There’s a story about a pottery instructor who ran an interesting experiment. He split his class into two groups for a month-long project. Group A had to create one pot every single day – 30 pots total by the end of the month. Group B got to spend the entire month perfecting just one pot. When the instructor evaluated all the work, something fascinating happened. Every single one of the best pots came from Group A – the people who had been churning out one pot per day. Not a single exceptional pot came from the group that had spent a month perfecting their masterpiece.

What this means for your business

Most business owners approach new ventures like Group B. They want to perfect their website before launching. They spend months refining their service offering. They delay their product launch until it’s “ready.” But the pottery experiment shows us something important: you get better by doing, not by planning. Want to improve your sales process? Run 50 sales calls, not one perfect pitch. Learning content marketing? Write 100 posts, not one perfect article. Building a new product? Launch 10 iterations, not one flawless version.

The quantity advantage

Focusing on quantity over quality (at least initially) has a massive psychological benefit – it removes the paralysis of perfectionism. When you commit to creating 5 pieces of content, you accept that most of them won’t be brilliant. That’s liberating. You stop agonising over whether post number 23 is good enough and just focus on making it better than post number 22. This approach works because each iteration teaches you something. The 30th pot teaches you things the 1st pot couldn’t.

Why most business owners get this wrong

We’re conditioned to think that more time equals better results. But often, more iterations beat more time. The business owner who spends six months perfecting their first product usually creates something that’s theoretically better but practically worse than someone who launched three imperfect versions in the same timeframe. Why? Because the person launching multiple versions gets real customer feedback. They learn what actually matters versus what they think matters.

The quality paradox

The pottery students making one pot per day had to figure out efficient techniques. They couldn’t afford to spend hours on details that didn’t matter. This forced efficiency made their work better, not worse.

How to apply this

Pick one area of your business where you’ve been aiming for perfection and commit to volume instead. If you’re trying to improve your marketing, commit to creating 5 pieces of content rather than spending months on one perfect campaign. The goal isn’t to lower your standards permanently. It’s to build competence through repetition so your standards actually mean something. The pottery class teaches us that mastery comes from doing, not from thinking about doing. Your business will improve faster through imperfect action than perfect planning.