From my friend Lars Doucet: Operation Garbage Fountain
Some nuggets from this post:
Maybe you’ve heard that story about the pottery teacher who divided the class into two groups: half would be graded traditionally based on the quality of their work, but the other half would be graded on sheer quantity alone. As in, literally, he would take all the pots they made that year, weigh them, and X kilograms of pottery would get you an A+. As the story goes, the quantity group produced not only the most pots, but also unambiguously the best pots.
Lars Doucet: Operation Garbage Fountain
And then a link to a post that shared the original story.
I’ve always been captivated by music, but much like many kids decide they “can’t draw” or “suck at math,” I likewise labeled music as a mystical alien magic that would forever be beyond me.
Later, in high school, I met a girl in the year below me who played the saxophone. She was really good and I assumed she started playing in elementary school. Nope, she started playing the previous year. That moment was the first click for me – you can just start learning new things, anytime. Even today.
Lars Doucet: Operation Garbage Fountain
The key argument is that it’s all about putting in the pracitce, the repetitions or “reps”, and not making excuses. From his own story:
It wasn’t easy learning an entirely new career, but I’m quite good at it now, and it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would. It turns out you can just learn new things if you have the right people to guide you and you have the opportunity and the inclination to put in the reps.
…
Learning, ultimately, is about putting in the reps. Figure out what you want to get better at, and practice doing it.
There’s a lot of things I would like to do. I mostly don’t do them. My reasons are all stupid excuses.
Lars Doucet: Operation Garbage Fountain
He outlines – and then rebuts – all the usual reasons we don’t learn more then outlines his solution, “operation garbage fountain”.
Basically a set of commitments to himself to just do the creative practice to get better, and to share it online in its raw form. Not concerned about quality, not concerned about the overall narrative arc of your posts, not concerned about audience or community building. And no guilt about posting too little or too much – just a commitment to make a little progress as often as you can, and to always post it in some form.
I love this. It’s a different take to what I also liked in Blogging as an Ideas Garden … but I’m not sure it’s incompatible.