Joyce Carol Oates: It's A Volume Game

In every facet of life, volume wins.

The writer who writes more will be a better writer.

The athlete who trains more will be a better athlete.

The founder who builds more will be a better founder.

Much of quality comes down to quantity. Life becomes a numbers game. If you want to do better, you have to do more—not today or tomorrow, but over the long haul. It becomes a game of consistency, not intensity.

The great poet W.B. Yeats worked at a snail's pace.

I am a very slow writer. I have never done more than five or six good lines in a day.

Martin Amis, one of the finest novelists of his generation, echoed a similar thought:

Writing from eleven to one continuously is a very good day’s work… Two hours. I think most writers would be very happy with two hours of concentrated work.

Building volume isn't working all day from sunrise to sunset, but getting some work in between sunrise and sunset for a long ass time. 

Joyce Carol Oates might have said it best,

I write and write and write, and rewrite, and even if I retain only a single page from a full day’s work, it is a single page, and these pages add up.

And here’s the line to remember:

I have acquired the reputation over the years of being prolific when in fact I am measured against people who simply don’t work as hard or as long.

You don't build volume in a day, a week, a month, heck, even a year. It often takes years, even a decade, or decades, to get great at a craft.

But if you're willing to be like Oates, Yeats, and Amis and put in a few hours a day, not for a few months, but for years, that's when you start to build volume that leads to real results. 

What the world calls genius or greatness is often just endurance. If you saw how long they worked—how much volume they built—you wouldn't be as surprised with what they did.

The greats are the ones who stayed in the game the longest. The ones who kept stacking up pages. Reps. Shots. Products. Over and over and over.

If you aren't where you want to be, it often comes down to one simple truth: you haven't done the thing for a long enough time. Whether you’re writing a book, building a business, learning a craft, or improving a skill, volume has been, and always will be, the answer.

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