The Pottery Experiment: Why Quantity Beats Quality

When you think you have a quality problem, you usually have a quantity problem.

A ceramics professor divided his class in two. One group was graded on the quantity of pots they made. The other was graded on the quality of a single pot. At the end of the semester, the quantity group produced the best pots. They learned through iteration — each pot taught them something the next one used. The quality group sat around theorizing about perfection and produced mediocre work.

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