Scaling is always the problem

posted by Jeff | Tuesday, August 7, 2018, 9:39 PM | comments: 0

If I had to rank the things that I was excited about for my new gig, the idea that I'd have to scale people and process at new levels would rank pretty high. In the last few years, I've done a lot to scale the technology itself, but applying all the soft skills and process knowledge to a growing organization is a great challenge.

Then I started thinking, you know, all of the problems are about scale. I mean, not just work, but life in general. The challenge with life is always to scale it. When you say things like, "If I only had more time to..." you're talking about time management which is scaling your life. I certainly still believe that you should embrace your limitations, but it doesn't mean you can't optimize. Scaling is optimizing your action.

One of my favorite things to say is that, with time, it's not that you change necessarily, but you do become more things. I disagree that becoming a parent changes you. I think that you can largely be the same person, but you become this new thing as well. That's an important distinction, the addition instead of change. Some things about you are immutable, particularly your past, so it only makes sense that you become something more with time. The more you become, the more you have to learn to scale. I still care about the things I cared about 15 years ago, but I also care about being a dad, a husband and a guy with a career. To scale, I have to figure out how to pay attention to all of these things.

Science, industry, even politics, all have scale problems. How do you deal with things that get bigger? While it's an interesting observation, that everything seems to be a scaling problem, I only wish that the solutions were all similar.


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