay. So, as you grow older, you also have lesser quantity. Or to say
differently, the time when they produce the most masterpieces of their career was also the time when they produced the most duds of their career. Yeah. And later on when their uh quality went down the quantity had also gone down. Was it the other way around? Was it because the quantity went down that their quality also went down? Absolutely. That is what the main point of all of this is. Right. So turning that on its head. If I keep producing quantity, yes, everything I produce will at some point become quality. Right. Basically he plotted the ratio of quality to quantity. Okay. And that more or less remains flat for most people, right? What that means is that
okay maybe in the beginning of the career that ratio improves you are able to produce better quality scales up. Yeah. At some point you reach a certain ratio of quality to quantity and it stays like that. Okay. Which is different from different people I'm assuming. Yes. That depends on how much of a genius you are. But the key is that the ratio remains constant constant. This means that to produce quality you have to produce quantity. And there is one person who's done this consistently throughout his career. That is one Mr.
Himeshami has produced tons of music. Some of it is really good. There is quality in some of that music. This is true of some other minor musicians also like Beethoven. Okay. Minor. He produced the most hits at a time when he produced the most misses also. Okay. Oh, okay. So, if Beethoven couldn't produce quality output all the time, what makes you think you can, right? True. People are under the impression that once they have success, then they can only produce quality stuff and they are not allowed to produce bad quality stuff. And that's why the quality goes down later because the quantity has gone down. People are afraid of having duds. Okay. Uh this is
true even of Picasso. Okay. Oh, okay. Yes. He had 30,000 works in his career. Wait, 30,000? Of which only 100 are hits. Okay. I thought he had a lot of work, but I only was thinking in the hundreds. I wasn't thinking 30,000 of them. Right. Right. Wow. Prolific painter. Yes. The greatest people are prolific and they are prolific at duds also. That's the key message of this episode. Yeah. In fact, I'm now beginning to think if people are this prolific, why do they even drop off?
Age, I understand. But some people drop off earlier also. Very simple. Okay. That once you are successful, people are ashamed to put out duds. True. True. So people stop producing. True. Another reason is that of course with age enthusiasm also goes down. Right? Naval Ravi Kant says that young people have more free time. They have less to lose. They have more ignorant enthusiasm. Okay. And they want to impress potential mates. Okay. Older people have less time because they have a family, a social circle, a managerial duties. Yeah. They have more to lose. So they don't experiment as much. Right.
They have experience of failure. So that makes them cautious, right? And of course they have fewer potential mates to impress. The one is already impressed. Okay. This also explains why George RR Martin is not writing his final book. Please, please, Mr. Martin, if you're watching this, please write that book. We've been waiting for years and years. We've suffered through episode uh sorry, season 8 of Game of Thrones. Don't don't don't do this to us. Please. I want that book. But from anecdote we have now come to correlation because that's the most I can see here.
There is correlation between quantity and quality that you have established. Is there causation though? Well, there is plausible causation. Right. I can give you a plausible theory as to why this works. Right. Okay. The more quantity you produce, the more experimentation happens. True. And as a result, more learning happens. Check out our episode on deliberate practice. Okay. The more quantity happens, the more experimentation results in more improvement because you are learning from every mistake. True, right? The more quantity you produce, the more experimentation you're doing, the luckier you get. True. We have done an episode on the types of luck. This is luck number two, active luck. Yeah.
Okay. One more thing is that the more quantity you produce, the more you're doing the same thing over and over again. That is rewiring your brain to be prepared for this. Right. Neurons that fire together wire together, right? Yeah. You said this in our chunking episode if Yes. Exactly. More reps, repetitions result in physical changes in your brain and the basics of whatever you are doing become automatic for you. Which means your brain now has time to think about the next level higher. That's where the quality comes from.
Right? M the quantity results in automaticity. The automaticity gets you started and consistency makes you continue it into quality. Okay. Quality is where usually my wheels get stuck because uh others may actually follow this pattern. In my case, my quality ends up royally man. Right? That means you are a good artist. Okay? Every good artist thinks her quality sucks and vice versa. Okay. Okay, basically this is a knowledge versus skill issue. Okay, imagine you are an artist. Okay, an artist's ability to visualize great painting and to recognize a great painting is usually here and their skill at producing that is lower. Okay. Yeah.
Obviously, if your ability to visualize a painting is here and your skill is here, you will still get this level, right? Yeah. The reverse is easier. Always your knowledge and your evaluation is running ahead of your ability. Right? As a result, whatever you produce, you always think it is no good. So my knowledge of what should be achieved is much higher than the skill that I have to currently achieve that. And that gap is basically making me think that my quality sucks. Right? Which also means that if there is no gap that means you are not good, you are not improving. Okay? And with some people it is the reverse, right? This is the Dunning Krueger effect. The people who
are not good think they are very good. Okay? It can happen to you temporarily but after a while again your knowledge runs ahead and then your skill has to slowly catch up. Right? Yeah. So basically message to all of you. If you don't hate your output, your vision, your imagination, your artistic sensibility is not good enough. Okay? Learn more or you're just as bad as I am and there's no getting around it. All right. So this is imposter syndrome. We've done an episode on this. Please check that out. Yeah. Okay. Fine. So from whatever you've described, moving on. I'm just moving on. So from what you've described it seems like I just need to keep producing quantity
consistently and quality will follow. Yeah. Mostly in deliberate practice we talked about the fact that along with quantity you also have to be trying to improve. Yeah. Okay. That trying to improve has to be there but that doesn't have to be very intense. Usually people focus too much on the trying to improve and not enough on the quantity and the consistency. Right. Okay. So this gap between intensity and consistency uh I'll give an example from James Clear. Okay. Intensity is I need to run a marathon. Okay. Intensity is I need to write a book in 30 days. Intensity is like oh I need to go and have a meditation retreat for 10 days. Okay.
Consistency is run every day no matter how much. Don't miss a workout on any day. Right? Write every week. Right? Just practice some meditation daily and put an episode out every week. Exactly. And the point is that if you have consistency and you just make small efforts to improve yourself, the compounding will catch up and you will produce quality. Yeah. We spoke about something like this in both the power of compounding and the episode on atomic habits, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, deliberate practice, power of compounding, atomic habits. you'll realize that a lot of our episodes are interconnected. This is not to make you go and watch those episodes and increase our views. This is actually because all
of these concepts are inherently connected and uh they play into each other to make you better or better in that sense. Uh the only thing is doing something consistently is very honestly difficult. It is the it is cracking the consistent bit that is difficult. Absolutely right. And that part is difficult but there is help. Okay, first of all, read Atomic Habits. That has lots of little and very useful tips on how to become more consistent. But I'll give you one or two simple techniques. Okay, one is the 2-minut rule. Okay.
Okay. Whenever you start a new habit, it should take less than 2 minutes to do. Okay. 2 minutes on every given day is something you can manage to do consistently, right? Yeah, anything more than that and you might do it for a few days and then drop off, right? Examples of how a habit can be started as a 2-minute rule. Suppose you want a habit of read every night before bed, change it to read one page every night. Okay, that takes about 2 minutes. Yes. Instead of do 30 minutes of yoga every day, just get into yoga clothes every day and take out the mat. Okay, takes 2 minutes again. Study for class. Change that to I
need to take out my notebook and open it to the correct page. Two minutes again. Fold the laundry. Change that to fold one shirt. Okay. And run three miles. Change that to you need to wear your running shoes and get out of the house every day. Don't have to actually run 2 minutes. Again, the first 2 minutes should be easy. The actions that follow can be challenging, but the first two minutes of the habit have to be very easy to do. Right? your lazy brain will handle the rest because once you're out there with your shoes, your brain says take now that I have come here might as well run. There is one counter example
to this that I don't think will work. If you want to learn cooking, don't start by making 2-minute noodles. That is not going to help you get into the habit of cooking. I disagree. If you make 2-minute noodles every day, very soon you will start adding things and you will become a good cook. Okay, master the habit of showing up. Okay, that is why quantity is equal to quality. This is not just a trick. Okay, you can stop after 2 minutes. On some days just some days are heavy. You can stop after 2 minutes. Yeah, but after a few days you will get back, right? And you will do the whole thing. Getting back on the
horse is important, right? It will work in the long run. It works. Okay. So the two-minute rule is one such technique to get you consistent. The other technique is something called a commitment device. Basically force yourself in some way. Okay. Athletes who have to make weight for a competition, right? Means for the competition they have to be below a certain weight. Everyone is aware of examples, right? Yeah. What they do is that they choose to leave their wallet at home so that they're not tempted to buy junk food and eat it. Okay. Yeah.
The problem is Foggat had UPI. So, no man, France does not have UPI. But let's not go there. That's a very painful episode. Habit expert Nyal, what he did was he attached a timer device to his internet router at home. Okay, which disconnects the internet at 10 p.m. That easily breaks the habit of not browsing at night and staying awake, right? Ah another way of committing is publicly announcing. Okay. What I often do is that I announce that I am teaching a course on something or the other in say October. Okay. That is my cue to learn that topic properly before that date. Otherwise I'm just lazy. Okay. I don't have the discipline to do the
things I actually want to do. Like this channel is also the result of a commitment device. I wanted a YouTube channel since 2016. Okay. And for 6 years I did nothing. Okay. Then I came up with a commitment device. I teamed up with Shriant and with video school and I said okay let's do it. Let's start a YouTube channel and we will shoot every Thursday and I told Shriant that every Tuesday we will prep our episodes. Okay. Now because there is going to be a call with Shriant at 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday. At 100 p.m. on Tuesday, I'm like desperately, oh, I need to prepare something. All episodes get prepared through the amazing device of lastm
minute panic of a deadline. Can you imagine Naven panicking last minute because I can't. Every Tuesday at 5:00 p.m., he's like the calmst person on earth. This is what we are going to talk about. These are the points and these are the things that I want to discuss. And then I come up with additional questions for him or whatever. and he's like, "Yeah, yeah, these are he's he just knows shit." I can't even imagine him prepping desperately at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday. But, uh, yeah, commitment devices, grab a friend and make them your commitment device if you want to produce quality, which begins by producing lots of quantity, right? So, the summary is focus on quantity and minor improvements
throughout and the quality will follow. Yeah. Okay. You will always be producing crap along with the good quality stuff. Okay, this is true of Beethoven and Picasso. It is going to be true of you and him. And use the two-minut rule and commitment devices to increase your consistency, right? So basically consistency with lots of deliberate practice with atomic changes in everything that you do and just keep producing is and the mother philosophy that sits at the top of all of those is karma. There you go. Check out our episode on karma vadikaraste. It will teach you about consistency. Yes it does. And if you want to know how you know where to go. This is Mishri Kant.
That's Naven Future IQ.