This is a translation attempt of a blog post titled “تُستصلح السفن وهي تسير” (roughly translated as Ships are reclaimed as they go) by the writer Abdullah Al-Whebey.

In the first lecture of the academic semester, Jerry Uelsmann, Fine Arts professor at the University of Florida, split his students into two groups. He told the first group that their evaluation will be based on presenting a hundred pictures. Whereas he told the second group that their evaluation will be based on the quality of a single picture. Surprisingly, in time for delivering the task, the most beautiful picture was delivered by students of the first group. One writer commented on this incident:

"During the semester, students of the first group got busy taking pictures, testing the interaction of color and light, testing the many ways of producing photos from negatives, and learning from their mistakes. In the process of producing a hundred pictures, students have refined their skills. On the other side, students of the second group took a long time just to think about how to produce the perfect picture. In the end they did not have anything to present except a bunch of untested theories, and a single picture of modest quality."

And so, one can find that the excess in focus on "quality" has led the second group to stumbling and failure.

It is possible to understand this incident in multiple ways. However, I like to think about it in a different, seemingly distant context. It has been said: "Ships are reclaimed as they go". Here, members of the first group have "reclaimed" their artistic taste as they were "sailing", in contrast to the second group that has stayed farther from realizing the nature of the "sea". And thus, sustainability of work, commitment to achievement, active movement, and purposeful action are closer to achieving desired virtues, and possibly attaining advanced and distinct levels. This is in contrast to the idealistic obsession with producing pure uniqueness, creativity, or supernatural excellence.
In the same way that the ship's captain and crew simply cannot wait for the suitable harbor or appropriate circumstances to fix their ship, and that there is no escape from proceeding with sailing and fixing the damaged ship at the same time, a person should not wait for the perfect moment to complete what he must, to achieve his goal, to repair his failures and suppress his shortcomings, or to tend to his wounds and repair them, because to stop and wait means to "drown"!