The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group: fifty pound of pots rated an A, forty pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an A. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work -- and learning from their mistakes -- the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

There are two creative processes I've wanted to participate in during this life: Writing and Coding. Both of which have periodically gone through periods of fertility and of drought. The solution for getting past the drought has always been to examine my situation in order to discover and discard those aritificial limitations I've put on myself. Mostly, the solution is to just keep doing it and push through.

To me, the message of the anecdote is that thinking about doing something is anathema to doing and learning from the doing. You have to produce shit in order to produce gold, because until you produce shit, you can't learn from it, you can't move on to producing gold. You cannot let yourself stop doing something just because you think you'll do it badly.

Writers talk about not writing well until you've written a million words. When someone asks a photographer how to take better pictures, they talk about taking many more pictures. And I know from personal experience that you don't get better at programming until you do a lot of it.

So whatever it is you want to do, whatever it is you are waiting to do, now is the time. Start doing it. Start doing it, if you have any desire of being any good at it.

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