When to focus on quantity over quality

Beginning of March I was on a content-creation frenzy for a couple of weeks. I wrote this weekly newsletter, I recorded six podcast episodes within three weeks, I created a crisis hub for Swiss startups, I posted daily on LinkedIn and wrote the first draft for an eBook. And boy it was fun and created a lot of energy and momentum.

But then all of a sudden a flurry of doubt hit me: "Where am I going with this?", "What's the purpose?", "Is my content good enough?", "Am I actually delivering value?", "Is anybody even reading/viewing/listening to this?".

So I stopped making new content altogether and started pondering these questions. For weeks. What followed were positioning exercises, tool research, keyword research, KPI dashboards, and content calendars. Content output? Zero.

No doubt, it's useful to have an approximate initial direction of where you're going and who your audience is. But based on my reflections above, trying to draw a detailed map of a place you've never been to, is not only useless, but also leads to decision-paralysis and kills any momentum at the root.

Or how a AJ put it on his Twitter account:

So what's the alternative?

Luckily, I stumbled over the parable of the pottery class, which goes as follows:

There was once a pottery teacher called Brian. One month, he decided to split his class into two groups. Group A had to make a pot every day for 30 days (so 30 pots in total). Group B had to work on a single pot for the whole 30 days. At the end of the month, Brian judged the quality of the pots. Without exception, every one of the top 10 pots came from Group A, the guys that made one pot per day. None came from the group that focused on perfecting their single pot.

In his article, Ali Abdaal says: "My advice is to always focus on quantity over quality, at least for when you are starting out with something new...". Want to get better at photography? Take 10,000 photos. Learning how to cook? Try 100 recipes. Video editing? Make 100 videos. At the end of that (and with a few YouTube tutorials sprinkled in for good measure), it’s hard to not be significantly better.

Or in the words of Russell Brunson's from Expert Secrets:

"Publishing daily is important because you will quickly see what topics and ideas people respond to and to which they don’t. Soon you’ll become better and better at creating and posting the things that people care about most. As you do that, your audience will grow, you will become more confident, and your message will become clear. Over time, that consistency will give you absolute certainty, and you will become your message."

Aiming for quantity has another benefit - it stops the fear of “what if this isn’t good enough?” from paralyzing us. We accept that as beginners, we’re going to suck and that’s okay.

So long story short: I get off my perfectionist stride and back to creating content.