I was wrong - quantity is important

I started to write for and post my work on this platform at a time in my life when I was still quite inexperienced in pretty much anything I did, lacking original ideas, understanding or wisdom. Not that I have an abundance of all those things now, but I grew in the past few years, learning a few things in the meantime.

One of them is related to something that I was preaching years ago.

When I first started posting articles here one of the things that I used to "preach" was that quality is always better than quantity. I used to say that it's much better to take your time and create something good than to just post a bunch of things that have zero value.

In a way, I still agree with that. Logging in just to post a random picture you find online hoping to get money in return isn't a great strategy. However, at the time I didn't take into consideration what would happen if a person would focus on quantity while also making an effort to do something good every single time.

For some reason I didn't really talk about that type of behavior, about attempting to focus both on quantity and quality, and what would result from that type of regular work. Now I know - focusing on both quantity and quality will result in a much quicker rate of growth than if you focus on either element alone.

If you only focus on quantity, as I said above, without making any attempt at improving and getting better results, then you simply won't move forward. You'll always stay in the same place, creating the same type of content, without getting better. That's bad.

If you only focus on quality, then it's very possible that you'll spend so much time pondering over every single detail and whether everything is right or not, that you'll end up posting very little work, exploring few subjects, trying very few diverse methods to be efficient, and therefore reduce the amount of progress you make.

Doing both is, in my opinion, a much better option. Doing something over and over, with focus on quantity, while always attempting to improve your work, even a little, will eventually help you grow in time.

The personal example I can give is writing. Although I was telling people that quantity mattered way more than quality, I was still focusing on producing as much content as I could, even making an effort to post daily several times. That contradicted a bit what I was telling people. However, because I was also always focused on writing better articles, I improved, not despite, but because of the high amount of posts I was writing.

I always tried to find new topics to write about, new ways to explain my ideas and arguments, to create better sentences and paragraphs, to have better introductions and conclusions, and so on. Doing this again and again, with a focus on getting better over time, allowed me to improve my content and to get good at this activity, at least compared to my former self.

Therefore, quantity is important, just as quality is. But you must focus on both of those aspects in order to grow organically, over time. You must create a lot, but always try to do as good of a job as you can. Do that for a few months or a few years, and then compare your recent work with your older projects. You should immediately see a difference, with your current projects being much better than your previous ones.