9 revolutionary insights of a quality-over-quantity life
Embracing a quality-oriented mindset is not just about making a few adjustments. Choosing quality over quantity is about embracing a philosophy that transcends superficial measures and empowers you to prioritize what truly matters. Get ready to discover a world where excellence takes precedence over excess, where each choice aligns with your values.
The meaning of quality over Quantity
Quality: The degree of excellence or superiority of something. It is often determined by its attributes, characteristics, or performance.
Quantity: The amount, number or extent of something that can be measured or counted
Choosing quality over quantity means recognizing situations, when it’s wiser to prefer quality over quantity. However, it’s not always better in terms of economical, relationships, personal well-being.
19 revolutionary insights of a quality over quantity life
1. Redefining success through a quality focused lifestyle
Hands down: Aren’t you plagued by a quantity lifestyle as well? How happy are you? How much do you earn? How good are your grades? How well do you perform at work? How many hours are you willing to work? What is your bank account balance? Everything is scaled, measured and judged by numbers and letters. The extreme is that you merely feel like a number in the wheel. The antidote is balancing things with quality-based beliefs and criteria.
“But Kevin, isn’t the quality of life determined by quantity?” It’s true that the quality of a life is often successfully measured by numbers and letters. However, there are more fundamental factors that enhance life quality as a human being. Examples are:
Are you able to retrieve contents of a book you have read one month ago?
Are you able to recognize the little signs your spouse gives you?
Are you able to adjust your vocabulary and communication style when necessary?
Are you able to choose diplomacy over dominance when needed (and vice versa)?
Are you able to stroll through the forest without pondering about the things you have to get done afterwards?
Are you able to absorb lessons of a setback and get over it quickly?
Quality is often overlooked when it comes to the peaks we aspire to climb. Balance a fast-paced quantity life with quality characteristics.
2. Breaking free from the quantity trap
You know exactly how the quantity trap feels like. As mentioned above, when you genuinely believe that you are merely a number in the system, it’s a clear sign that you fell for the quantity trap.
But why do we feel like that at all? Simple answer: We don’t want to be a “thing”. We are human beings with feelings, which want to be loved, understood and accepted. Breaking free from the quantity trap doesn’t mean changing life. It means changing how you think about life. Believe it or not, but there are people out there with the same job, with a family, similar hobbies, salary and residence. The one feels like a number, the other thrives like a blossom in the spring. How is that possible? Various factors. However, there are patterns, which demand positive answers:
→ Do you belong to something bigger than yourself? What is it?
→ Do you prefer to give or receive?
→ Do you believe humanity is fundamentally evil, or good?
→ Do you believe the system is a tool that doesn’t provide you positive things?
→ Do you live for humanity / nature or for reputation and economical gains?
Finding the right answers to these questions lead you slowly but surely out of the dark forest. The deliberate choice of quality over quantity is a great start.
3. Re-establishing quality conversations, instead of quantity smalltalk
”How are you? Great, and you? Also great, thanks for asking. Awesome, have a nice day!”
You’d be surprised by how many people believe to have family and friends around where they genuinely show and talk about what’s going on inside of them. The reality is most do not. Most people deal with their struggles and concerns by themselves. Because of fear. Fear of judgment. Fear of exclusion. Quality versus quantity hits our relationships hard. These day’s agenda consists of meaningless small talk, automated words we babble day in, day out. But what if we dare the take off our poker face once? Maybe we’d find out, that we are not so different to our neighbor, family or friends.
4. Choosing quality dopamine
”Cheap dopamine”. You’ve probably heard of that term. Cheap dopamine is like a sugary candy. I offers a burst of sweetness and immediate satisfaction, but its effects are short-lived and leave you craving more. Just as the candy fails to nourish your body, cheap dopamine fails to nourish your soul. It’s a temporary high that fades quickly, leaving you wanting something more substantial to truly satisfy your needs.
If we always choose the quick and cheap dopamine, instead of the delayed dopamine we’ll be happy in the moment. Usually right after it streams through our body, we feel bad and guilty. It doesn’t have to be like that. Being aware of what daily netflix, beef, chicken, pornhub, youtube, tiktok, processed sugar, processed carbs, do to our body and brain – is the start to new beginnings.
Our brain is like a thick layer of fresh snow. Once somebody has built a path by walking the path first, everybody else will follow this way. Neural connection work like this as well. Once we gave our brain the permission to only use the stairways of netflix and co in order to feel good, it’s hard to form a new, better path. Develop consciousness about quality and quantity dopamine. What’s the opposite of cheap dopamine?
5. Cultivating meaningful experiences instead of material accummulation
Indoctrinated through society and the industry, many of us venture through life with simple goals: Gaining and achieving. Unfortunately, these are false friends. It’s not that nobody is aware of that, still the script plays as written by the author. It’s hard to break out of the vicious cycle of material accumulation.
The flipside looks much more sustainable: Sitting together with friends or family and ruminating about the one time when you were camping with them, caught fish by yourself, told each other tales and so on. What makes life memorable? It’s rarely an iPhone, the one nice car, or the luxury holiday.
6. Letting go of quantity-based expectations for personal growth
How compelling is it to set a goal reading two books a month? Speaking to 3 strangers a week? Swallowing three reasons for anger a day? All of these are great strategies and goals. But there is a sustainable approach to personal growth: Have you ever felt like you are walking on the same spot, even though you make improvements? Well, there could be a simple reasons for that. If we don’t live for the process, but for the progress, we’ll never arrive. Living for the progress means we desire an end. We desire to arrive. Unfortunately, this will never happen. It’s a myth.
Choosing quality over quantity when it comes to personal growth is the key to break out of this cycle. James Clear stated in order to feel fulfilled now, we have to fall in love with the process, rather than the outcome. Other than that, happiness and fulfillment is always one step away. How could this look like?
Rather than simply reading two books a month, you could create a mastermind with friends, where you teach each other the contents of the books you have read. With that you will memorize tremendously more, which safes you time of re-reading. Quality over quantity.
Rather than using “anger repression” to avoid anger, you may try to reframe all those situations that make you become angry in the beginning. Reframing is a super effective tool, used by psychologist to re-write automated scripts in your mind. The pattern is simple: It’s possible to choose quality over quantity when it comes to personal growth. This is a great addition to push your personal growth to a next level.
7. Embracing minimalism for maximum quality in life
”The things you own, end up owning you.”
Chuck Pahlaniuk
With everything we own, we get emotionally entangled and it takes space in our lives. Chuck Pahlaniuk realized this and created a masterpiece to convey this message. His first novel “fight club” is at the same time his most popular work, due his unique and disturbing way criticizing a quantity society.
8. Quality decision-making: The key to remarkable results
”You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
Warren Buffet is known for is quality investing decisions. He advocates for getting the right decisions right, instead of making too many wrong decisions. In the beginning this looks self-explanatory, but if we take a deeper look we can find a valuable lesson here. Every day you make thousands of decisions. The first decision is waiting already when you wake up: Will you push the snooze or get up immediately? Will you check social media first, or go to the bathroom straight? The key to Warren Buffets success as a high-quality decision maker lies in his merciless aspiration to make quality decisions. At the end of the day we have to find the decisions in our lives with the biggest impact and get them right. All decisions that follow are fractions that derive from the big decisions we make in our lives.
We gotta ask ourselves:
→ Do I want to live a memorable or mediocre life?
→ Do I really want to start my day doing …
→ Do I want to cease overwhelm and procrastination now and forever?
→ …
9. Quality learning: A lifelong journey of knowledge and growth
One of my personal favorites: Did you ever wonder, why some people are able to absorb tremendously more information than others? They learn the same content, but memorize much better. Yes, we know stories of super learners with eidetic memories (known as photographic memories), but reality doesn’t look like this. However, what if I tell you, that there are strategies which enable us to become super-learners? The Authors Peter C Brown, Mark A. McDaniel, Henry L. Roediger III revealed in their remarkable book “make it stick” scientifically proven techniques to become a walking library. Three of them are:
Space out your retrieval practice
Spaced practice means studying information more than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions.
Elaboration
Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material. For instance: Examples include relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how it relates to your life outside of class.
Mnemonic Devices
What are they? “Mnemonic” is from the Greek word for memory, and mnemonic devices are like mental file cabinets. They give you handy ways to store information and find it again when you need it.
