Author Seth Godin writes a blog post every day.
Karen X. Cheng, the founder of the creative agency Waffle, danced every day for a year
— at work, at bus stops, in line at the grocery store.
Kanye West, before he won dozens of Grammys, made five beats a day for three summers.
People like to tout “quality over quantity,” a phrase that sets up quantity and quality
as two separate choices — in order to have more of one, we must compromise on the other.
But quantity and quality are actually intricately connected.
Making and releasing a high quantity of work is a reliable path to improving its quality.
In each of the examples, we can see how small, consistent practices — or, microprojects,
if you will — became part of a larger body of work.
Godin turned his best blog posts into bestselling books.
Cheng produced a timelapse video of her dance mini-sessions, and it raked in 12 million
views.
Kanye became Kanye.
Research has shown that active learning (interacting, participating or doing) is more effective
than passive learning (listening to a lecture or reading).
In a paper published in Teaching of Psychology, for example, students absorbed material more
thoroughly with ungraded five-minute writing assignments than in five minutes of thinking
time.
And the process of turning an idea into a reality is one of the most active ways of
learning there is.
In addition to lessening the mental load of things we need to remember to do, completing
a project can also be emotionally rewarding.
It’s nerve-wracking but thrilling to put your work out there, creating a sort of positive
loop that makes you want to learn and do even more.
Also, constantly “shipping” your work — declaring it done with and moving on to
the next thing — can prevent what psychologists call “fixation,” the mental block that
prevents you from discovering any valuable insight.
When you’re able to show others what you’ve created, you escape the often-myopic trap
of your own brain.
Microprojects allow you to reap these benefits more frequently.
And when you create something small and release it into the world, you gain the momentum that
propels you to do it again.
And again.
Here’s how to come up with a simple, focused idea to execute.
Get your ideas out of your head and out into the world, no matter how imperfect they are.
In her now-classic writing guide Bird by Bird, author Anne Lamott explains: “Almost all
good writing begins with terrible first efforts.
You need to start somewhere.
Start by getting something — anything — down on paper.
A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down.”
Author Danielle Steel, who has written over 179 books, recommended a similar tactic in
an interview with Glamour earlier this year.
“The more you shy away from the material, the worse it gets,” she said.
“You’re better off pushing through and ending up with 30 dead pages you can correct
later than just sitting there with nothing.”
This often means lowering the fidelity — the quality and level of detail — of what you’re
making.
For example, some product designers choose not to start their work on the computer.
Instead, they fiddle around with ideas in a notebook, or they make paper prototypes.
This not only taps into a different part of their brain, but also gets their vision out
faster so they can get their team’s feedback on it much sooner.
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first
version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”
He recommends making something and putting it out there as quickly as possible, so you
can learn from people’s responses and reactions.
By delaying your launch, you’re wasting valuable time that could have been used to
learn about how to improve your work.
In her memoir Bossypants, Tina Fey recalls a lesson she learned from her mentor, Saturday
Night Live creator Lorne Michaels: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready;
it goes on because it’s 11:30.”
Tight deadlines can be a blessing — relentlessly releasing small projects enables you to learn
through constant execution.
One type of microproject you can do is copy someone else’s work and improve on it.
“What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere,” writes author
Austin Kleon in Steal Like An Artist.
“All creative work builds on what came before.
Nothing is completely original.”
And copying, he believes, is how we learn.
In his lecture at Harvard, Virgil Abloh speaks about his “3% approach.”
The idea is to create a new design by slightly modifying an original one.
If you don’t want to use other people’s work as a starting point, you can also modify
your own old projects a little bit to create something new.
Take a drawing from your early sketchbook and add more details.
Pull up an old essay and make it snappier.
Find a piece of code you wrote years ago and optimize it.
The common thread in all of these points is to keep everything small and simple.
When the creative process begins, the vision often starts changing, expanding from all
the excitement.
Start a simple hand-lettering project on Instagram and watch how quickly someone suggests, “You
should start a hand-lettering business!”
In Bossypants, Fey writes that she noticed this at SNL: “You would think that as a
producer, your job would be to churn up creativity, but mostly your job is to police enthusiasm.”
Don’t get so caught up in what you could be doing that you distract yourself from the
task at hand.
The lesson is to think small — and then even smaller.
It’s the fastest way to creating something big.