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Pursuits That Can’t Scale
Chasing scale seems to be a kind of early life affliction. The more you chase it, the bigger the thing you chase gets. Perhaps it’s a natural desire to see how important we can be or at least how important our creations can be to the world (and hence how important we can be by proxy …). A desire to take on a seemingly insurmountable challenge,
... See moregoes. If I myself had to give advice, I would recommend someone pick a profession that is not scalable! A scalable profession is good only if you are successful; they are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities, and are far more random, with huge disparities between efforts and rewards—a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving other
... See moreNassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)
As anything scales too effectively – from restaurants and ad agencies to social networks and search engines – the market opens for more non-scalable alternatives. Once Starbucks opens on every block, we crave the artisanal coffee shop. There's the identity piece of it, where we want some degree of distinctiveness. But there's a practical side too: ... See more