Quantity and Quality

An art teacher conducts an experiment. He divides his pottery class into two groups.

One is to be marked based on the quality of whatever they produce. They have to pour all of their effort into making as good a single piece as they could.

The other group are to be marked based on their output. Quality is irrelevant, they just need to churn out as many pots as possible.

By the end of the experiment, something strange had happened.

The second group not only produced more output - but the quality of what they had produced was also higher too. They managed to outperform the first group on both metrics.

While the first cohort of students thought and planned and made lovely designs to create the perfect piece of art, the second group just cracked on.

They churned out a pot, they screwed it up, they iterated and after getting so many reps under their collective belts - they ended producing efforts which were consistently better than their mates’, who had spent all of their time sat across the room theorising.

Image credit: Shutterstock.

On the face of it, managing our finances looks very much like an exact science, all pounds and pennies and decimal places. Binary.

The temptation therefore can be to consistently aim for the absolutely optimum outcome all the time. Perfection or nothing. This is especially the case amongst people who have been wildly successful in some outside endeavour - they are naturally used to “nailing it”.

But good financial management isn’t about threading the needle time after time.

No, good financial management is about keeping it in between the hedges.

Staying in the game to give all of those little positive actions time to compound.

For this to happen, we must simply begin. Set aside the spreadsheet, and start.

Developing a savings muscle requires nothing more than setting up an automated payment into a savings or investing account. Developing a (conscious) spending muscle requires nothing more than having a look through our bank accounts for half an hour one weekend a month.

Every endeavour starts with a blank sheet of paper. Progress is the aim, rather than perfection.