Grow Where You're Planted

Say you’re trying to light a fire. Before you get it going, before you make it as big or as hot as you need to, you need a spark and whatever is going to initially light your fuel. It’s the first step and it has to be very reasonable and very calculated.

Now, say you’re on LinkedIn, posting about how you’re “cooking with fire.” In that, you’re telling people your goal or mission or vision or whatever you’re calling it, is to help 1 million people with xyz thing.

I see the same logic in both of these examples. And I see a critical flaw in the second one. I think about this a lot.

Before you start a fire to, say, cook a meal, you have to understand just how much heat you’ll need, and have the goods to get your fire started (spoken like a person who hasn’t had the right lighter, or the best chimney for the fancy Japanese charcoals, or - look, I’ve struggled with this).

Before you help 1 million people, you have to understand how to help one person. And not just your brother or the college friend of your spouse. You have to prove your help’s value to a stranger who actually wanted it and then wants to go tell somebody else about it.

Figuring out the one spark, right under your nose, is wildly valuable and undervalued.

Because there’s no glory in it.

It isn’t the scalable part. It isn’t the sexy-to-talk-about part. It’s just the most important first part, in every instance.

Danny Meyer (and his daughter, Hallie) were at a recent Masters of Scale live event that’s on YouTube. He told a story I love, that I could stand to hear a million times. It’s the one about how he spent ten years trying to perfect one restaurant, refusing to open a second, partially out of fear, and partially out of an awareness that you have to grow where you’re planted before you propagate.

The restaurant industry is not the normal place where you get advice like this.

And, in an even less common place, it makes me think of the Paul Graham essay, “Do Things that Don’t Scale,” where he suggests the value in Danny’s approach. How, by choosing to do things that can’t be scaled up, you can learn a ton of lessons to apply alongside what can be scaled up.

Small things are OK.

Big can come later.

But prove your small idea out first, make sure you really (really) love it, and then see how you can put more of that love into the world.

ps. I’ll cop to why I am so happy I stumbled across this story again when I did (Danny Meyer is Cultish Creative canon, after all).

After sharing more details about my personal podcast strategy, and how Just Press Record is a show made for the two strangers/guests I invite on first, with anybody else who wants to watch as an afterthought, I very, very much want other examples of similarly anti-scaling ideas that catch on in the real world.

Danny’s first restaurant, the original Shake Shack bit, and then Hallie’s remarkable ice cream business - Caffe Panna (which, my wife and I just bumped that towards the top of our “must eat that next time we’re in NYC” list), with her story about collaborating with fans on the menu(!!!), all hit me straight in the gut.

If you can nail something, and I mean really nail it, on the smallest scale possible, you might not change the world, but you’ll change some people’s experience with the world as you’ve reset it, ever so slightly.

And when you gift someone that experience, they will talk. That’s what spreads. That is everything.