Quality vs Quantity: The Age Old Debate

Fun Fact before diving into heady topics… Did you know there are some writers who don’t drink coffee? I’m so sorry, that fact wasn’t fun at all. It killed me to shatter your world like that, but as a fierce defender of Capital T Truth, you had to know that sinners walk amongst us.

Okay, now we have that monstrosity out of the way we can get down to business.

In the world of creation, whether it’s arts or business, we’ve gone back and forth on the quality vs quantity debate. And this subject tends to be a trigger conversation for many artists, or anyone who is obsessed with perfection.

**The Silent but Piercing Scream for Quality Control

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As a creative and fiction writer, hobby photographer, and paint dabbler, I can’t tell you how many junk ideas have been tossed. In the never-ending witch hunt for perfection, a battle that evades my every grasp, I fight the urge of never posting and over posting.

We want to share our passions with the world, to help others think about ideas in a new way, explore questions that keep us up at 3:27am. We crave the connection that our Internet Footprint creates.

The dark side of that is self loathing and perfection begging to the point our value to the public world becomes obsolete. The artist in each of us doesn’t just want the perfect idea, we want the perfect expression of idea. And we all know that what we see in our minds clearly, takes 10 fold the effort on the physical realm.

**Mind Numbing Yet Entertaining Influx of Content Overload

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Welcome to the Internet, The Grand Equalizer, The God We Really Believe In, Our Eternal Drug of Choice. Whatever name you want to give it, there’s no denying it’s sheer magnitude and power.

99% of my waking life is spent gazing adoringly into a screen with glazed hope, snark, and the future. The eyes might be the window to our souls, but the Interwebz is the window to freedom. Guess which I put the most faith in?

But with quantity also comes trash. Loads of it. Clickbait, micro blogging posts we never meant to hit publish on, keyboard warriors, and hedonistic monsters lurking in cobb webbed corners.

We don’t want to be caught up in that downward spiral.

**Stained Glass and The Equilibrium

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Two artistic and engineering structural things I’m obsessed with:
Stained glass and pendulums.

When I was a kid, we used to take field trips with my dad to Sciworks a local science museum. There were a million amazing things to learn about in there, but my absolute favorite was their Pendulum.

They had this spiral walkway which ended in a corded off circle, and a pendulum swinging. I’d always get sucked into the hypnotic rhythm, and the curvature of the swing. Vacillating from one side to the other till it found a middle ground.

As I grew up, I would think about that time spent watching the pendulum and comparing it to our lives, and the world. We swing in wild directions, then we would find the equilibrium.

Maybe that explains our intense battles with polarization? A constant fight for middle ground.

That’s what the Quality vs Quantity debate is like. We struggle with maintaining quality, yet it is in the quantity of production in which we develop quality.

If it’s hard to picture the pendulum, or you’ve never seen one, think of stained glass. The other structural design that is a perfect reflection of who we are.

Broken shards that form perfect pictures. Every jagged edge, creating a full masterpiece.

**### The Final Question **

How much are you willing to produce to come close to the quality you’re looking for?

That's all I got folks, now back to aggressively hunting for all my grammar mistakes and missed pun oppertunites. I hope at LEAST the memes were entertaining. :-)

Cheerio!
~ Devani