What the Matern Method and the Parable of the Potter have to teach us
Have you ever heard of Matt Farley, a 45-year-old Canadian musician and filmmaker? There's a good chance your answer is yes, as he's considered the most prolific musician on the face of the earth, with more than 25,000 songs recorded to date. His extremely high musical productivity is the result of an ingenious idea he had a few years ago: to take advantage of the way we search for a song on the internet, which uses a search engine and the main words that appear in the song's title or lyrics.
In order to ensure that almost all searches for music on platforms like Spotify and YouTube include his songs among the results, he has composed and recorded songs about practically every possible subject: soccer team names, women's names, jobs, animals, different marriage proposals, and even our most bizarre bathroom activities. In fact, his most played songs are on an album called Toilet Bowl Cleaner. If you're interested in getting to know one of these songs, click here. The latter, in particular, are very popular with children.
To reach his target, some days he even composes and records 50 songs! Even though he only earns half a penny every time one of his songs is performed, he receives the incredible sum of U$200,000 a year. Such high productivity caught people's attention and led him to write a book in which he explains his method of artistic creativity: The Motern Method. For Matt, if you have an idea, whether it's fantastic or ridiculous, you should make an effort to put it into practice. In this way, you're telling your brain that ideas are worth having. Otherwise, the next time you want to create something, it will punish you by abandoning you in a creative drought.
Matt's method of high creativity is in line with the ideas of the photographers David Bayles and Ted Orland, published in their book Art & Fear. The authors suggest that, when it comes to artistic production, high productivity leads to the production of high-quality works. This rule obviously doesn't apply to genius artists like Mozart or Da Vinci, but to normal people like you and me. To explain this concept better, they tell the Parable of the Ceramist:
A ceramics teacher announced on the opening day of his course that he was going to divide the class into two groups. All the students on the left side of the studio, he said, would be assessed only on the quantity of work they produced, and all those on the right only on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the last day of classes, he would bring his bathroom scale from home and weigh the work of each student in the "quantity" group: fifty kilos of pots would be graded with an "A", forty kilos with a "B", and so on. Those who would be graded on "quality", however, only had to produce one vase - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". When the grading day arrived, a curious fact emerged: the highest quality works were all produced by the group that was being graded on quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busy producing piles of work - and learning from their mistakes, the "quality" group was sitting around theorizing about perfection and, in the end, had little to show but grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
For me personally, using this method of high productivity has been beneficial. Even if I can't say that I've produced any great texts, I've noticed that the challenge of writing every day has produced results. Routine leads to an evolution of technique and facilitates the flow of ideas. By combining the routine of writing every day with the fact that I'm starting a training course for writers, I intend to make a leap in the quality of my work. But only time will tell.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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