The Story of The Ceramic Teacher
A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. Everyone on the left side only needed to make one pot all semester, and that one pot would be graded on its perfection. Everyone on the right side would be graded only by weight. He said, “I don’t care what you make on the final day, I’m going to bring in my bathroom scale, and we’re just going to weigh it. Over 50 pounds of pots gets you and A. Over 40 pounds gets you a B. Thirty pounds a C, et cetera. I don’t even care what it is. I’m not even going to look at it. Just weigh it. Go.”
At the end of the semester, there was a surprising result. The works of the highest quality when an outside observer was watching at the end of the class were all the ones that were made by the quantity group. Those that were being judged only on weight. It seems that while this quantity group was busy just churning out piles of work and learning from their mistakes. The quality group, the one that was being judged just on one part, had sat there theorizing about perfection and in the end had nothing but grandiose theories and one mediocre part.
Source: https://sive.rs/failure