QUANTITY OR QUALITY?

When I was 19 years old, I decided I wanted some adventure in my life, so I applied to and was accepted into a very unique live-in student program in Chicago studying Zen meditation and the martial art of Aikido. One of the first things the founder and chief instructor of the program said to me was that the average student who comes here gets about 3-4 hours per week of training, which is about 150 to 200 hours per year. In this particular program, you’re going to get between 1800 and 2000 hours per year of training. Are you ready?

 Of course, I said ‘HAI Sensei!’, which is a very Japanese way of saying, ‘yes, I’m all in!’ Little did I know just how difficult the whole experience would be. What I did learn, however, was a plethora of life lessons that are still making themselves known to this day, some 30 years later. One of those lessons was that very first statement from what would become one of my greatest teachers and mentors. He basically said, you’re going to get 10 times the training in that the average student would get, are you ready? Of course, If I asked you if you’re ready to do 10X what everyone else is doing, most people would say, ‘nah, I’m good.’ And they’d be smart in doing so because doing 10X that kind of physical and mental training is something that broke more than a few of my fellow live-in students.

Good morning my friends, my name is Blaine Feyen, and I am your host for this and every episode of the always sponsor free, Real Value Podcast. Every week, trying to deliver some value for you and your business, whatever that business may be. Of course, all I can do is deliver the content to you, it’s completely up to you what you do with the content and whether or not you get some value from it. I’ve said many times before on this show that I essentially give away for free almost everything I coach on in my various coaching programs. I don’t really hold anything back from you because, well, that’s just not my style. I’ve had hundreds of free coaching calls, some of them have been with some of you, and I hold nothing back. People often leave those calls with thousands of dollars (if not tens of thousands) in free advice. I never try to sell anything or recruit, I just give advice and leave it up to you to decide if it’s valuable advice, if it’s something you’re going to actually implement on, and if you want more of it through a more direct coaching relationship.

What I can tell you is that the vast majority of people do not do anything with the input and advice that I give them, and this happens for several reasons. One of the big reasons is because the information is free, the other being that the advice always entails having to do something and make some kind of change, which most are loathe to do. Human beings hate change and will avoid it at all costs. Combine our disdain for change with some killer free advice and you have the perfect recipe for doing nothing. And, while this used to really bother me, I’ve since come to appreciate that people are like this and that means people like me, maybe you, can excel at almost anything we do if we’ll just start to implement, get those reps in, and adjust over time with the feedback from our efforts. 

One of the big takeaways for me from that very first lesson from my Sensei was what eventually became a bit of a fascination for me, and that’s the question of quantity over quality. He basically said to me, you’re going to train every single day until your legs fall off, but then you’ll grow new ones and they’ll be stronger than the old ones. When your arms fall off, new ones. When your mind can’t take it anymore, new thoughts, new mind. Better, stronger, faster, wiser, and far more experienced than almost everyone else here because of the quantity. The one big caveat he gave me regarding the quantity was this, don’t just do something to do it, do it as practice for the next time. If you go into everything with that attitude, you aren’t just going through the motions, you’re learning from every single movement and effort and you’re getting better each time, even if only one onion skin layer at a time. The reference to onion skin indicating that the growth is imperceptible when it’s happening. It’s so minute and so beneath the surface that you won’t know you’re learning and growing, but the number of reps you get in can never be taken away from you and each one is practice for the next. 

That one lesson alone has done more for me in the way of telling my ego to sit down and shut up than almost anything else. The ego wants us to stay the same in many ways because that’s a much safer path, so it will tell us to slow down, go for quality over quantity. The cry, by the way, of many appraisers who simply don’t want to get out of their own way and leverage the time, talent, and treasure of other people, other tech tools, other apps and programs, and other methods for producing appraisals that are of high enough quality for the purpose they’ve been engaged to fulfil, but in substantial enough quantity that you have a sustainable business model and enough income and business to sustain you through the valleys and troughs in business. Anybody can be a rockstar in the peaks, it’s the one’s killing it in the valleys that you should be studying.

So, where does this quantity versus quality thing play out? It plays out in everything, always. We’re almost always faced with a quantity versus quality decision whether we’re choosing food, clothes, activities, tv shows, writing, producing, doing work, working out; it doesn’t really matter. The thing is that the decision has already been made for us somewhere deep in the recesses of our brains. We use shortcuts called heuristics to make rapid decisions based on previous experiences with similar scenarios. We know what foods we like, easy decision. We know how we like to dress, easy decision. We know what we like to watch, easy decision. We know the music we like to listen to, easy decision.

 Where it’s not such a clean-cut choice or decision is when it comes to areas we want to excel in, things we know we should be doing but aren’t, and new things we want to learn and eventually master. The problem with even talking about this topic is that most people place the words ‘or’ or ‘over’ between quality and quantity. What I mean is that we automatically make it a binary choice; either you can choose quality OR you can choose quantity, but you can’t have both.

 Appraisers love the 3-legged stool analogy of price, quality, and speed. As the saying goes, you can pick two of those things, but you’ll always have to sacrifice the remaining one. You can have fast and cheap, but then you have to sacrifice quality. You can have quality and cheap, but then you have to sacrifice speed. You can have high quality and fast, but then you have to be willing to pay more for it. And I don’t really disagree with the analogy, although no analogies apply to every situation every time. Personally, I think the analogy has a hidden message in it, and that’s that those who figure out how to perfectly blend speed with quality with price own the market. Appraisers use this analogy as an excuse for why it takes them a ridiculously long time to complete a standard lending appraisal by saying, “Hey! You can have it fast, but then the quality goes down! Or, you can have it when I get it to you, but it will be higher quality!”

 To this I say, hogwash! All three of those things; price, speed, and quality, are not only subjective, they’re also relative. What is high priced to me might be low priced to you. What is fast to you might be slow for me. And what is considered quality to you is likely different for somebody else. The problem in a lot of industries is that the producer of the thing tries to set the definitions of those three categories without ever asking the market what they want. The market gets to determine what they consider to be the proper price, speed, and quality.

 What’s the message in all of this? Quantity versus quality shouldn’t be an either-or question, it should become an understanding that quantity and quality are inextricably linked and the one often leads to the other. The more you do anything, the better you will inevitably get at that thing. The more I write, the better I get. The more podcasts I record, the better I get. The more I work out, the stronger I get. The more appraisals I complete, the better I get at completing them, and hopefully in less time. Yes, time is a component in all of this and the power of quantity is that, the more you do something, the better you get at doing that thing in less time.

 One of the goals in anything we undertake should be to figure out how to achieve the result in less time. I know what you’re thinking, what about meditation or a massage? Those are things we don’t necessarily want to rush and the simple act of either is the point of it. Wrong! I’ve been meditating for 30+ years now and yes, the primary goal is just to get to that spot, sit, and meditate. However, another goal is to get into that ideal state faster with each session. The only way to accomplish that is with the quantity of tries. I’m happy when I can sit and meditate for 30 minutes regardless of the quality of the session, but I feel much better when I can get into the zone faster so that I can stay in that zone longer. The only way through that is with quantity of at bats and efforts.

 If you want to be good at anything, you have to get through the first 500 efforts or tries as fast as possible, which is quantity. If you are concerned about quality, be concerned about quantity first. If you want to be good at writing, you have to have lots of bad writing first. If you want to be good at Aikido, you have to show up for 1000 classes and get the bad out of the way. If you want to be good at Jiu Jitsu, you have to roll 1000 times and get choked out 995 of those times. If you want to be a good appraiser, work on lots and lots of reports, learn from each one, and then figure out how to blend quality with speed so you can produce more with higher quality each time, but in less time.  

 I’ve sat in the same spot writing almost every morning for the past 10 years or so. When I first sat down to do it, I was doing it as an exercise I had read about. It was to sit down and write consistently for 30 days straight regardless of whether or not I had anything to write about. It was a painful and anxiety ridden exercise because I never woke up with some great idea to write about. And that’s the point of the exercise. You have to learn to prep the page with something, just start stream of consciousness writing, and then see what it morphs into. If you stick with it, over time it gets easier and easier, although never easy. Over time, if you stick with it, you’re forming new pathways in your brain that will be on the lookout for things to write about tomorrow and it will all start to happen quite unconsciously. And that’s the point of the quantity.

 If you want to build a skill, do it over and over and over. If you want to be good at something, do it over and over and over. If you want to be good at something, you have to be bad at it first and the only path to getting good at it is to do it over and over and over. When you watch a Netflix special with Chris Rock or Jerry Seinfeld and they’re nailing every joke the whole hour, what you’re not seeing is the thousands of hours of writing, testing the jokes in a dive bar on a Wednesday night, seeing what gets laughs and what bombs, and then going back and either cutting or altering the one’s that bombed and trying them again on Thursday night at a different dingy lounge. They do this over and over and over again for years before they’ve gotten through all the bad jokes, the poor timing, the wrong delivery, and eventually to the point where they have enough material and just the right timing and delivery to nail it on Netflix.

 Friends, if you want to be good at something, the key is quantity. Nobody is telling you to sacrifice quality for quantity, but instead to plow through quantity to eventually arrive at something you can confidently call quality.

 For those of you who know Seth Godin, author of a bunch of books, he writes a blog post every single day and has for 20 years. He has a lot to say on the quantity versus quality debate, at least when it comes to writing, but I think it applies to everything. Here’s what he says, “Isaac Asimov wrote 400 books that got published…The way he did it was, every morning, he sat down in front of his manual typewriter and he typed until noon. It didn't matter if it was good, he just typed. Once your brain knows you're doing that, it can't help but want to do it better.”

 In talking about his blog, he says, “For every blog that I post, I write four or five blogs that you don't see. They all end up in the queue. Every night before I go to bed, I look at tomorrow's blog post and often rewrite it. Knowing that a blog post is going to appear tomorrow causes me to think really hard about whether I'm happy with that, and it also causes me to write another blog post, because either you're falling behind on your queue, or you're not.”

 Seth Godin also has a very pointed view on what others have called writers block, which is the perceived inability to come up with something to write about. To which Godin simply says, ‘show me your bad writing’. What he’s saying is that there is no such thing as writers block, there’s only lazy and arrogant people unwilling to slog through the practice of quantity, even if it sucks.

 I’ll end this episode with a quote from Justine Musk, the former wife of Elon Musk and an accomplished writer. When I read this quote to myself, I hear a message from her about the power of quantity and how it can lead to mastery. Here’s what she said, “Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life.” 

And with that, my friends, whatever you’ve been thinking about starting, but haven’t yet, start it. You have to work through the bad to get to the good. You have to do something every day for 3 years, 5 years, 10 years to become a master of it. You have to log hours, reps, and failures over and over again before you can expect to arrive anywhere with confidence. The hours start today, the reps start today, and they never end.