Beautiful Papers: Quantity vs. Quality

An art teacher told their class that at the end of the semester they would be judged by one piece of work. Half the class was instructed to make as much work as possible and on the last day they could pick which piece would determine their grade. The other half of the class was instructed to create only one piece – a perfect piece – for the entire semester. When the last day of class came they would be judged on that one piece. As it turned out the students who created massive amounts of work learned and eventually created perfection. The other students who worked on only one piece and labored to make it perfect failed and were never able to create beyond their original skills.

Here you see a participant in our class creating a design by dragging it across paste paper. The only limit on what can be created was the limits of her imagination. Not everyone in class liked creating paste paper. They thought it was redundant and boring to simply spread the color then create designs. They got bored after a couple sheets. They moved on to other methods and left the paste paper to those in class who enjoyed making it. The student you seen the photo created the most paste paper in our group. She mastered it more than any of us. Within two days she created more paste paper than the rest of us combined, and became the expert in the class.

For me she exemplifies the art students in the story. She was willing to do the same thing over and over and over again until she mastered it. She became an expert by putting large amounts of effort into learning the ins and outs of paste paper. As a class we all admired her efforts and the fabulous designs she developed. It was amazing to see how she progressed in such a short period of time.

Are you willing to put in the work to master your craft? Are you willing to do what others think is redundant in order to learn through mistakes, trial and error, and ingenuity? Are you willing to forego other things in order to concentrate your efforts and become the best at something? In a world that seems to want to reward quick, speedy, and instant somehow we have forgotten that quantity leads to quality. Without doing something over and over again we never learn how to do it well.