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The Discipline Required To Create The Life You Want
You know, not everything has to be big.
I realize that the impulse, especially when it comes to business, is to try to grow everything to the absolute biggest it can be.
This is not a new, but it’s certainly a defining trend of our age. After all, all this drama about data centers is being driven by hyperscalers — companies built around taking things that work and scaling them as far as they can possibly go.
But I hate that philosophy…or at least, it’s not what I practice in my life.
In 2019, I could have started just about any kind of business. A bunch of my friends were starting tech companies. Others had been making a fortune investing, flipping real estate, trading crypto.
I was the crazy one who decided to open a small bookstore in rural Texas.
What’s crazier though is that the bookstore worked. And yet do you know what I get asked, probably once a week? “When are you going to open another location?” At least three struggling bookstores have reached out about us acquiring them.
What strikes me isn’t that people ask — it’s how instinctively they ask. As if expansion were the only logical next step. As if the point of having one successful thing is to have two. Then four. Then forty.
