đș Make More Pots
Hello! Adam Thornhill here. âThe Podcast Guyâ saving you 10 hours a month.
Today, youâll learn about why doing more beats doing it perfectly thanks to MFM.
The people waiting to make something great never do.
Theyâre planning. Perfecting. Protecting their idea from failure.
Thatâs exactly why they never make anything of substance.
The answer? Make more pots.
The pottery experiment
Half the class was told to make one perfect pot. Your grade depends on quality alone.
The other half were told to make as many pots as you can. Your grade is based purely on quantity.
At the end of the semester, the quantity group didnât just make more pots.
They made the better pots.
Shaan Puri
Why quantity wins
Why? Three reasons:
More shots on goal. More chances to make something great.
Skill goes up. The more you do, the better you get.
You stop self-inhibiting. When youâre not chasing perfection, you stop playing it safe. You go wider. And wider leads to more original, more novel work.
Oh, and they had more fun too. They swept the board.
Shaan Puri
Christinaâs story
Christina Cacioppo was an associate VC at Union Square Ventures.
She had never coded in her life. She decided to teach herself.
She dressed up like she was going to work, went to a co-working space, and sat at the same desk every day.
Then she just started making stuff.
25 mini projects. Most of which never saw the light of day.
The last one wasnât even code.
It was a spreadsheet - a manual SOC2 checklist in Excel. She helped companies fill it in by hand.
That spreadsheet became Vanta. Now worth close to $10 billion.
She had this quote on her personal site, from the book Art and Fear:
âThe overwhelming majority of your work is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your art that soars.â
Shaan Puri
Why it matters
This is applicable now more than ever.
The people winning with AI arenât the ones waiting for the perfect use case. Theyâre the ones making lots of pots.
Every prompt you write, every tool you test, every half-baked project you ship - itâs a rep. And reps compound.
Last weekend, Oliver (my 6 year old) wanted to count how many times we could hit a balloon without it touching the floor.
I got tired of counting.
So we built an app together using Claude.
Hereâs roughly how it went:
We described what we wanted. Claude wrote the HTML. It didnât work first time. We iterated. The camera counted my head as a balloon. We fixed it. The red pixel threshold was wrong. We fixed that too.
By the end, we had a working balloon rally counter that tracked red pixels, played a fanfare on a new high score, and showed a live camera feed.
Did it take a while? No, about 30 minutes. Was it perfect? No, it worked about 90% of the time. Did Oliver love it? Absolutely.
And I learned something about motion detection, colour thresholds, and browser camera APIs that Iâd never have learned by reading about it.
Thatâs the point. You have to tinker now, not in 6 months when it feels more ready.
The reps you put in today are what will separate you in the years ahead.
Next steps
The goal isnât to be a professional developer. Itâs to be a professional tinkerer.
Use AI personally, not just at work. The best learning happens outside your job description.
Do projects with your kids or friends. Low stakes, high fun, high learning.
Do silly projects. The balloon app taught me more than most âseriousâ experiments.
Quantity over quality. Ship the bad version. The good version comes later.
Think about your childrenâs future. The kids who grow up making things with AI will have an enormous advantage. Start now, even if itâs just a balloon game on a Sunday afternoon.
The pot youâre most proud of is somewhere in your next 25 attempts. Go make them.
Your thoughts?
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