I think a lot of this story from Atomic Habits by James Clear…
- “ON THE FIRST day of class, Jerry Uelsmann, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his “Beginning Photography” students into two groups.
Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the “quantity” group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. One hundred photos would rate an A, ninety photos a B, eighty photos a C, and so on.
Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the “quality” group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A, it had to be a nearly perfect image.
At the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group. During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo.”
The moral of the story here is that we do better things if we try and fail, and fail often, than if we hold our breath theorizing about perfection.
Of course, it makes sense that it is hard to fail. Many of us have been trained since childhood to always try to get the right answer, do the right thing. Failure meant bad grades, angry parents, social rejection, disappointment.
But beautiful, frequent, spectacular failure is also the gate we have to pass through to making better stuff, to learning more, to being the person we want to be.
It’s a spiral path of growth.
Because with each failure, we learn a little.
Why didn’t that work? How can I adjust that part a little? What did work?
So even though we return to the same problems again and again, we’ve grown a little; we are a little further around the spiral.