Doing Your Best, and The Parable of the Pottery Class

[rowyn]

The parable of the pottery class goes like this:

Two groups of students take a pottery class. One group is graded only on their best pot. The other group is graded on the total number of completed pots they produce, regardless of quality.

At the end of the class, the group graded on total number of pots not only produces more pots, but has also produced better pots. The group graded on their best pot -- agonizing over trying to make each pot perfect -- learned less about how to throw pots. Their best work is not as good as the other group’s best work.

As far as I can tell, this story is apocryphal: it never actually happened. It makes a good story and it rings true, which gives it a longevity that many scientific studies lack.

My recent obsession with digital painting and completing one study of an hour or so each day has brought this parable to mind often.

In contrast, one of my friends quote-tweeted a comic artist saying something like ‘your audience can tell the difference between your best work and phoning it in. Fix your mistakes.’

There is a natural tension between the quantity and quality. The parable of the pottery class is flawed. It only works if the students want to improve despite the lack of incentive or reward for doing so.

You always need to care about both. If you don’t care about quantity, you’ll never finish anything. If you don’t care about quality, you’ll never improve.

But most advice I hear is on the lines of “finish things and move on.” Don’t rewrite the same book endlessly. Don’t labor over the same painting for years. Declare victory or declare defeat, but call it done and do the next thing. That quote-tweet has stuck with me because of the rarity of hearing someone advocate for no, don’t give up. Make each thing the best.

I gave up on today’s CuratorPrompts (#79) at 37 minutes, because I didn’t want to work on it any longer than that. It’s not my best work. Every painting I’ve done for CuratorPrompts is not my best work. Instead, I am doing the best I can in a limited amount of time. This one is done. There will be another CuratorPrompts tomorrow. I can try to do better on that one.

It stands in contrast with the third and fourth Demon’s Series books. I finished drafting the fourth book in January of 2021. It’s been eighteen months and I’m still not ready to release either one. I haven’t spent much of that time actually working on the books, of course. I’ve written two other books and 5/6ths of a third during that time, and edited one of those. (This is slower than my productivity in some previous periods, granted). Mostly, I’ve dragged my feet and postponed doing any work, rather than labored but made no progress.

In many ways, it is easier to let go of a picture than a book. If I give up on a picture and show it to everyone, and two years later I decide to paint the same picture again but better -- the same people will still look at it. Many artists make a habit of re-doing paintings to see how they’ve improved or changed over time. And I have even less investment in the CuratorPrompts paintings: these are studies completed for practice, not my own vision that I want to share.

But if I give up on a book and publish it, that’s it. If I made substantial revisions to it or rewrote it years after publication, few readers would give the new version a try.

So I will persevere.

Comments

[tuftears]

That's a very important point about books, once it's out the doors, that's it. Barring 10th anniversary editions, or Diane Duane going and making a New Millenium edition of her So You Want To Be A Wizard series, of course. ^.^;;

[terrycloth]

I mean the parable assumes that the best pot people didn't think of maybe practicing a bunch before trying for real too. I guess the danger is they'd make an unusually good pot sometime in the middle and then lose interest in continued practice because they didn't think they could top it, compared to the 'most pot' people learning bad habits that make their pots uniformly suck and ingraining them deeply because they don't care about quality.