Scale down, after scaling up

Coming back down to reality, after reaching the top [Don’t Work: Part 08]

Sep 22, 2024

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Series: Don’t Work | Part: 8 of 10 | Reading Time: 6 mins
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This is part of the series, Don’t Work, exploring our identity and meaning around work.

I. Servants of Scale

In my last role, I supposedly helped millions of patients. I mean, I didn’t meet all but a few of them, but they were still supposedly there.

The scale of that impact was hard to argue. It was healthcare, damnit! An effective altruist would be proud:

Large number of people = check!
Important problem for people = check!
Big, neglected societal issue = check, check, check!

So why did the impact feel so empty at the end?

The problem was these people I was helping existed only as numbers on a spreadsheet. I only saw some pixels on a screen.

Many of us live in a pixelated world. The people we interact with, our customers or colleagues, are barely any different than some words or numbers on a screen.

Every relationship is behind some screen - the computer screen or the screen of a business transaction. More of an object to be used by one another than a real human.

Our work has also become increasingly abstract within the complex corporations we operate. We wade through a complicated bureaucracy, so thick with paperwork and politics, that our impact becomes ambiguous, at best.

We’ll sit in a meeting, or work a process or a metric (that someone said matters), and we’ll wonder: “was that real work or fake work?”

For those in leadership roles, our relationship to real work becomes even more watered down. Most of the work gets done through our teams, less of it directly through us. So we survive on a false sense of accountability, each of us unclear (and anxious about) where the real responsibility sits. It’s fair to wonder: “where does my work start and end?”

We get lost amongst so many layers. So much abstraction. So much… SCALE.

Not so long ago, we never even considered our work would scale. But now, it’s the expectation.

II. Scale Up

After achieving some level of success, many of us believe it’s time to double-down. To scale up to that next level: the next title, next salary tier, next status level, next, next, next.

So we opt toward the obvious. The pursuits that guarantee we scale up, not down. Because, what are we doing if we aren’t ratcheting up to that next level?

After leaving my last role, I believed that my next step was starting a company and becoming a Founder/CEO. I expected to grow my Very-Important-Person status into an Even-More-Important-Person. I mean, what else is there to do, if not that?

“What if, instead of being an early employee/SVP of a $2B company, I was a Founder/CEO of a $10B company? Now that sounds like a Super-Important-Person!” - from Unraveling the layers of working identity

Or we scale our company because, you know, we have to grow it. That scale requires standardization (i.e. the human taken out of it), to make our work easily reproducible, so it can be stretched across more.

As our work scales, so must our identity. We are told to turn ourselves into a “personal brand,” constructing an image that’s easily consumable and scalable in the digital world.

But if you think scale has disconnected you from your work, you must stand in awe of the investor. Disconnected through so many layers of financial abstractions, they’re barely able to name the companies they’re invested in, let alone a single employee or customer at any one of them. All of these lives at stake underneath it all, dumbed down to numbers on a screen.

So. Much. Scale.

But the seduction of scale comes with a cost: we lose touch with what matters. We lose touch with the tangible, our heads lost in the clouds.

We lose contact with the work that helps someone, directly. The work that feels rewarding and fulfilling when we do it. Not the work that is supposedly rewarding or supposedly helping through all these layers, but the kind of work where we don’t have to ask these kinds of questions.

Our brains are not wired to comprehend such scale. It’s no wonder we feel overwhelmed when our work is stretched across millions of pixels.

So I made a choice after reaching the height of scale. Instead of chasing that next level, I tried the opposite: I scaled down.

III. Scale Down

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” Leo Tolstoy

Once I realized I had lost touch with the work that matters, I realized it helps to go back to something tangible.

For example, instead of helping one million people, I tried helping one person. Like literally, I volunteered to mentor one person.

I scaled down to the relationships that mattered most to me. To my family. To capture the full experience of being with my children while they are still young.

I scaled down to the friends that will stick with me, regardless of what I do in life. My work colleagues? I appreciate them, but most of them stopped caring about me after they realized I’m no longer useful to them. “It’s just business.” We had a transactional relationship all along.

I scaled down to improving the quality of my own experience - my health and the ordinary satisfaction of daily life. I had to remind myself about the reasons why life is worth living. That I was not just a success machine, optimized for extreme output.

I scaled down my status. No longer important, no longer needed. There were no big projects or groups of people to command. My influence was now confined to my immediate world.

I scaled down to the level of my soul. Where did I find meaning in my life? How do I see myself in the vast scale of the cosmos?

Instead of trying to make a dent in the whole universe, what about making a dent in my universe?

In our scale, we lose track of the things that bring us the most purpose. The deep relationship. A fulfilling hobby. The cause we care most about. For many, that’s the good stuff.

Scale alone offers no such salvation.

For you, scaling down could be about finding a community project. Helping an aging parent. It could be as simple as starting a garden. Or scaling down your possessions to create space for what matters.

We also forget that big things start so small. If we do something new or different or something from the beginning, we’ll need to get comfortable with being unimportant again.

Consider that when I left my last role, my team was responsible for over 1M patients. A few months later, when I wrote my first article here, I sent it to 147 people.

This is the beauty of scaling down: it’s in the smallest of acts that we often find the greatest meaning. A grand journey beginning with one small step.

IV. Scaled Out

“Whenever I want to write a big song, I can’t. [...] Because I try to write a song to fill the entire galaxy. I’ve never gotten a song that way. But if I write a song about something the size of a glass of water, and I do it right, I notice a week later it’s got the universe in it. Right? So I’d rather have the universe in a glass of water, than try to make a glass of water fit in the universe.” – John Mayer, in conversation with Zane Lowe

I’m not denying the benefits of scale. Me, of all people, have benefited from them.

And it’s important to know that when you scale down after scaling up, you give something up in return. You give up the myopia that you are the most important protagonist in the tale of the universe. It’s healthy to remember you are no such thing.

Scaling down is a great reminder that you are utterly irrelevant in the wider world. But it’s the best reminder that you are so critically important to your world.

Some will argue scaling down leads to selfishness and nihilism. A turning inward so far that we lose track of the problems around us. We’ll just throw up our hands on the world’s wider issues.

And it’s true. There is probably a point of scaling down that goes too far, for too long.

But my experience is that scaling down, after scaling up, can restore our senses. Because when considering the tangibility and simplicity of the world around us, things become much more clear.

We aren’t lost in the clouds of scale because we can see there is someone or something right over there that needs us, scale or no scale. We can choose the work that matters, not deluded by a veiled attempt at inflating our own ego.

By scaling down, we can regain ourselves and restore our ambitions. Grounded, connected, and plugged back into reality. Perhaps even ready to scale up again.1

Next up, I’m talking about the real experience of change, and what that feels like.