Make No Small Plans: Lessons on Thinking Big, Chasing Dreams, and Building Community

In the early days of Summit, to help push ourselves past our comfort zones, we’d rattle off a punchy one-liner to each other: “If you’re not scared, it won’t make the movie.” It was our way of pressuring each other to lean into discomfort and go big.

As the age-old adage goes: “You never fail until you stop trying.”

Momentum is a powerful tool. It creates feelings of excitement, it compounds trust, and it instills a sense of urgency. When people can feel the energy of something building upon itself, they want to be a part of it.

We had discovered that although they might not trust us, they most certainly trusted their friends. We knew if we could get one person to say yes, then their friends were more likely to say yes as well. It wasn’t the event that really mattered; it was the people with whom you were experiencing it.

We saw life as a giving competition, not a game of trades or a reciprocity loop. And if you’re genuinely giving without the expectation of return, you create the ability to ask the same of other people. We called it the Triangulation of Goodwill.

By the end of the weekend, everyone was asking how they could help build this community with us. We told everyone no photos were allowed. They could tell as many people as they wanted in person, but they couldn’t email anyone about it or post on social media. We wanted it to be shared one-on-one. We’d learned just how crucial this strategy was when

The idea alone is not what’s valuable. The real value comes later, through hard work and execution. There’s a great, albeit violent, observation from the physicist Howard Aiken that backs this up: “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” It’s way more likely that peop

We’ve long believed that entrepreneurs lose a great deal by not sharing their ideas out of fear of having them ripped off. Nobody is really thinking about the same thing you’re thinking about, let alone plotting to steal your idea to monetize it. Even if they tried, could they be more successful at it than you?

We’ve never been the type to keep secrets. If you keep your cards too close to your chest, you’re not going to get mentorship from the world, and it’s going to take you a lot longer to accomplish what you set out to do.