Selection over perfection

Many of us know that a complete solution (design/architecture) to a problem does not happen in one day. It takes months and years for a great architecture to be done. And what has hurt software engineering is to go extra mile for perfection. It is very interesting to take some ideas on ways to think or be creative from a poet - http://tesugen.com/archives/02/09/lowerstandards .

In the book Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, is a story about a university pottery class that were broken into two halves: one half was told that their grades depended on the quality of a single pot handed in, while the other half should get their grades based on the total weight of all their semester’s pieces (50+ lbs was an A, 40-50 lbs a B, and so on).

The best pieces all came from the latter half of the group – the ones “graded by weight”. Blog uses this example to illustrate how a poet experienced a shift in his writing as he began to write one poem a day, instead of working on a single poem at a time, revising and polishing until it was good enough. Basially prefering a selection from his 100s of poems than perfecting few of them. Instead of making one long continuous mistake do once-a-day. Lower your standards and get things out - this way you are training your brain to be better each time you do a selection.