Perfection

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>> Sarah Drasner: So when you first start designing, things might not turn out the way that you intended, right? They might not be exactly like what you wanted to or come out exactly perfect. But that's okay, because when you look at the designs that you see on Dribble or some of the fantastic designs for applications that you use, Spotify has a beautiful design.

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You might think, I wanna do that. It might not look like that right away, and that's okay. There's tons of ways that designs will fail. And sometimes it takes a couple of bad designs to make a good design. You probably didn't learn how to code overnight, you had to write some really bad code and then you get better and better.

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And you look at the code from a year ago and you go, wow, I can't believe I wrote that. That's not good. So keep trying, keep working on it. There's even gonna be times where I'm gonna be live designing for you today. I might be really bad, and that's okay.

[00:00:57]
I'll do it a couple of times until we arrive on something. This pumpkin is definitely gonna be me later today. I like these, so I [LAUGH] just keep going with them. I'll do this all day long. So the last thing I wanna talk about is this concept of perfection.

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And there's this book called Art and Fear, that I really love, and it has this stanza in it. 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 quantity of work that they produced.

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And all those on the right, solely on the quality. His procedure was simple. On the final day of the class, he would bring in the bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group, 50 pounds of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on.

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Those being graded on quality, however, only needed to produce one pot, albeit a perfect pot to get an A. Well, it came grading time and a curious fact emerged. The works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the quantity group was busy churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes, the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection.

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And, in the end, had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. I think that that's great. That's how we learn. That's how we grow, is by making mistakes. By things not looking right at first, and eventually you get better.

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So, if you start to work in this class and you're like, it's not quite where I want it to be, just keep at it. It's okay. It's only and eight hour class. This is gonna give you some of the tools in your toolbox so that you can build great things later.