Lately, as you can tell, I’ve been binge-reading the blog and cartoons at Gaping Void, like this one…
In the blog post this cartoon is in, they mention the phrase “humans don’t scale” — one of my favorite phrases, especially in this era of social media and influencers, where big numbers are considered de rigueur, where an “influencer” might have a million followers and a “cool” email list might have 60,000 people on it (this email list, BTW, is crazy small, you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you, and that smallness is actually quite intentional).
The really big events in almost any life follow the “humans don’t scale” rule. For example, I am not in Turkey because 9 million influencers on Instagram said it was a cool place to be. I am in Turkey because I met one person, and I met that one person because of a second person, and I met that second person because of a third person, and I met that third person because of a fourth person, and I met that fourth person because of a fifth person, and on and on like that.
In fact, the trajectory of my entire adult life can be traced back to one action of that fifth person, Rosemary D’Agrossa, when I was 23 years old. It has been decades since I talked to her, and she probably doesn’t even remember who I am. But when I was 23 and just back from China and crashing on my brother’s couch in Ellensburg, Washington, because it was near Seattle and I could live there for free while I looked for a job, Rosemary was hiring someone, and I wasn’t right for the job she was hiring for, but she gave my resume to my soon-to-be boss, John Alfrejd (the fourth person), who took a chance on me, so my entire adult life, including my current presence in Turkey, can be traced back to that one action. If Rosemary hadn’t given my resume to John, I would probably be somewhere else, doing something else. Sliding Doors (if you are a movie buff, you will get that reference; if not, sorry).
Anyway, my point here is that the decisions that affect us the most aren’t made by influencers with 9 million followers, they are made by 8-12 people sitting in a room. In the business world, this means the CEO and the board, which is why my work focuses on pitching your idea to a small number of people. And fortunately for me, while I am absolutely terrible, and have been for my entire life, at getting large numbers of people to do anything at all, I am good at getting small numbers of people to say yes. We go into that (getting the board to say yes) in this episode of the podcast:
