A simple idea to unlock improvements and creativity
A word about learning. Lately I have been frustrated with my ability to produce quality visual design. I’ve started a simple thing to get better. The idea is basically this:
Quantity matters much more than quality.
For quite some time, my approach to trying to make something visually appealing was to try really hard to make one perfect thing.
But I felt super frustrated because I was barely improving between projects.
I’ve very recently started to deliberately practice visual design by starting a simple challenge (called daily UI).
For 100 days, I receive a simple prompt and I have to design one screen based on this. Just a simple UI.
I am only 2 days in and I can feel that I am learning fast. Why ?
1) instead of agonising on one real production project every few months, I have started from 0 and finished twice in two days.
2) there aren’t high expectations
I have experienced this with other things, but this last project made me want to share the idea with more people. I want to drive the point home with a few other examples.
The first one is surfing. When you surf, you don’t catch many waves during a session. Maybe you get one minute total standing up in a 2h session. This means: not a lot of practice overall, and also each wave is very precious. Who wants to risk ruining a wave? No one.
So what is becoming more standard practice now is to practice on land with a surfskate (a modified skateboard that reproduces the sensations of surf). In 1h of surfskate practice, you can practice your turns 200 times.
More than you would in one year of surfing sessions.
Stakes are low, quantity is high. It’s perfect to experiment, learn and also have fun.
Another example is this story about an art teacher. I can’t find what the original experiment is, but here is what happened overall:
An art teacher split their class into two groups.
The first would be rated at the end of the year on their highest quality artwork.
The second would be rated on how many artworks they had produced in total, no matter the quality.
Now guess which group had actually produced the best work?
It was the second group.
Same ideas again:
1) Repetion
2) No fear of doing bad work.
No crippling expectation of having to produce something great.
I want to finish by drawing a parallel to an adjacent idea, from a quote I absolutely love:
“You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
Amos Tversky
Almost always, the fastest way to go is to start with some amount of “unproductive” training.
To me, the most important idea here is to accept that the journey starts with us sucking at the job.
If we avoid this phase, then we basically never start.
It always amazes me how much more we can accomplish when we stop fearing failure.
Have fun learning !
