Scaling vs. Scales

People are obsessed with scaling. Making improvements. Doing everything - exponentially. 

Scaling is cool. I’m not anti-scaling, at least not as a rule. I’m just open to other options. 

Scaling is great, so long as scaling isn’t the thing that matters. 

And not all things that matter scale. 

I’m coming around to thinking of “mattering” as a weight. 

An item that has some heft, and not from sheer size, but from meaning. 

Something that you could put on a scale. 

A meaning scale. 

I want more things I can put on my meaning scale, and less things that are scaling for the sake of “look how big it could be!”  

Take dinner. It doesn’t need to be as scalable as a restaurant meal, one that’s ready to be franchised, with private equity investors lined up outside of the investment bankers office ready to take it global. 

Dinner can just can come from our kitchen. My wife or I can make it. We don’t even have to share (except with our dog, we’re not savages).  

One-offs. One’s-of-one’s. Perfectly perishable, often peculiar. 

The post-financial crisis, 0% interest rate, growth is scarce world seemed to go away during the COVID-crisis. 

But a lot of people are still acting the old way. 

Looking for scaling like looking for new social media platforms and SaaS startups. 

And it’s driving more and more of us to look for simple things we can just put on a scale. 

At home. With our friends. With our people. 

Meaning, with weight.

Don’t scale unless you’ve put it on a scale to know how much its meaning weighs first.

Ps. Ok, it’s not the peaceful vibe, but it is the make it meaningful energy - this is just stuck in my head (you know I can’t resist an excuse to put Ice Cube on):

If that was too much for you, let’s go to where you were thinking right after…