Quantity or Quality? The Dumbest Debate Dominating Our Digital Domain
Ever since the internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eye, content creators have wondered: quantity or quality?
(87% of people just read "Al Gore" as "A.I. Gore," so maybe quantity is winning. Anyway, back to the debate...)
"What'll it be, my friend?" I say as you wander off the streets into my Storyteller Saloon. "Quantity or quality?"
"One large glass of quality," you say, because that's who you are. You care. I do too. That's why I smirk at you.
"A high quantity of high quality, coming up!"
Wait... you think.
And you think right.
* * *
Quantity and quality are not opposites. They don't sit at either end of the same spectrum. They sit on two different spectra (which, yes, is the plural of "spectrum" but also a great name for a superhero).
How quality is it? That's one spectrum.
How much of the thing is there? That's another.
The opposite of "good thing" is not "many things." High quality and high quantity are not opposites.
A synonym for "good thing" is not "few things." High quality and low quantity are not the same thing.
Ah, you think, but to create good things, you can't also create many things.
But you think wrong.
It's true, sometimes, that is the relationship between these ideas. Sometimes, we need to create fewer things to create better things, but other times, it's actually the opposite, wherein creating more things leads to you creating better things, and if you're starting to get confused by these things, that's either because of the drink I handed you earlier in this piece OR the fact that this debate makes no sense. We are looking at this stuff all wrong. We're making a comparison of two things that aren't directly related to each other. It's like asking:
Tasty or smooth?
Silly or snowy?
Fast or fried?
That. Makes. No. Sense.
Quantity and quality can harmonize or they can clash. It all depends on one thing:
Our intentions.
"Quantity or quality" is a nuance-free decision. It ignores the same thing being ignored when people use AI to create entire pieces of work, passing it off as their own. (And that’s AI as in tech, not Al as in Gore.) The debate between our two Q-words ignores the fact that WE are present in the work and influence every sentence.
When we make anything, we haul with us a messy bag of humanity, and one of the shiniest gems in that bag is our intention for what we create. So let's apply those intentions to make sense of the debate:
Lazy quantity, or quantity that doesn't bring with it the intention to be quality, is repulsive and useless.
But there's a corollary here.
Vain quality, or quality that seeks to be perfect before shipping anything, is ineffectual and serves neither the creator nor the audience.
The closest I can come to answering the nuance-free version of the question is to conclude:
Quantity is practice. Quality is the goal.
But again, that assumes something about your intentions.
Quantity and quality can only be understood when we qualify them in some way. As abstract ideas, we can't really say much about their relationship. They are merely categories of traits which need to be specified and contextualized. How MUCH quantity? How MUCH quality? What does quantity actually LOOK LIKE to you? What does quality actually MEAN to you?
What about to others?
All of these questions must be answered by contextualizing them to our specific situations. The only generalized thing I'm comfortable saying is that we ought to avoid lazy quantity and vain quality. They are both equally selfish.
I believe quantity is practice and quality is the goal. That, given my context and my intentions, is the shortest way I can end the debate so I can busy myself with the real work. I don't think you can't create quality things, at least not purposefully and consistently, without practice, and your practice won't be effective without constantly trying to do things well.
Quantity and quality are both present in everything we do, but they can be calibrated, like an old-timey doctor measuring your weight on one of those metal scales, tapping the blocks one way, sliding them the other, aaaand there we go. They can be calibrated, but they are not inversely proportional. Just because one goes up, doesn’t mean the other goes down.
* * *
So what'll it be, my friend? What are you drinking?
When I hear that from an actual bartender at an actual bar, my answer always depends. Sometimes, I feel like having a Michter's bourbon with one ice cube. Actually, make it an Old Fashioned with the same. Or maybe I'll try that new brand I've been seeing everywhere. Or, hey, I'm celebrating, let's go with a Blanton's. But other times, I want a hazy, citrusy IPA. Other times, maybe just a club soda with lime, thanks. Or maybe it's a Mai Tai, but probably only at a beach.
It always depends. How am I feeling, who am I with, where are we located, what's the weather right now, what's going on in my day or in my life broadly, how much have I had, how familiar am I with this...?
Just last week, I had a few drinks with some friends in a Boston-area bar called Saloon. The week I had, the friends who came, my personal taste, the bar's ambience, the rainy weather -- it all led me to choose what I chose to drink that night. I calibrated my decision for the moment.
It's no different when you leave the actual bar named Saloon and walk into the fictional bar I named Storytelling Saloon and slump down in front of me.
"What'll it be, my friend? Quantity or quality?"
It depends.
The key question is: depends on what? I have some ideas...
How I Calibrate My Quantity and Quality with Less Stress
2025 will mark my 20-year anniversary of creating content on the internet.
That's a sentence I just wrote.
(Okay, I'm back.)
(Oh, I should explain: I had to stop writing and go stare at a wall for one full hour. I know you couldn't tell that from the line break. Anyway...)
In my, let's just say, short little while creating stuff online as a very young man with almost no gray hairs if you squint really hard, I've learned to dance with quantity and quality as ideas, rarely stressing out about the debate. I almost never stop to wonder if I should make more of something or make those things better. Instead, I’m focused on the various stages of evolving my ideas towards something I can own publicly — a premise and surrounding IP.
When I pick a problem to solve or start exploring a new idea or topic, I’ve realized I always move through the following stages of content:
Answers I'm ready to share
Questions I'm eager to ask
Assertions I'm confident in making
At first, I’m acting like an expert with answers. I start with what I know, but what I know very quickly runs out. My answers are dwarfed by my questions in terms of quantity, as with anyone. (It turns out expertise is finite but curiosity is infinite). I realize, wow, I have many more QUESTIONS about this stuff I’m exploring than I have answers, driven by equal parts frustration with how things are and a curiosity to understand why that is and what might be better. So very quickly, after a low-volume of content, I switch from expert to investigator, asking questions and using my content to figure things out. Then, after awhile, I feel I understand things enough to make an assertion: THIS is what currently is and THAT is what should be. I have my premise, and I narrowly focus on that.
So the evolution of my content (and really my posture as a storyteller) look like the image below — and I think that’s true of just about anyone who is in the business of change. We start as experts, then become investigators, and finally become visionaries.
Note that visionaries aren't faux-gurus. They aren't "influencers" either. Visionaries have something simple but elusive on offer: vision.
They see something clearly. Something is broken. Something would be better. Something gets us between here and there. They're leaders, moving us away from something insufficient and towards something better. They see the mountain in the distance more clearly than others, because visionaries have vision.
Moving across these three stages naturally calibrates my quantity. Turns out, I (and we) have fewer answers than questions. When I'm acting like an investigator, I don't have answers, but I have TONS of questions and frustrations to explore. Thus, quantity looks like this, in yellow:
When you feel demands to publish more content and you keep dipping into your well of answers, you can feel it running dry pretty quickly. That's why so many experts start sounding the same or else they resort to hollow stunts to stand out. They're pushing harder on stuff that isn't all that worthy of sharing, either because it's not new and differentiated or they've said it a million times. Because their well has run dry. Because they're dependent on sharing answers. They don’t know what else to share. But instead of sharing what you know, what if you used your content to try and understand? What if you stopped acting like an expert and started acting like an investigator?
Your Idea Well might feel full again, as questions beget more questions:
What frustrates me? Why?
What's the core issue?
Why do we do that?
Has it always been this way?
What does that word mean anyway?
Who's doing this better?
What does the science say?
How about history?
What stories can I tell from my life?
Is that thing I saw a metaphor for this?
What am I teaching? Is there a framework?
What are the parts? Can I explore each?
What stories do I have for each part?
What do I say to skeptics?
What's my spin on that news or trend?
When I act like an investigator instead of an expert, I have plenty of ideas -- and my quantity goes up. I'm almost like a standup comedian, bringing notes and ideas to small comedy clubs (in my world, social media) to work out material. I post a lot. I blog a lot. I podcast a lot. I appear as a guest on other shows a lot. It's all to work things out, not share what I've already worked out. My content is material. My personal projects are my comedy clubs, while social media channels are the smallest comedy clubs, because any one thing I post there matters less to me and my business than any one thing I share on my show or to my newsletter.
I'm looking to learn and improve, rapidly, and so quantity helps me do so.
Slowly, over months of doing this, and alongside a growing audience (since I work things out publicly instead of in my head), I feel more confident in my ideas, and I'm ready to make my assertion. The status quo is broken. THIS is how things SHOULD be -- despite what currently is.
I start excitedly sharing a new premise, making a handful of assertions to the world. Those might sound like this:
You should care more about resonance than reach.
Don't market more. Matter more. When your work matters more, you can hustle for attention less.
Don't be the best. Be their favorite.
All of these assertions are representative of my current premise for my business and platform. But there are far fewer of these and, next, far less content I need to create around my premise to defend and own that concept as my own, publicly. I’ll need some stories, some frameworks, and some key terms, and then I’m able to defend and own my premise everywhere I show up. So the volume goes down and you perceive the quality to go up. But then I once again turn into an expert, sharing what I know, when suddenly a new problem or question or source of frustration hits me, and the process repeats.
In moving from expert to investigator to visionary, your quantity and quality naturally calibrate. You don’t need to stop and think about the debate itself. You’re too busy developing your IP and serving others — and building your business in the process.
When my own quantity feels lower to you and the quality feels higher, it’s not because I decided, “QUANTITY BAD.” It’s because I’m calibrating. I am moving past the period when I was trying to harness the unique benefits of creating a high quantity of things (namely, learning and sharpening my thinking), though I maintained the intention to be quality all the while. Like the comedian winding down their tour of small comedy clubs to finally shoot the Netflix special, I shift to focusing on fewer, better things.
None of this has to do with skill. Maybe it's more about stamina. Certainly, it's about intention.
In this way, evolving our work as creators and leaders might start with evolving out of the need to debate quantity and quality. It turns out, hiding in this dumb debate is a much smarter approach to making things that truly matter.