Quantity Breeds Quality

This morning I asked everyone to stand up. As recently reported, sitting all day is the leading cause of many diseases that plague modern society (bowel cancer? Bowel cancer!). While standing, I then asked everyone if they thought they were an artist.

"Are you an artist?"

"Um, maybe."

"I guess."

"Not yet."

Nearly the entire class did not identify as being an artist. One student, did however, immediately identify as being an artist and the crux of his argument for doing so is that he is not intimidated by those who are "above" him in the hierarchy of his field. The rest of the class still needed more, so I picked on one student to get out their iphone and look up two definitions. 

1. Art - noun - the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aestheticprinciples, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinarysignificance.

2. Artist - –noun - a person who produces works in any of the arts  that are primarilysubject to aesthetic criteria.

Then, I asked each student about what they are producing in the world. Are their bedrooms arranged just so? Did you artfully craft your outfit this morning? Think about the design work that you aspire to and imagine that moment that you step away from it, finished, and think, Ahh. That is a work of art. 

Roger Ebert recently (finally) won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. What I love most about this is that the editor of the New Yorker cartoons section called Roger out for his tenacity, citing the productivity theory. According to creativity expert, Keith Sawyer, 

cartoon contest winners usually generate lots of captions. Studies of creativity have shown that quantity breeds quality—what I call the productivity theory, because high productivity corresponds to high creativity.

While quantity does not guarantee quality, it sure does bring you a whole heck of a lot closer. Here's Roger's winning cartoon (though personally, I much liked his NSFW submission a lot better).