QUANTITY MAKES QUALITY.

Cover paper!

Cover paper!

Cover paper!

This was the gospel of my tutor Tony.

For the only way you where going to get anywhere, was to go on a paper binge!

I was already living by this before I started the Watford course,

covering paper with my regular entries on One Minute Briefs,

placing them on my TONY I WANT IN! blog.

Eventually getting me into Watford,

and winning the most prolific OMBLE award,

hitting two birds with one stone.

Quantity and lots of it in thinking!

I loved producing loads of ideas,

because it never felt right getting to something with a few scrapes of paper.

It didn't feel there was a enough hard work behind the idea.

Keep covering until you got to one good idea,

keep covering until you got to two good ideas!

John Cheese once said in a talk on creativity,

that during his Monty Python years, he never settled on the first good sketch,

he strived until he got a second, a third, a forth better then the first.

This was the reason the dead parrot sketch came into existence, persistence!

I remember my week at GREY London, during the Watford tour,

and a creative team called Greg and Thomas said to us all,

that our biggest enemy was ourselves, that we must beat the best thing in our book!

That would mean always working on our book, always coming up with more and more,

until one idea toppled the best one!

One single creative that inspired me,

during my time at Mother London,

was Paddy Fraser, former Watford.

As Paddy put it in a interview with DRUM, you need to keep practicing and practicing,

until 1 in 40 is good, 1 in 20 is good, 1 in 10 is good!

Anders Ericsson said's in his paper 'The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance', it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be a expert at something.

So as I sit in Starbucks with my pad of 500 sheets of wilko paper,

(forget about the fancy layout pads, paper is paper, plus it's cheaper),

I cover, cover, cover, until one day, every sheet of paper has one good thought on it.

That or I cover 500 sheets of paper in a day with crap, and a few gold nuggets.

You must shovel through shit before you find gold.