This story is old hat by now, but I’m rewriting and posting it here because I need the reminder.

On the first day of a high school pottery class, the teacher announced he was splitting the class in to two groups: one group would be graded solely on the quantity of pottery they produced during the semester, while the other would be graded solely on the quality.

The Quantity group spent the whole semester churning out ashtrays and flower pots as fast as their high-school-sized hands could move.  The Quality group spent the semester calculating, measuring, theorizing, sculpting, and re-sculpting until they had created their personal masterpiece.

On the final day, all the clay knickknacks were lined up for inspection.  The Quantity group obviously had a lot more to display — and frankly, a lot of it was bad.  Some even godawful.  But a lot of wasn’t.  In fact, much of it was better than the work produced by the Quality group, most of whom had only one mediocre piece to display.

The lesson, of course, is that everybody makes bad shit.  Whether you’re making ashtrays, blueprints, paintings, or great literature, you’re going to make a lot of bad to go with the good.  And that’s fine, because whenever you make something bad, you get to learn from it and apply those lessons to make the next thing a little better.

The only way to create your way out of making bad shit is to make so much of it you just don’t have any left in you.