Quantity over Quality
Can you remember a year where something amazing happened to you? Where you may have produced a standout piece of work? Where you felt like you had the Midas touch? This, my friends, is known as your Annus Mirabillis.
Annus Mirabillis is a Latin phrase for The Year of Miracles. The term was coined by John Dryden, England’s first Poet Laureate back in the 1600s. In his poem, he reflects on the year 1666 where the English endured a trio of hardships: The Battle of Lowestoft against the Dutch, The Great Fire of London and The Plague. In each of these instances, disaster was averted and Dryden’s view was that God had performed breakthroughs to keep England afloat.
It seems that popular culture thinks the same as John Dryden when it comes to assessing the works of great artists and inventors. The prevailing narrative is that the outlandishly prolific produced their groundbreaking pieces of work as a result of a moment of genius. But, what if I were to tell you that when it comes to masters of their craft — the idea of a year of miracles is nothing more than a myth?
Allow me to explain.
A Course in Miracles
“I believe success is achieved by ordinary people with extraordinary determination” — Zig Ziglar
Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982
“For Basquiat, it all converges in 1982,” Art dealer, Jeffrey Deitch remembered “Those of us who were there at the time and saw those paintings just couldn’t believe it. The level of achievement was just astonishing. It was almost a miracle. Everybody around him knew that these were extraordinary.”
Basquiat was far away from the glitz and glamour of the arts world in the late 1970s. He was 18 years old, working as a graffiti artist on the streets of New York City. He worked under the pseudonym SAMO© alongside his friend Al Diaz. SAMO was a private joke between the duo, as an abbreviation for the phrase “Same old.” Their cryptic messages and unique drawings quickly captured the attention of the city’s burgeoning art scene.
After participating in The Times Square Show exhibition, Basquiat’s work was beginning to gain celebrity. The raw and unpolished aesthetic of his expressions gave each piece a distinctive edge that resonated with enthusiasts and collectors alike. In order to meet the demands of studio art, he switched graffiti for the more traditional medium of canvas and not long after he sold his first painting, the Cadillac Moon (1981) to Debbie Harry, lead singer of the punk rock band Blondie, for $200 after they had filmed Downtown 81 together. With his style honed, strong demand for his work and key relationships like that of Andy Warhol, Basquiat was poised to make 1982 a remarkable year.
That year Basquiat produced his masterpiece Untitled (1982) which would sell for $4,000 at the time. 35 years later, the very piece would realise a price of over $110 million at Sotheby’s New York. To go with the Untitled (1982), Basquiat produced 200 major canvases across that year, including renowned works such as: Untitled (Two Heads on Gold), Six Crimee, Obnoxious Liberals, and Charles the first. His paintings from this momentous year are, as Sotheby contemporary art specialist David Galperin said, “demonstrative of an artist who’s really at the height of their powers, who’s being seen for the first time, and who’s taking all of that instinctive energy and language and power and putting it onto canvas.”
The Untitled (1982) painting has become a cultural icon and has inspired a new generation of artists and art lovers. Basquiat, who was 21-years-old when he painted Untitled, is the youngest artist to eclipse the $100 million mark. It is also the first work made after 1980 to sell for more than $100 million and becoming the sixth-most expensive work ever auctioned.
Albert Einstein, 1905
It is not overly hyperbolic to say that almost every physicist knows about Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis. Physicist Historian A J Kox remembers 1905 as the year in which Einstein published three papers that should have earned him three Nobel prizes, instead of just one: the paper on the special theory of relativity; the paper on Brownian motion, which earned him the Nobel prize; and the one, which Einstein called `very revolutionary’ in a letter to a friend, formulating the light quantum hypothesis and providing an explanation for the photoelectric effect.
Einstein had graduated from the Federal polytechnic school in 1900 to a mountain of problems. His had father just died, leaving him to care for his mother and sister, which was incredibly difficult because he was unemployed. To add to this, the family was in significant debt to Einstein’s uncle. He thought that by acquiring his Swiss citizenship that he would automatically be enrolled into mandatory military service at least, however, the Swiss authorities deemed him medically unfit to serve. He also found that Swiss schools too appeared to have no use for him, failing to offer him a teaching position despite the almost two years that he spent applying for one. With all the necessary certifications in hand to teach mathematics and physics, luck just was not on his side.
At this point a young, depressed, and solemn 21-year-old Albert Einstein was on the verge of giving up on his dream of becoming a physicist. He had taken his first shot at publishing a paper, titled “Conclusions drawn from the phenomena of capillarity” that he afterwards referred to as worthless. Eventually with the help of a friend, he found employment. Einstein journeyed an hour south to Bern take a position up at the Swiss Patent Office as an assistant examiner. He liked the job because he could finish work in time to experiment with his true passion of testing and developing his theories to publish.
In his new position, Einstein would evaluate patent applications that arrived at his desk on ideas for a gravel sorter and an electric typewriter. Some of the ideas submitted for Einstein’s assessment were broadly on space, time and light transmission of signals and the synchronization of clocks. You can probably guess where the topics he toyed around with everyday would feature? 3–4 years later in Einstein’s Special Theory of relativity. Coincidence? I think not.
1905 arrived and Einstein was ready to place his thought experiments on paper for submission. Over the course of the next 9 months he would publish 4 papers which would completely disrupt the foundations of physics.
In March 1905, Einstein submitted a paper that challenged the general consensus that light was a wave, and instead proposed that it was a particle. Two months later, in May 1905, Einstein submitted a second paper. This time he challenged widely held beliefs that atoms didn’t exist, and provided proofs of their existence. But Einstein wasn’t done yet. In June 1905, Einstein submitted a third paper — the granddaddy of them all. Einstein proposed the idea that time and space were the same, and formalized his thoughts as the special theory of relativity. Then, in September 1905, Einstein published a fourth paper as a follow-up to the previous one. He suggested that mass and energy were equivalent, and derived the most famous equation in the history of mankind: E=MC².
In the years to come, these four papers would be labelled the “Annus Mirabillis” papers — deeply impressing Einstein’s contemporaries and radically transforming the way humans understand the world. Along with his Nobel Prize in Physics, Albert Einstein would end his career firmly established as one of the greatest physicists of all time.
Tupac Shakur, 1996
“Maybe it was his time in prison, or maybe it was simply his signing with Suge Knight’s Death Row label. Whatever the case, 2Pac re-emerged hardened and hungry with All Eyez on Me, the first double-disc album of original material in hip-hop history. With all the controversy surrounding him, 2Pac seemingly wanted to throw down a monumental epic whose sheer scope would make it an achievement of itself.” — Steve Huey. Indeed he would.
Shakur begun his music career frustrated. He was signed as a backup dancer to a collective known as Digital Underground. The collective’s co-founder Chopmaster J worked closely with Tupac on their earliest studio recordings. Dright recalled that Shakur did not work well as part of a group, and added, “this guy was on a mission. From day one. Maybe he knew he wasn’t going to be around seven years later.” Chopmaster J was spot on, a year and some change after joining the music group, Tupac had left and in November 1991 he dropped his first solo album, 2Pacalypse Now — which went certified Gold, selling half a million copies.
Time remained of the essence for Shakur. Over the course of the next 3 years, Tupac would release a further 3 albums: Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z… (The album was certified Platinum, with a million copies sold), Thug Life Vol I (released as part of a collective) and Me Against The World (debuted at №1 on the Billboard 200 and sold 240,000 copies in its first week, setting a then record for highest first-week sales for a solo male rapper). Whilst dropping an album a year may seem like nothing to be amazed at, Tupac had also starred in 4 films (Poetic Justice, Bullet, Juice and Above The Rim), was shot 5 times and despite pleading not guilty, was serving part of a 4 year prison sentence.
In October 1995, Shakur posted bail and legend has it that he headed straight to a studio to begin recording his album. He had already decided that the title of his upcoming album would be based on his exact orientation to the world at the time — All Eyez On Me. Tupac moved quickly, often recording three songs in just an hour without even listening to them. Many in his entourage including Snoop Dogg have been cited speaking on Tupac’s incredible work ethic in the studio. As soon as Tupac had laid down one track, without even listening to his work, he’d be onto the next one saying, “Put that shit over there, pull the next beat up.” No sooner would the rapper finish with that song when he’d say, “Ima do one by myself.” That was the routine, and it worked.
In June 1996, All Eyez on Me debuted at number-one on both the US Billboard 200 and the US Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums charts, selling 566,000 copies in its first week, becoming 2Pac’s second number one album on the chart. Today, the album is certified diamond, selling 10.6 million pure copies to date. Music critic, Steve Huey remembered the album saying “Erratic though it may be, All Eyez on Me is nonetheless carried off with the assurance of a legend in his own time, and it stands as 2Pac’s magnum opus.”
Thomas Edison, 1879
20 miles north of Manhattan, in a remote part of New Jersey, many journeyed out to Menlo Park to see the new discovery. It was the final few hours of 1879 and the score of amazed visitors were keen to ring in the new decade by witnessing the launch of a new epoch in human history. After two long years of testing, Thomas Edison and his researchers were finally ready to demonstrate the world’s first commercially viable lamp.
Invention was Thomas Edison’s lifeblood. He became so good in his first job as a Telegrapher sending signals between the United States and Canada that he begun inventing ways to improve the process — leading to the creation of the automatic telegraph, duplex telegraph, and message printer. Edison couldn’t temper his itch to invent further, so in January 1869, he took the big plunge — resigning from his job as a Telegrapher and devoting himself full time to inventing things.
6 months after his resignation, he had his first patent — having created the first electric vote recorder. His second invention came in 1875 in the form of the Electric Pen. It was the first electric motor driven appliance sold in the U.S. and the predecessor to the modern copy machine. The very next year, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It was a great invention, but the first telephone had very poor sound. So in typical Edison fashion, he invented the carbon button transmitter which improved the sound quality and range of Bell’s telephone. In doing so, Edison now knew it was possible to transmit sound electronically, so it is also possible to record sound. In 1877 Edison invented the phonograph and was the first to record and play back sound. But, believe it or not, he had bigger plans than any of these inventions on his mind.
By 1878 he had already formed the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with several financiers, including J. P. Morgan and the members of the Vanderbilt family. Setting aside the phonograph for almost a decade, he set his sights on the electric light system. Work continued into 1879, as Edison led the charge into the future saying “We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles.”
Thomas Edison and his 20- to 30 team of young assistants faced the problem statement: What filament is cost-effective, safe and will burn for a long-time inside the bulb before dying? They tried 6,000 plant materials including raw silk, cotton and even the beard hair of two of his employees with little success, before they turned their attention to the conditions inside the bulb itself. Edison thought, what if the bulb needs oxygen inside it to allow the filament to burn longer? With that question, they unlocked the first chamber. His team succeeded in creating a vacuum of air that allowed a platinum filament to light without catching fire. But the issue remained that platinum was still too expensive a material to use. With more testing, the final chamber was unlocked as the landed on carbonized bamboo. Voila — 1,200 hours of light. Edison’s first incandescent lamp patent was granted on January 27, 1880.
To say Thomas Edison’s work was important is inadequate. The wizard of Menlo Park transformed human life with design concepts which are still used today. American Historian, Richard Norton Smith said “…What Edison does, is nothing less than to banish the darkness.”
Quantity over Quality
Quantity has a quality all on its own — Unknown
In the context of lifestyle, the call for us to subscribe to quality over quantity is probably a good one. Quality over quantity is the choice to focus on a few significant things in your life, rather than embarking on a frivolous acquiring spree. Ultimately, you become more concerned about the value that each acquisition might contribute over the short and long term — which is great, but the question is, does this principle hold in the world of creative work?
My assessment shows that those who are ridiculously prolific in their chosen expression do one thing consistently better the most — produce, a lot. What we may have misunderstood is the level of importance that increasing your volume of output plays relative to producing a seminal piece of work.
In his New York Times best seller “Originals”, Adam Grant notes that creative geniuses and massively successful entrepreneurs are not qualitatively better in their fields than their peers — they simply produce more work. A lot more. Producing more work gives these individuals greater variation and thus the higher chance of producing a massive success.
Let’s take a second look at the stories of the masters I’ve just outlined. What I want to point your attention to is that each of these individuals remained productive either side of their seminal works.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Before his untimely death at the age of 27, he created more than 600 paintings and 1,500 drawings.
Albert Einstein: During the years from 1901 to 1954 Einstein published more than 300 scientific works.
Tupac Shakur: Between the years 1992 and 1996 he produced somewhere between 700–900 songs.
Thomas Edison: In his 84 years, he acquired an astounding 1,093 patents. Averaged a patent every 10–12 days.
Even in the case of premature death for Tupac at 25, he had a lot of work which followed him. Since his death, there have been seven Tupac studio albums, 10 compilations, two remix albums, one soundtrack album, one live DVD and countless singles and featured appearances over the years.
The issue is that by overly revering the finished product, we buy into the idea of these masters experienced a ‘lightbulb moment’ (excuse the pun). We also simultaneously neglect the body of work that preceded the “All Eyez on Me album” or the Annus Mirabillis papers. So rather than selecting one a piece of work from an individual’s substantial catalogue and labelling that very moment as their entry to the gates of genius, we need to recognise how the prolific train like athletes. Contrary to the narrative of a year of miracles, these masters were producing all along and waiting for us to catch up to their brilliance.
Go forth and produce
Before the gates of Excellence the high gods have placed sweat — Greek poet, probably Hesiod
Don’t get me wrong, anomalies do exist. Every once in a while, a Leonardo Da Vinci appears in the world. A person who will only produce about 20 paintings throughout their lifetime, yet still be esteemed as one of the greatest painters ever. Da Vinci represents the exception to the norm as an individual who produces very little but remains on par with his peers.
For the most part, geniuses have worked habitually and continually. An argument could be made that a Basquiat or an Edison could have achieved the same results by modelling the lackadaisical methods of a Da Vinci — but didn’t. They opted for a different approach. Their style was to move with ferocity. Whether it was Sigmund Freud producing 330 published papers or Pablo Picasso creating more than 20,000 works. All of these great creators produced as if time was of the essence and showed a strong bias to action in their output.
As uncaptivating as this may be in one sense, it also means that you too may be able up your chances of experiencing a year of miracles by following one simple principle — produce more.
