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Keep writing, Christopher

Christo­pher from Austin, TX, writes, “You write a lot. So do I. My teacher says I should write less, and that will make me get bet­ter. What do you think?”

Well, Christo­pher, Adam Grant, in his new book, Orig­i­nals: how non-con­formists move the world (Viking, 2016) writes this:

creativity“…the most pro­lif­ic peo­ple not only have the high­est orig­i­nal­i­ty; they also gen­er­ate their most orig­i­nal out­put dur­ing the peri­ods in which they pro­duce the largest vol­ume … It’s wide­ly assumed that there’s a trade­off between quan­ti­ty and quality—if you want to do bet­ter work, you have to do less of it—but that turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea gen­er­a­tion, quan­ti­ty is the most pre­dictable path to qual­i­ty. Orig­i­nal thinkers … will come up with many idea that are strange muta­tions, dead ends and utter fail­ures. The cost is worth­while because they also gen­er­ate a large pool of ideas—especially nov­el ideas.”  [Page 37]

When Grant uses the word “nov­el,” he means orig­i­nal. But hey, I’ll take it to mean lit­er­a­ture. So keep writ­ing, Christopher.

2 thoughts on “Keep writing, Christopher”

  1. Come Mon­day morn­ing, I know what I’ll be dis­cussing with my sixth-grade stu­dents. All year I have been stress­ing how writ­ers can­not have qual­i­ty with­out quan­ti­ty, and it’s fan­tas­tic to see a source that states the same. 

    One thing though: Is it pos­si­ble the Tex­an teacher was advo­cat­ing word econ­o­my? Maybe he meant: You should write less TO SAY MORE, and that will make your writ­ing better.

    Reply

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