I have something of an engineering background, so I easily end up thinking of success in terms of quantity. Maximizing this variable or that. Ensuring the greatest possible reward, or the smallest possible cost. But sometimes this is fallacious thinking.
As an academic, I would like to publish prestigious articles. It would be nice to publish 10 papers at second or third rate conferences, but they might all be made irrelevant by a single article at a first rate conference (or even an article in Nature or Science, say). So quality is a better measure than quantity.
I would also like to come up with new and influential ideas, but I suspect I would probably be happier if I managed to influence 10 very highly regarded people than if I managed to influence 10 000 laymen. (These exact numbers were computed using the “wild guess” algorithm and further evaluation may be needed.)
In professional life, I’ve found it dangerously easy to fall into a mode of thinking where you evaluate yourself by your income. This is true up to a point, but I’ve found that there’s a point beyond which additional income has diminishing returns in terms of how much it adds to my overall rewards from life. So beyond this point, quality is a better measure than quantity. What are my tasks, how do they force me to learn and evolve, what kind of satisfaction do I feel and why? So quality is a better measure than quantity.
User satisfaction with computer software can, to some extent, be measured using response time and latency. A snappy, responsive user interface usually produces more satisfaction than a sluggish one. But this can often be compensated for to a surprising extent by having appropriate progress indicators, animations and design features that placate the user in some way, assuring them something is being done. This is in a sense the opposite of the money situation: up to a certain point, quality makes up for quantity, after that point (when the slowness becomes impossible to mask), quantity becomes increasingly important.
What’s most interesting is perhaps the convertibility between quality and quantity. In engineering a device or a software system, quantitative metrics can be crucial tools in the construction process, but the final user experience must be qualitatively right. So quantity is a tool to construct quality. And in the real life situations where quantity is actually the best measure — bargaining, comparing, communicating, constructing, … — I think of it as a way to mask qualities. The numbers are simply easier to consider than the vast number of qualities that lie underneath.
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