Loop

There are some tasks I feel reasonably comfortable doing, equally there are lots of things where I feel less comfortable. I think this discomfort flows from feeling I don’t know what to do or how, or that there’s an expectation about the level at which I’ll perform a task, either held by myself or by someone else, which I’m not sure I can live up to.

There is a popular story about a tutor who works with two groups of students. It’s a pottery class and to the first group, they say “You have a month to make as many pots as possible”. to the second group, they say “You have a month to make the best pot you can possibly make”. Now, each group is free to set their own methodology, but the challenge itself contributes something to how they go about completing their tasks. And it’s very easy to imagine that if you were asked to make the perfect pot, you might spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a pot perfect and all that sort of stuff. The other group, on the other hand, just have to make sheer volume, and so they’re going to get started and try to innovate and improve along the way so that they can make as many pots as they possibly can. And the curious thing about mechanical tasks like making a pot is that there’s a lot of learning and thinking done in the material.

So the story tells us that at the end of the month, not only have the first group made a lot of pots, but the quality of their pots, especially the ones made towards the end is just much higher than anything the second group produced. Perhaps there are a few lessons to take from this. One of them is if you’re trying to make the best possible pot, make a lot of pots.

I saw a video where Alex Hormozi talks about this. And he considered it a way of. Removing random variation from a circumstance. After all, if things can go well and things can go poorly, then simply do a lot of things.Then some go well and some go poorly, but the count of things which go well is just inevitably higher. Because if you’ve done 10 things and it’s 50:50, you’ve got 5. Whereas if you’ve done 100, well then, perhaps you have 50 and that’s literally 10 times better. So the key variable isn’t skill or fortune. It’s volume.

I wonder how much this applies to these 500 word articles. Although some of them are a bit longer than 500 words, I do occasionally run searches to ask if there are any that are less than 500 words or any missing altogether. Then I will take a little bit of free time to go back and write an entry or to top up an entry to bring it into conformity because the idea is a minimum of 500 words.

But to stick to the point, I wonder if this applies to these little entries. Are some of them just totally awful things nobody, including me, is going to want to read ever again? While others are little gems. Things that genuinely are worth publishing. Thoughts and ideas other people might actually appreciate reading and that I would appreciate reading and looking back in the future and thinking, oh, I was on a good day when I when I wrote those thoughts.

Certainly it’s on my mind that I’ve not written any fiction recently. When I first started writing these posts, then I would take time fairly often to write some poetry or to try to express some verse. Maybe tomorrow I should try to write a song. That’s something I haven’t done. I don’t have any ability with it, so why not? I mean, it’s very likely I’m going to write an absolutely terrible song, but I could just write a song about something and then, and then I can say that I’ve written one and uh, maybe if I write some more, one of them might be halfway good.

I do think I need a feedback loop. Perhaps I should expand this daily practise to include some kind of review. I am publishing posts, sporadically is probably the best word. I need to get a better habit around editing these things and putting them onto the Internet. But that forms some sort of review because if if the blog becomes more useful then people will read it and then I’ll be able to see, based on the readership, which of the articles and posts have some relevance or interest to a wider audience and which do not.