Quantity Before Quality

topic

Quantity before quality is the divergent thinking principle — supported by both creativity research and the biographical evidence of prolific creative practitioners — that the quality of the best creative output is positively correlated with the total quantity of creative output attempted, because the most original creative connections characteristically require traversing more of the creative possibility space to encounter than the most obvious ones, and because the creative evaluation necessary to identify the best outputs requires a substantial generative output to select from.

Role

Quantity before quality is simultaneously the most counterintuitive and most robustly evidenced creativity principle — with Dean Keith Simonton's research on scientific and artistic productivity consistently showing that the most creative individuals in every domain are also the most prolific, and that within any creator's body of work, the proportion of high-quality to total output remains roughly constant regardless of the total volume of output. This means that the way to create more masterpieces is to create more work — because the masterpiece proportion stays constant while the total number of masterpieces increases linearly with total output. Linus Pauling's quip that the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas captures what the research confirms.

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