How Doechii Can Teach You To Be Better at Everything
Choosing quantity over quality guarantees quality. Choosing quality over quantity risks condemning you to neither.
On February 2, Doechii took home the Grammy for Best Rap Album. Her winning mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal, dropped on August 30, 2024, and 30 days before she delivered the final mix of those 19 tracks she hadn’t written a single word of it. Instead, she approached the project as an experiment to see what she could do in just 30 days. The story has quickly become mythologized, the full philosophy and process best documented in the first half of an interview with Rolling Stone, but it’s simple: one day she called up her label and said, “I’m dropping a mixtape in 30 days, do what you want with that information,” and then she got to work.
This moment is uniquely instructive. What Doechii accomplished in those 30 days illustrates the one thing that every creator can do right now that will make them better. And it reveals the truth that’s counter to what we’ve been taught our whole lives.
Choosing quantity over quality guarantees eventual quality, but choosing quality over quantity risks condemning you to neither.
For Doechii, making an entire mixtape in just 30 days meant long days and short sleeps in the studio with her Engineer/EP, Jayda Love (who also features in the Rolling Stone interview), but it was mostly about removing the barriers to creation and prioritizing the work, even if for a relatively short amount of time.
“I’m just gunna write a song a day,” she says in the Rolling Stone interview. “Whatever I get out of this month is what I get, so I better write my ass off. And I did!”
And she did.
Ironically, there’s been some hemming and hawing on TikTok claiming that Doechii’s process illustrates the power of restriction. But Doechii herself states it was about freedom: the freedom to work. In fact, that’s why she called it a mixtape instead of an album - to free herself from those associated expectations.
“I want to just be able to cry and scream and color and scribble all over it,” she explains. “And not have to worry about perfection, and just be able to detach myself from this idea of the perfect project”
In my 11 years as a professional writer, the scariest email I’ve gotten was a frantic interrogation from my editor’s boss demanding my next article. He was worried because it had been a full 90 minutes since I had published an article. The agreement was I’d write, edit, photo edit, and publish a new article every hour on the hour. I was writing for Complex Sneakers at the time, and with a lunch break I could get away with publishing seven articles a day, but the stated goal was eight.
If you’re wondering, “Are there eight unique sneaker things happening every day?” your incredulity is right on. There aren’t. But there was enough to fake it.
When I first heard this expectation I thought it might be a joke. One article an hour? That kind of volume is impossible. But it wasn’t just expected, it was par for the course.
After a few months on the job, I collected enough sources so that most days weren’t eight hours of panic anymore. And around the same time I could write most articles in just a few minutes. Preciousness didn’t matter as much as the deadline, good enough is good enough, and nine times out of ten, voice and language and structure are mere adornments.
“Wait!” You might say, “Isn’t voice and language and structure foundational to any writing project?”
Which… of course it is. In the same way that blocking and accents and imbuing objects with emotional memory are foundational to an actor’s performance. But a blank page has no language, its structure is mere bleached cellulose. We have to fill it first. And one way to break through the arresting consideration of “What to write?” is to remove it entirely. The commitment to volume arrests the primary question, the aesthetic question, and places the focus on what’s beyond.
Once the first obstacle is conquered, you can focus on the work of writing, the craft of writing. The problem is, most get stuck on the first point.
This happens when writing fiction (what scene is this? what’s happening?), in photography (where am I going to shoot? who’s the subject?), choreography, cooking, gardening, every creative pursuit is complicated first by the question of the aesthetics: what’s the thing made out of and what is it supposed to be?
But the art doesn’t live there. The art is in the doing.
Most people get stuck in that primary question, and those are the people working out the perfect foot placement at the starting block. A perfect launch won’t get you to the finish line. To get to the finish line you have to get good at running.
I haven’t read Atomic Habits. Like The 48 Laws of Power and The Shack, when I see a book on one too many white supremacists’ suggested reading list I strike it off my own. But a version of the Parable of the Pottery Class appears in that book and is likely how most people learn about it in the first place. The OG telling appears in Art and Fear.
The story goes:
“[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”
This is based on a true story of a photography class (which is told as a photo class in Atomic Habits), and speaks to this question of volume as the barrier-breaker.
One of my favorite interviews with Ira Glass includes a nearly identical takeaway.
“The most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work, do a huge volume of work, put yourself on a deadline, so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap [between your taste and your skill].”
If I were to offer a caveat, I’d say that Ira Glass’s advice is deceptively lenient. He works in radio which requires a huge amount of effort to create a single story (research, writing, recording, editing, maybe interviews, etc), so “one story a week” is probably appropriate if misleading.
If you’re a photographer, shooting 300 frames in a day should be the goal.
If you’re a writer, you should be able to write one story a day, easily.
A screenwriter can write a short in a day. A filmmaker can make a short every week.
A ceramist can make five pots a day.
Doechii committed one song a day. That is obscene.
It should sound obscene. It should feel obscene. And Doechii did it anyway. And won a Grammy.
Growth is on the other side of the discomfort you feel when you consider the obscene commitment.
If you’re looking for a way to deepen your practice, if you want to get better at what you do, if you’re looking for that kind of evolution, you need to admit that what got you here won’t get you there.
You will be uncomfortable.
And thank god for that because if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
If any of these ideas reminded you of a loved one, please consider sharing this with them. Sometimes that is the easiest way to connect with each other.
