This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee.
I am a big believer of this principle: quantity is not an enemy of quality, rather it is a misunderstood friend.
I have seen this again and again, that people use the excuse that quality will be affected if we do something too often. They claim that it is not possible to increase quality and quantity at the same time.
It’s garbage, don’t listen to those people. When you do more, you learn faster, you learn how to do things better and you have the massive undeniable benefit of scale on your side.
I hear:
If I write too many articles in a month the quality of these articles will be bad.
If we do too many webinars in a day, quality will not be good, or that we will attract a smaller audience for each.
Some social media experts claim that if you put out too much content on your social media account it is a bad idea. Focus on quality, not quantity, they say.
Some rookie telecallers claim that they need to make fewer calls every day if they have to make high quality calls.
I have always found these premises to be totally wrong. Just look around.
The best lawyers before any court often argue in 3 times more matters than everyone else and yet they do better. I have seen Senior Advocate Janak Dwarkadas do this in Bombay HC day after day, for decades.
China manufactures more of everything than everyone else, and yet they produce the most superior quality of goods (or the worst, they will provide whatever you want and pay for).
The Netherlands, a tiny country that is smaller than Delhi NCR in size, exports 10 times more food than India does, and yet their quality of produce is far superior than what we export.
The best sales person in my team completes twice or thrice more calls than the average caller every day, and yet he is at least 4 times more effective on calls. Before the quality of a rookie caller improves, they must start doing a lot of calls – we focus on quantity first and later on quality.
The most popular people on social media I know, who I have seen build up a formidable presence very quickly, tend to post notoriously often, all through the day.
I have built a large network on LinkedIn by posting frequently! This also happened to my twitter account when I started posting frequently. Recently a social media expert I hired to manage an ad account told me how we should post less frequently. Guess where that report went? In the garbage bin.
Btw, look me up on twitter, just search for Ramanuj Mukherjee and say hi 🙂
It would be nice to connect with more of you on twitter.
The best writers are also the most prolific ones – in any country or language. Look at Arthur Conan Doyle or Rabindranath Tagore. They produced prodigious volumes of content, and yet they were the best in their leagues. Authors who wrote fewer books or poems or plays could not match the greatness of the work of these magnificent authors who wrote incredibly copious amounts of text – in various formats!
Just think of Newton, or even Einstein! They have not produced one or two pathbreaking scientific papers, but many of them, in entirely disparate branches of science which changed the world forever!
Or movie directors? The best of the best have made far more films than the rest. Add up the numbers and see for yourself.
Why is that? Why do we see that people who have been consistently creative, produced path breaking or highly influential ideas or impact have also produced some of the biggest volumes of work?
I assume it is because the time spent at one’s craft, and the number of productive attempts made at doing great work tend to compound over time. If you bat more balls and do so more frequently, you learn more and much faster than others who spend less time playing.
Sachin Tendulkar spent way more time at the net and in the grounds playing cricket every single day as a kid – more than anyone else, which you will realise if you read his biography. Most of the stories are about how he continued to play for hours and hours, through every kind of pain and suffering and never stopped at anything for any reason.
There is, of course, the 10,000 hours rule, that says that if you spend 10,000 hours practicing a skill you become a master at it. I do not know if it is accurate, but I am sure it takes us in the right direction.
The more you do, the more rapidly you learn, and better you become in the long run.
If someone does one webinar a week, they get 52 chances to learn in a year about how to do better webinars. At LawSikho, we do 4 a day, so we get more than 1200 chances a year to improve what we do and how we do.
And our audience is usually bigger than people who do fewer webinars still! Every day new people sign up to attend them!
When I used to publish only one post on iPleaders blog, it was not that the quality of posts was far better than what we put out today. Now we put out 15 articles a day, but they are of far superior quality and attract a larger audience! However, this would not be possible if I did not spend those years doing whatever I was doing, learning from each step, ignoring criticism from randos whose biggest achievements consist of anonymous sarcastic remarks on social media.
You have to be the artist who can envision what it will look like when the painting is complete, and please don’t end up joining the critics who compare your first painting with someone else’s 10000th one.
And why do people still claim it is better to do a few things with greater quality?
I guess they are afraid of failure.
What if I do all this hard work and it comes to nothing?
Let’s do a little and see it succeed before I invest more, that’s the most common mentality.
What if I put in 10,000 hours of hard work and it comes to nothing?
Forget 10,000, most people cannot even do something for 100 hours consistently!
The excuse of quality is quite handy, and every team manager has to learn at some point how to guide their reportees past that objection.
I have always recognized that it is important for me to make a lot of videos on the topics I care about if I want to push the causes I care about more effectively. Video communication is quite the ultimate front of communication and evangelism today, through which you can build up great impact. However, I have not gotten to doing it well so far.
I had my birthday in August, and I resolved to make videos regularly.
It was in September that I developed the discipline to do one webinar a day. I asked my team to schedule a webinar for me every weekday at 9 pm for an hour. We did it.
September is now over. I have done 20 webinars through the month, and they met with moderate success. We had a few people only in the audience, the numbers varying between 20-50, but they loved the webinars.
However, this is just the beginning. There is a long way to go! Real results start showing many years into a practice or a habit. These are still early days.
Today, iPleaders blog is read by 55k+ users every day, and it clocks 20 lakh plus pageviews in a month. It took ten years to get here, and the beginning was very humbling. Not even 100 people would read our blog in a week a few months into the process. Growth was flat for years, but I didn’t give up.
Today, it’s one of the largest law blogs in the world, if not the largest. And we will grow ten times bigger in the years to come:)
I just know one thing: if I keep doing something long enough, I will soon be one of the best in the world at it. It could take 10 or 20 years. But consistency is the critical magic ingredient.
Now is the time to keep up this habit.
So what topics will I cover in October? I have worked on a list, and will love to get your suggestions.
Also, let me know which ones you want to attend, if any!
Let me know which topics I should drop and which ones I should prioritise as well.
LawSikho has created a telegram group for exchanging legal knowledge, referrals and various opportunities. You can click on this link and join:
