Quantity Drives Quality, Part 2

While showering this weekend, I remembered a passage that I hadn't consulted in crafting the first post I made about quantity driving quality, and about the need to tolerate mediocrity in idea generation. I could have sworn it was in Derek Thompson's delightful, "Hit Makers," but alas, I couldn't track down the passage I had remembered... Then, while brushing my teeth, it dawned on me: it was actually in "Originals"!

Before I had finished brushing my teeth, I had tracked down the remembered passage. Apparently, Adam Grant is a fan of Dean Simonton, too. Here's a portion of what I remembered:

"How do originals maximize their odds of creating a masterpiece? They come up with a large number of ideas. Simonton finds that on average, creative geniuses weren't qualitatively better in their fields than their peers. They simply produced a greater volume of work, which gave them more variation and a higher chance of originality. 'The odds of producing an influential or successful idea are a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.'

Consider Shakespeare: we're most familiar with a small number of his classics, forgetting that in the span of two decades, he produced 37 plays and 154 sonnets. Simonton Tracked the popularity of Shakespeare's plays, measuring how often they're performed and how widely they're praised by experts and critics. In the same five-year window that Shakespeare produced three of his five most popular works, he also churned out two which rank among the worst of his plays and have been consistently slammed for unpolished prose and incomplete plot and character development."

He goes on to cite Mozart, Picasso, Einstein, and Edison as fitting this rule as well. He concludes: "It's widely assumed that there's a tradeoff between quantity and quality -- if you want to do better work, you have to do less of it -- but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality (emphasis mine)... Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection."

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