the goal is resonance, not scale

“The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band."

-Brian Eno.

Optimize for legacy, not empire. Empires die because they’re alone, legacies live because they involve others.

-OH, on building teams and brand communities

Ad legend Bill Bernbach letter on creativity, written in 1947:

Dear ________:

Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance

how many people you touched > how many people you reached

“How many things which are good when small get better by becoming bigger? That local restaurant you love can’t scale to millions of users. Do you really want your favourite indie band to aspire to stadium-level fame? People get cheaper books, and an independent bookseller closes its doors to make way for a giant warehouse full of underpaid people w

Working in technology means one thing above all else: chasing scale. There is a reason why much of the tech world is obsessed with growth. Free from physical constraints, digital systems can scale to an incomprehensible size. The appeal of conquering the engineering, design and business challenges of mega-scale is strong, the rewards immense. But u

The Internet fails to scale gracefully.

To me, the ideal life is to take the 20 percent of my time that make me feel most alive and see if I can cut everything else out until that fills everything. Then do that again, cutting the “worst” 80 percent of the best. This is the inverse of how many companies operate. There the ideal is often “growth,” which they take to mean “say yes to all op

What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.” — Jorge Luis Borges

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell. -Edward Abbey