1, #110 - Care doesn't scale

Estimated Read Time: 59 seconds.

The Lost Child by Arthur Hughes, via Birmingham Museums Trust.

What makes quantity so appealing to us? Why does more intuitively feel like it’s better?

In the world of tech startups, this relates to an obsession with scale. How big can you grow a company and how fast, powered by the practically unlimited scalability of software products?

So, Paul Graham’s famous recommendation for early-stage founders—“Do things that don’t scale”—only seems contrarian because the whole startup ecosystem is built on a commitment to things that do scale.

I read a short essay this week that highlights the limitations of this approach:

“But sometimes things can’t scale without changing. Care doesn’t really scale without becoming something else. Thinking about this has helped me reframe how I feel about things like parents looking after their children, things like my friends taking time to chat with me. It’s not that I cynically didn’t think those things were important; it’s just difficult to shake the sense that people, that I, should be doing bigger, better things.

For care, though, it doesn’t get bigger and better. If your goal is to educate the world, you can look for ways to educate thousands or millions. If you want to inspire the world, the billions await. But if your goal is to care for the world, and in a given moment you’re deeply caring for one person, you’re doing the best it’s possible to do.”

So, here’s to doing things that don’t scale in our personal lives, too.

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Insight inspired by Steven Scrawls and his essay, Care doesn’t scale. Thanks to Kai Brach for sharing it in the latest Dense Discovery newsletter.