Scalessness - No. 39
One of the effects of industrialization and globalization has been a cultural obsession with scale. We can sell a product to millions of people on multiple continents and in many different countries. A message can be shared simultaneously with people around the world. Now, through technology, every person has the potential to take something to scale. From startups to manufacturing, packaged goods, media, influencers, and content producers, the goal in most industries is to reach as many people as possible. The key to success has increasingly become scale. Every part of our brave new world is an ongoing experiment with scaling anything and everything in the name of success. When we distill most current cultural measures of success down to their most fundamental level, we find two metrics driving everything: how many and how much. This has created a big problem for us all. We weren’t made for scale.
What we were made for is journey, connection, transformation, and presence. We can’t be in lots of places at once, and we can’t connect with lots of people at once. We are profoundly limited by time and location despite the best of our efforts to overcome them. In this great limitation, there is a great truth. Everything we truly crave in life doesn’t require scale. We don’t need thousands of followers to feel loved and fulfilled. In fact, a few great relationships are more than enough for most people. We don’t need to talk to hundreds of people at once, just a few who will actually listen. We are made for intimacy and real relationships, not likes, subscribers, and followers. We don’t need a fortune to live a great life, just enough resources to provide clothes, food, shelter, transportation, and some fun adventures. Most importantly, God is accessible to all of us all the time. The beautiful mystery of our humanity is that we can all find what we desire most. What we most deeply long for, whether we are aware of it or not, is connection to God and the people He brings into our lives.
The great mystery is that what we long for and spend most of our lives chasing is already available to all of us.
The illusion of scale pulls us out of the present and makes us believe that what we really want requires us to achieve something big. It tells us we need more, more people in the form of friends, fans, customers, admirers, listeners, attendees, and viewers. It tells us we need more money, a bigger house, another trip, nicer cars, better toys, and more stylish clothes. What we need is always more than we have, because that is what scale is all about, more. It also leads us to believe that to impact the world, we need to reach lots and lots of people. It causes us to undervalue the relationships, places, and moments we have right here and now. When we do that, we miss the real opportunities for connection, fulfillment, purpose, and impact.
So many people chase more because they feel unloved, insignificant, unseen, and alone. I think more men in business are driven by insecurity and fear than by a real lust for power or wealth. We unknowingly take a deep and good unfulfilled longing and apply our culture’s solution to it. The problem is that it can take decades to realize that wealth doesn’t fill you with peace, and recognition doesn’t make you feel truly loved. During those decades of pursuing more, so many people accidentally rewire their brains to a very broken way of thinking. Then, if they are lucky, they wake up one day and realize they don’t know how to have real relationships, they don’t feel close to God, and they don’t actually have a real and deep sense of identity.
The way of life we were made for
In order to recover the way of life we were made for, we must embrace what I am calling “scalessness.” I made it up, and it simply means abandoning the idea that more is better and embracing a life where we are present with ourselves, others, and God.
I am by no means a master of scalessness, but my transformation journey has led me to walk away from more and run towards what is real. I look back on the last 10 years, and I see exponential growth in my value for time with men of wisdom, friends, and my family. I also see a sharp decline in my interest in accumulating stuff and getting recognition. Along the way, I have experienced so much more peace, joy, and beauty. I am driven into nature and long for sunsets, water, views, and trails instead of wanting stuff, accomplishment, or status. It’s very exciting to think about what another decade might do. What will it be like to be more content, more present, and more connected to God?
I don’t see the concept of scale as a virtue anywhere in the Bible. In the Great Commission, Jesus says something that trips most modern minds up: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” I think that has driven a lot of Christians to this idea that we need to reach as many people as we can. So seemingly endless numbers of ministries have spent fortunes leveraging technology to reach as many people with preaching and gospel-related content as possible. That is not necessarily bad, but often it seems to be the world’s way of thinking about scale applied to disciple-making. We seem to have forgotten what discipleship really is and how it works. We think disciple means convert, but it actually means so much more. Jesus had 12 primary disciples, and they followed him everywhere He went for three years. He poured most of his time and energy into those 12 men, teaching them how to think and live. Discipleship was like the PhD program for spiritual growth, transformation, and preparation for ministry. You can’t scale discipleship in the modern sense. It is always based on real relationships over long periods of time, where an inordinate amount of energy is invested in a small number of people. Discipleship will naturally scale, however, over time, because each disciple goes out and makes more disciples.
Here is the crazy thing, from a modern Western mindset, Jesus was highly inefficient with his time. He should have reached more people, covered more ground, and written stuff down himself. Instead, He poured into a relatively small number of people and spoke to whoever showed up. Dallas Willard says that “Jesus is the smartest guy who ever lived.” Assuming that is true, why was He so incredibly inefficient? The answer, I believe, is that we weren’t made for scale; it isn’t how we learn, and it isn’t how we transform. It seems Jesus was more interested in the transformation and the preparation of his 12 disciples than he was in spreading his message to the ends of the earth. Or perhaps he knew that the true way to reach the world was to invest deeply in a small number of people so that they could go and do the same work He did. Now, 2,000 years later, the world has been shaped by the teaching of this man who was so terribly inefficient with his time. Jesus was not worried about scaling His ministry, message, or personal brand. He was interested in one thing, transformation.
The allure of scale is all around us all the time. We have literally been baked in it our entire lives. Even our churches tend to judge success by how many and how much. Organizational thinking (Box and Line Thinking - No. 8) always leads us to those two measures of success. When we embrace scalessness, we start to think in terms of who, not what. Who am I being led to spend time with? Who has God uniquely created me to be? What is God going to reveal to me about Himself today? Identity and connection take the place of scale and accomplishment.
This kind of thinking doesn’t feed our ego at all, because it doesn’t allow us to check boxes and earn points. It doesn’t lead us to feel like we are accomplishing something big and extraordinary. It is often quiet and slow. It leads us to ego death, not vanity. But every step of the way, we are being nourished by the connections and way of life we were made for. We find the freedom, fulfillment, and purpose we long for in the only place it can actually be found.
- John Walt
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