Lift Interactive

Make more crap.

I’m told that this story originally comes from Art and Fear:

On opening day, the ceramics teacher announced that he would be dividing the class into two groups: group A would be graded solely on the quality of the work that they produced, while group B would be graded based on the quantity.

The teacher had planned a simple grading system: on the final day of class, he would bring in his bathroom scale and weigh the work of group B. Fifty pounds of pottery would get an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. For group A, only one pot was required – but it had to be a perfect one to get an “A”.

The class progressed as most classes usually do, and the groups split up. The members of group A pulled their chairs together and started theorizing about what made a pot perfect, while group B fired up their kilns and started furiously churning out pots.

Eventually(probably too long for some members of group A), the class was over – and grading day came. The members of group B came with bags and bags of pots, and the members of group A each had their single pots on display. However, when the teacher sat down to grade each student, a curious fact emerged: the highest quality pots were all coming from the group that was being graded on having the highest quantity of pots.

While group A was theorizing about what makes a good pot, and how to achieve perfection, group B had been churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes. In the end, group B had more pots, and better pots – while group A was left with grandiose theories about perfection, and merely okay pots.

In the creative industries(and especially design, it seems), it’s easy to get caught up in the little details – tweaking that one little thing, or executing that project perfectly. But the reality is, your execution will never be perfect. There will always be something you want to change, or that you look back at later and go “wow…how did I make something so crappy?”.

Realistically, I’ve spent more time than I need to writing this; we’re hard-wired to try and not be crappy. But the reality is, you are going to make crap. Everyone does, and it’s what you do with the crap that you make that defines whether you improve, or keep making crap.

Your favorite creative? When they first started out, they made a lot of crap. And if they tell you that they didn’t, they’re lying because they’re embarrassed by how crappy their first work was. But they didn’t get to the point where they were someone’s favorite creative by designing crap – they got there by creating lots of crap, and learning from the process(and their mistakes).

You will make mistakes. You will also make crap. But if you aren’t making anything, you aren’t learning anything either – you’re just wasting time. So stop thinking about crap, and focus on making more crap.

Posted by Luke on March 27, 2009 | Comments (3)

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