Perfection and the Pottery Class #010

Good morning! Welcome again to Every Dawn, one thought for your day, every day. There is this other story I wanted to talk about. Yesterday, I told you why I'm doing this because I feel that forcing me to be more productive actually makes me more productive. Forcing me to do this every day actually improves me as a person. It makes me faster, better, a more productive person.

But there's another thing which has always impressed me—this story. And I don't know if the story is true; nobody knows, perhaps, if it's true. It's just a kind of an urban legend, and perhaps you have heard it already from productivity bloggers or other YouTubers. It is the story of the pottery class.

And it goes like this: there was a pottery class, and in this pottery class, students had to make pottery, and they were assessed on the pottery. But then, the teacher had the idea to split the class into two halves. One half of the class got a conventional task of making one perfect pot, and they had a month to do it—a perfect pot. And at the end, this would be the thing they would be judged on: this one perfect pot. So, they went to work, and they made their pots, and they improved, and they tried, and they worked one month to make the one perfect pot.

The other half of the class got a different task. Their task was to make as many pots as possible, and at the end, they would be judged by the weight of the pots. The only thing that mattered was the total number of pots, how productive they could be in terms of quantity. And at the end, the teacher looked at all those pots and decided which were the best quality pots. The surprise was that the best quality pots all came from the class which had the task of producing as many pots as possible. They didn't come from the class that was producing one high-quality pot as an assessment task.

So, what does this tell us? It is something that I have very often done wrong myself. I very often had the same problem: when we try to perfect something, when we try to write the perfect blog post, to make the perfect video, to write the perfect book, the perfect poem, in any way being creative and then try to do the perfect one thing, this is doomed to fail, almost always, because we are just not good enough to make this one perfect thing without practicing.

On the other hand, when we try to produce as much as possible, without being blocked by this requirement that things are perfect, then they turn out much better because now we feel free. We don't have to obsess over one thing; we can just create, we can just have fun, we can just do it. And in the end, they will turn out better because we have all the practice.

And now I come back to my own life: when I make a video a day like this, I have no illusion that these are good videos. They are not. There are perfect videos out there, and I have other channels in which I am posting videos that take me a week or two weeks, or three weeks to make. But when I'm doing this here, I'm forcing myself to produce quantity—one video every day. And I immediately notice, now we are in the second week, I immediately notice how much better I'm getting at this. A week ago, I wasn't able to speak freely to the camera. Now I'm doing it without any notes. I don't have notes. I don't have a teleprompter. I'm just talking to you. I couldn't do this a week ago; just creating ten quick videos made all the difference.

And I feel that I'm improving, and it doesn't matter whether I am good or not. Again, I have no illusions that this is not, you know, any masterpiece, what I'm doing here, but it helps me overcome perfectionism because perfectionism, in the end, means that you're producing nothing. And giving up perfectionism and just going for it, just producing pots, as many as possible, gives you this exercise, it gives you this practice that you need in order to produce something that is really good, and in order to improve yourself and to believe in your creative powers.

So perhaps, if you like, take this into your day today: the idea that we don't need to be perfect. We can just work on more things and just keep producing, keep making things, making products, putting them out there for the world to see without each one needing to be perfect. And the more we produce, the better we will get, and then eventually, we will perhaps reach perfection without even aiming at it.

Thank you, and see you on Monday. Bye-bye!