On Spring of 2016, I learned about an experimental course called 100 Days in the Making offered by NYU ITP professor Katherine Dillon during a lunch-and-learn. She began her presentation by showing us a split photograph where on the left stood a lump of clay and on the right stood dozens of beautifully crafted pots.
Katherine told the story of how a high school teacher once held an experimental pottery class where the class was divided into two groups that would be graded differently. The first group would be graded based on the quality of their best pot while the second group would be graded based on the number of pots created. Katherine then asked us which group we thought would produce the highest quality pot. She took a tally and logically I raised my hand for the quality group — from my entire eighteen years in school, the most important thing I’ve been taught to focus on my whole life was quality and perfection.
Fast forward to the end of the semester, we learned that despite not aiming to produce the perfect pot, the students in the second group had produced far superior pots both in quantity and quality. The first group had been so fixated on creating the perfect pot from…
