🎨 How to create a masterpiece

While creating a masterpiece is a noble goal, I like to use this piece more as a guide on how to raise quality more generally. Whether that is service quality, product quality, or simply your quality of life. The core principles are the same.

Put shortly, you want to increase your output volume and your variance. I will take each in turn.

Volume:

Most people naturally understand that if they do more stuff, it follows that some of that stuff will be good.

By increasing volume, the amount you do something, you increase your chances that what you do is amazing. It also helps increase your average ability, by doing it more you learn and improve. This is true across almost every area of your life, from email outreach and sales calls to sex and social activities. You should probably do more.

HOWEVER, doing more doesn’t mean doing as much as possible. You don’t need to do as much as you think. Don’t spend every waking moment cramming in more in the name of volume. You need to have a reasonable amount of volume, not a deluge. You want volume so you can spot trends, patterns, problems. This brings up one of my favourite quotes: Do as little as needed, not as much as possible — Henk Kraaijenhof

Variance:

This is the counterintuitive one. You want some of your stuff to suck.

I don’t mean you should actively make things bad, but that you should be trying new things and doing things differently often enough that they don’t work out sometimes.

If none of your stuff sucks, you aren’t varying things enough (and you probably aren’t doing enough volume either!).

Having variance within the range increases your chances that you will strike gold, that the thing you do will be good or even exceptional. You want that. Nobody wants to be mediocre, or buy from somebody who is mediocre. Everybody wants exceptional.

Exceptional has a cost, sometimes things will be only okay or even bad. That is a cost worth paying. High quality clients know that. The cost of bad is far outweighed by the value of exceptional. Stagnant mediocrity is death, apathy is the enemy. The Pareto Principle holds true, 20% of inputs are responsible for 80% of outputs. The 20% that is exceptional pays for the variability.

Much like volume, variance also helps increase your average. By trying different things you learn and improve. Your average level of ability improves.

Now, much like avoiding a deluge of volume, you don’t need to go out and try something that has very low chances of success in the name of variability. Approach it like a scientist. Make calculated bets. Create hypotheses, track data, and test your assumptions. Like scientists, most experiments will be incremental. A slight tweak to something we already do. Some experiments should be bold, a potential step change. A little scary, but still calculated. When something works, incorporate it more. The experiments will pay off. You will improve much quicker than you think.

Try that new content idea, or a new structure for your sales calls, or that new social event. There are many benefits to having the variability, from cognitive improvement to skill development and improved ability to predict. Importantly for this post right now, variability increases your chances to stumble on something amazing.

Direct quote from the article, about the above graph:“Here, Ms Perfect has a better average skill than Ms Fukit (the yellow bell’s average is to the right of the green bell’s average), and the same variance (the green and yellow bells have the same shape).

And yet Ms Fukit’s track record is better than Ms Perfect’s: Look at the dots to the right. Ms Perfect has one good quality piece, but Ms Fukit has one masterpiece and two more pieces that are better than Ms Perfect’s only attempt. Why? Fukit tried more times, failed more times, and was lucky enough to land more successes.”

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-august-30-2023

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