On Being Big

You know who had epic, visionary dreams? Railroad barons. They convinced thousands of Swedes to move to Nowheresville Minnesota so there would be a town for their railroad to go through. They built big mighty Rocky Mountain hotels – modern Valhallas – so their trains would have a destination for customers. They gave people things – great big dreams – that got them excited about the future. 

Big thinking has rocked the world in many forms: skyscrapers, thick novels that took weeks to devour, epic movies that played in Panavision. But then it all started to shift. "I am big,” Norma Desmond says in Sunset Boulevard, “it's the pictures that got small.” Today, the pictures are so small they fit in the palm of your hand. Everything is less dramatic. The “star-making machinery” that created Marilyn Monroe, Robert Redford and Brad Pitt is fundamentally broken; most Americans can’t name five actors under the age of thirty. Homes are all painted beige. The auto-tuned songs on the radio have lost their bridges, they simply coast along, without any variation or tension. The thrill of the day is getting in a driverless car that tosses Uber drivers out of work and then inches through the streets like your grandma’s driving.

What does this mean? Honestly, it looks hard for a human being to make a sustained dent in the universe. But is it? People do it every day. Liquid Death figured it out. Ben & Jerry’s figured it out. Christopher Nolan figured it out. You could figure it out. Telling tall tales and then making them come true is a great American tradition. 

So, take a step today that makes something big happen. Challenge your agency, challenge your team, and challenge yourself. Embrace audacity and see where it takes you. Maybe it will just be a quick trip, or, who knows, maybe you’ll wake up in your own Valhalla.