Make Room For Things That Don't Scale
When we look at the speed of innovation and technology, specifically the boom of artificial intelligence over the past few years, the capabilities now exist for us to do an incredible amount of things at scale, for better or for worse,
But I am increasingly convinced that the magic, that the secret to success in the future, will be in doing things that don't scale and doing them incredibly well.
I am not saying not to do things at scale, but to be on the hunt for the things that will still be important that don't scale. The things that someone looks at and knows that a human was responsible for them and it matters. The things that are uniquely human, things even if you could scale it, you shouldn't because it would ruin what that action or experience means. Things like that is where future advantages will be found and maintained.
For example, last month, I hosted the 50th gentleman's dinner since May of 2019. This experiment in human connection all started with a simple hunch that a new friend, John, and I co-hosted dinner where I would bring three people that he didn't know and he would bring three people that I didn't know. I would host in my garden and cook for everyone, and we would see where the night took us...
The first dinner very surprisingly lasted from 7:30 pm till 2:30 am. There was just something about the magic of convening people without any pretense or ask, but just to bring people together and give them a chance to have an honest conversation.
The format we found worked first time was a surprise, the second time a confirmation, and the third time became a tradition.
Over the course of 2019, we hosted another six or seven dinners. As the pandemic hit in early 2020, we invited any of the gentlemen who had been to one of those dinners to join us on a weekly Zoom call while we were all trapped in our homes. That continued for about 10 weeks, where we would check in with each other, see how each other was handling the quarantine that we were all experiencing, and what might come next as the pandemic restrictions lifted.
Convening and getting back to seeing people was going to be at a premium and fortunately, we already had a test case with a larger enough sample size to let us know we might be on to something.
Next, we started hosting the other people's homes. We started expanding the number of people that we brought. And then we started doing quarterly happy hours, where the only thing that people had in common was that they had attended a dinner. Surprisingly, over 50% of the people who had attended a dinner would show up for these happy hours, much to our surprise, because the only thing they knew that the other people were coming was that they'd attended a dinner.
Since that point, a true community has been formed. We've got almost 70 people in our WhatsApp group. We meet for weekly coffee now on Fridays, and we have a schedule of events coming up this fall that I'm really excited about.
But in that process, some people have asked me, "when do we start charging membership dues? Will there be an application to join this community? Should we buy an apartment together and use as a clubhouse where we can all meet and gather?"
And while I love the signal that those types of questions give off for what this community means to others, I've watched so many communities that started off with a genuine connection ruined when they tried to scale.
They turn themselves into businesses that rent out mountains, take over cruise ships, or try and become something much more than what they originally were formed as, which was a community of interested people gathering together for the sake of the community.
Formalizing and making a scalable membership program has ruined so many amazing communities. Once people know that what it takes to get into the community is filling out an application of being able to afford it, the incentives of the original curious people who showed up first to to know that the only reason the other people are there is because they're they were personally vetted by another member of the group goes away.
Trying to make community into a business doesn't work, or at least not the way that the true community originally was formed.
In the same way, this newsletter doesn't really scale for me.
I write all of these newsletters myself. I don't use AI. The words that I write, they're all mine, and so are the spellinng and grammar mistakes, and sometimes the offhanded comment that upon reading it the next day after it's been sent out to the 1000s of people that read this newsletter I think, "maybe I could have pulled myself back a little bit there, or maybe I should have said more."
This newsletter isn't meant to be scalable. I know how I could create 1000s of pieces of content in a matter of minutes. I've actually done it. I've played with it all, and I've seen the power of what it can automate and that's the reason that I don't.
When I get an email, even from a friend or business partner that I know was just them hitting copy and pasting something from their AI, I tend to not take it quite as seriously. I have a bias against it. I know that it wasn't written by a human for me; it was a prompt engineered to create content that hit my inbox. And maybe that's okay for things that aren't important, for mundane box-checking tasks. But I think we are all quickly spotting the lack of humanity in the most perfectly worded robot scripts.
"To err is human..." - Alexander Pope
My hope for the future of technology is that the things that robots and algorithms should do are done efficiently and they free all the rest of us up to be even more human than we are right now.
But my fear is that the false idols of productivity and massively scalable processes will cause many to forget what it means to be human and end up with perfectly typed, absolutely not human content as our standard for what it means to be good at what you do instead of the raw, the messy, and the uniquely human mistakes.
Being good at being human is hard. Not even being a good human, just being a human. So be kind to someone today who might be having a more challenging time at it than you even know.
PS: This post came from my conversation with Theo Tabah last week. After I'd written it, I logged into LinkedIn to see that our non-scalable one-on-one had been significant for him as well.
Andy Ellwood
My Favorite Poem
Every time I read it, a different line means something powerful. Read it here while listening to Michael Caine's voiceover in this video.
What line jumps out to you today?
For me today, "If all men count with you, but none too much..."
"I'm Mad As Hell And I'm Not Going To Take This Anymore"
This clip from the 1976 movie Network feels like it could have been filmed recently. It came to my attention in a recent newsletter from The Edgy Optimist.
Substack
It also made me think of this Instagram post that feels far too true.
Best Book I Read This Summer
I've mentioned this before, but I've continued to go back to this book and over again this summer as I have sorted out what is really going on now and its implications for the future. From historical trends to how the current generations will handle the next few decades, it is the closest thing to a prophecy that I've seen since my 14 year old obsession with the book of Revelation.
Related Conference I Wish I Was Attending
But I couldn't quite fit Singapore into my September schedule. But what an amazing topic of conversation—start-up countries!?
