On Doing ✏️ vs. Perfecting 🖋️

When I was younger, my dad taught me swimming at a very young age, and for some reason, besides loving to learn new languages and loving to tell stories, something about swimming just caught my attention. And so I spent a lot of my childhood spending almost every weekend swimming 🏊♀️.

As a kid, I used to go to this big pool in the diplomatic quarter in Riyadh and swim with a large group of kids. But I wouldn't just swim; I used to swim with a competitive edge. I'd look for the best swimmer and challenge myself against them. There was a thrill in trying to outlast them underwater or swim faster. Ironically, most of these kids were oblivious to my silent competition; it was all in my head.

Little did I know that it took me almost 10 years to actually know how to swim in order to be good enough to compete with the kids in my neighborhood. As I grew older, I realized that in work, because I like to upskill constantly and I love lifelong learning and I did a lot of things, that competition was not something I could do because everyone has developed their own niche expertise. But what I could do is actually retain the playfulness of continually improving.

It’s a common misconception that continuous improvement is about perfectionism. It’s not. It’s about progress. It’s about understanding that there’s always room for growth, regardless of your experience or expertise. It's about embracing challenges as opportunities to learn and evolve.

The Quantity vs. Quality Myth

In his book, James Clear tells a fascinating story about a professor at the University of Florida named Jerry Uelsmann, who taught photography📷.

At the beginning of the year, the professor divides his students into two groups: the first group is known as the "quantity" group and the second group is known as the "quality" group.

The first group (quantity) is evaluated only based on the amount of work they produce, as the professor counts the number of photos each student submits. This means that submitting one hundred photos means getting an excellent grade, ninety photos for a very good grade, eighty photos for a good grade, and so on.

The second group (quality) is evaluated only based on the quality of the work they produce, where each student has to submit only one photo during the semester to get an excellent grade, but this photo must be almost perfect.

At the end of the semester, the professor discovered that the best photos came from the "quantity" group and not the "quality" group. The first team was busy taking pictures and experimenting with color and light exposure, so they learned by practice and testing different ways of developing and learned from their mistakes. In the process of producing hundreds of photos, they honed their skills. At the same time, the students in the "quality" group were only thinking about the quality of the photos and how to produce one perfect photo, and in the end they had nothing to offer but a bunch of untested theories and one mediocre photo.

This experiment highlights a crucial point: often, the path to mastery involves making mistakes, learning from them, and iterating. It's about the process, not just the outcome.

Applying Continuous Improvement in the Real World

In a similar experience when I was working in the technology sector, I worked in the innovation department, we had a similar idea to this concept called MVP or Minimum Viable Product. The team is asked to produce quick ideas and test them in the market to see their quality and develop them continuously. This does not mean that everything that was produced was used, but it does mean that the team first developed, and in the end we were able to create a product that serves a specific segment in a specific market, then build on it and expand.

In my current work at Turwa By Fadwa , I use the same methodology when I am asked to give a lecture or prepare training, I test each idea & every idea by sharing them on social media or in my blog or by filming short videos. or testing my content in a smaller workshop and then adjusting it according to the interaction. In this way, a single large lecture targeting a large audience will have been tested three or four times before I give it to a big group

The Power of Feedback

I believe that there is something about learning through trial and error & learning out loud this methodology helped me make the public speaking less intimating, and second, it clarified things I didn't know, because people were asking me questions, and based on their questions I kept refining my lecture until I reached content that I could deliver to a big audience.