"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."
>The Sales’ also pushed for a punishing first-take philosophy, which Bowie found enticing. No overdubs unless necessary for guitar solos, no synths (the old Queen boast), and most of all, no lyric rewrites. The band would go to lunch and return to find that Bowie had written out a complete provisional lyric for whatever song they were working on. But that was as far as he was allowed to go: he was forced to keep to his first instincts. Sometimes this worked out, sometimes it didn’t (see “Crack City”).
>Given these strictures, Bowie and the band stuck to music “that didn’t have too much orchestration about it,” as Bowie said in a 1989 interview. “If it got too chordy and arranged, it wouldn’t be anything what we wanted to do. The structure had to be as loose as possible so that we could improvise.” Rather than reworking songs, they just kept cutting more, with as many as 35 to 40 pieces coming out of the sessions. So most of Tin Machine is basic blues-centered rock, with the average song having no more than five chords: it lacked the harmonic ambiguity and structural games of Bowie’s older work. While the record often worked on a song level, with 14 tracks on the CD version, the album was a wearying listen. Few records are as exciting in miniature and as draining as a whole as Tin Machine.
from here https://bowiesongs.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/heavens-in-here/
The point is to get over that mental hurdle of achieving perfection, which blocks a lot of people from getting started.
It's an appealing idea because it's counterintuitive, and here on HN were are absolute suckers for contrarian ways to outsmart the herd. But we have been given no reason to think it actually works.
> The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
From: https://lithub.com/ray-bradburys-greatest-writing-advice/
... incidentally, also Neil Gaiman's advice in the Masterclass lectures.
The reason it works so well for writing is, as Neil Gaiman points out, that if you work for a year on one story, you've probably practised starting a story 52 times. But you've still only practised finishing a story once. And getting into the habit of finishing things is one of the most important habits to get into.
I say this because I've worked with a lot of inexperienced developers that commonly have a stack of half finished projects, or things they've re-written half a dozen times to get the architecture right. I'm my experience you learn a lot by finishing things, and being constrained by previous decisions.
Bonus points if you can get customers relying on your work, nothing motivates like support emails.
Consider someone with little to no experience with programming trying to build a single app and planning it out and refactoring and refining it continuously, compared to constantly creating and archiving multiple toy prototypes of the same app and then considering the best among those.
(The app's size and complexity should be commensurate to a single clay pot in a ceramics course.)
It requires the students to actually try to make something of quality, sure, but only to the same degree that the students in the original (apocryphal) story did- after all, those students could easily have shown up with a pile of baked misshapen clay instead of proper pots.
creating 1 pot using 10 tons of clay = writing 50,000 lines of code for 1 project
vs
writing lots of different projects = creating lots of different pots.
It's like order and chaos, what you want is to find a balance that allows you to explore, and leave things a bit open so they can also be extended, but also sound and precisse enough so that it actually works, and does the job.
That matches "the quantity trumps quality" idea above more closely in our industry.
Even if the initial thing is so terrible it needs to be redone completely, at least you figured out what you don't want. All while getting into the habit of doing the thing.
It's just an avenue for having a discussion about what we actually want to say.
Or I decide to "refactor" a piece of code, and then spend days thinking about how I'll "refactor" it, rather than just doing it or not doing it in the first place.
> Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.
It could, but there's no reason you couldn't start with a terrible outline instead of diving right into prose. The point is just that when you see something your brain will stark noticing all the ways it sucks and it gets things going.
>Another trick to start sloppy - you might have high expectations of your finished work.
>You want to write a great book, not just a good one. Or create a stellar artwork, or start a great business. >All those expectations can put more pressure on you than you can bear, leading you to avoid it by procrastinating. >Instead, you can escape those expectations by starting deliberately badly.
I use this one a lot. I always heard it called a 'vomit draft'. It really works. It's easier to see how truly terrible thing could be improved than it is to just start working from a blank slate.