Clarity in Quality

• May 11, 2008
  Nil Comments // Creativity

Why is one movie better than another? Why do we prefer the writings of this author over that one? Why do some pieces of art make our hearts sing while others make us flatline? Quality is personal taste not owned by anyone else, not always describable but, without a doubt, felt. So why don’t we put more thought into how we define quality?

Quality helps us to grade something. The problem a lot of us face is that our value of quality isn’t something we actively try to develop. We have an idea of what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ and whatever is ‘bad’ we try to eliminate from our scope. So what happens when we remove all the bad, or low, quality things from our lives and we’re only left with the good, or high, quality stuff? What we should be doing is removing all the low quality things from our lives and then looking at what is left. Then adding to the high quality end of the spectrum and continually removing from the low quality end. In other words, what you consider is good now, needs to be replaced with what’s great, pushing the good, down into the bad and then being removed completely.

What can happen if we don’t do this is that we’ll float from one piece of creative output (books, movies, albums) that we think are pretty good, to something else that we think is pretty good, somewhat grading the next on the previous, but not really considering how they might affect our own creative output, not really looking elsewhere for inspiration or ideas. Variety is a good thing, a really good thing, if you’re a creative person. It’s important that we look for new inputs, we need to look for a new experience we are fairly sure will be bad, but have a slight chance of being great. If it is bad, then no harm dealt, you’ll be less likely to give something like it a shot in the future, but at least you gave it a go. But what if it’s great? What if it’s something that changes your life for the better and introduces you to a whole new world? When we’re young, most things are new and it doesn’t take long for us to realise we’ll love something or hate it. As we get older, we throw a fence around what we like, never letting anything new in, or old out, because it might not be worth it and will be a waste of our valuable time, right? The problem is that it’s harder to grow in any meaningful way if we constantly receive the same experiences over and over.

they should be tentative guides at best