"Quantity has a quality all its own"

February 2, 2019

It's not clear who first said this, but it's true.

When you're in the early stages of learning, or in the early stages of building something, quantity can propel you forward faster than quality.

Have you ever gotten out of a long-term relationship and thought, "all right, now I'm going to be single for a while"?

When you're not sure what sort of person you'd be happy to have a relationship with, you can find out more quickly by casually dating lots of people—whether simultaneously or not—than by dating one person for a few years, then another for a few years, and so on. You'll learn from long-term relationships too, but if you're not sure what sort of person makes you happy, the best way to find out is not to spend years in unhappy relationships.

Yes, it is possible to get more "quality" out of a longer relationship, but if what you need is information on whom to date, quantity is better for you right now.

(Not to bash short-term relationships, by the way. They can be amazing too!)

Let's translate this example to business. Perhaps you know that you want to start a business, but you're still searching for direction. You have a general idea what your business should be about, but you'd like to have more focus.

An effective way to find out whether your business is focused on a real problem that people will pay you to solve is to create content to help people solve that problem. Write a blog post or shoot a video and teach people something. Do people respond? Do they care? Do they thank you for helping them? Then you're onto something—lean into that direction. There is a possible business there.

Now, you could write 4,000-word blog posts, record hour-long podcast episodes, or shoot 20-minute videos. But doing so takes a lot of time and energy and you can only address one topic at a time. After you publish your piece of content, you'll get one piece of data: did people engage, or did they not engage, with this topic?

If you instead create ten 400-word blog posts in the same time, you'll get ten pieces of data on whether people engaged or not. (And so, ten pieces of data on whether there is business potential there or not.)

Creating lots of short content is the business equivalent of going on lots of dates to learn what types of people are out there and who is a good fit for you.

So, in business and in dating, quantity has a quality all its own.

Yours,

— Peter

## Photo by Linh Do

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