The Cure to Perfectionism: a Pottery Tale

The pottery tale

Brian, a pottery teacher, once divided his class into two groups for a project.

One group was asked to make 30 pots in 30 days, while the second group was asked to make one in 30 days.

The ten best pots were selected at the end of the 30 days. Guess what group had the best pots made? 🤔🤔

*ding, ding, ding*

Well, it turned out that ALL the ten best pots came from the group that had to make 30 pots in 30 days.

Now, if you are thinking like I did initially, you’d probably have expected the group with only one pot to make better pots.

I mean they had a whole month to create, carve, and perfect one pot right? How hard could that have been?

As we observed, that wasn’t the case.

Brian and his experiment proved that you get better with more times you do a thing.

That way, you get to make mistakes, recognize these mistakes, correct them, and incorporate the corrections in the next project.

The takeaway from this?

Stop trying to perfect that video, essay, or book on the first try.

Repeat it several times, consistently learning from the mistakes and correcting them each step.

And eventually, on day 30, your project would be better than it was on day 1.

So, dear aspiring writers like myself, write and publish that imperfect essay. Please do it!

I learned about the pottery Tale from Ali Abdaal’s YouTube Video, “8 Surprising Habits to Get Millions of Subscribers.”