I’m going to (try to) write a short post every day.
There are a number of examples of people doing this with great success: Jerry Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain” method for writing new material, Fred Wilson on avc.com for years and years, even David Hockney has shared some fun, but seemingly deeply iterative, work in progress. (Below is my favorite from Hockney: Untitled 10 from his “iPhone Drawings”. This work was done in 2009 only 2 years (!) after the phone was introduced, pretty remarkable early adoption. Also it was presumably his 10th iteration of something. It’s quite strong motivation, things don’t need to be perfect, even if you’re a world famous artist.)
I’m also a pretty strong believer in the power of improvement via iteration. There’s a now famous study from Art & Fear that discusses the differences in quality of ceramic pieces generated by a group that was told they would be judged on how many pots they made, and another group told they would be judged on the quality of just one pot after hours of theorizing about how to make the perfect pot. Surprise, surprise: the best pots came from the group that just made as many as they got. Time to start making pots.
