In 1971, an English teacher, a writer, and a history teacher—all in their 20s—borrowed $5,000 from a bank and invested $1,350 each to start a coffee shop in Seattle. They named it Starbucks.

16 years later,  an entrepreneur named Howard Schultz acquired Starbucks. The company had opened 16 more stores, on average around one per year. Just a year later—in 1988—the company would open another 16 stores, making the total number 33.

The pace continued ratcheting up, to 425 stores in 1994, 3,501 stores in 2000, and 15,011 stores in 2007. In 2007, Starbucks opened 2,571 new stores—that’s seven per day on average. 

With its emphasis on growth, Starbucks failed to preserve the quality and prevent saturation; that very same year, Starbucks stock started dipping, continuing into 2008. It had to slow down and refocus, shifting away from growth; the number of total stores would stay steady for the next three years. In fact, in 2009, Starbucks was down 45 stores; an incredibly different pace than opening seven new stores every day.

In Same as Ever, Morgan Housel describes a most convenient size as, “A proper state where things work well but break when you try to scale them to a different size or speed.” Starbucks had far exceeded its most convenient size, and had to deal with its growing pains while slowing things down.

This rule can apply to other businesses too; in an extreme example, perhaps if Elizabeth Holmes didn’t rush building Theranos, she wouldn’t have cut corners and made the decision to commit fraud. 

It also applies outside of business. For example, nearly a century ago, J.B.S. Haldane writes:

To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.

Conversely, while gravity has little effect on small animals like mice and insects, a force like surface tension will heavily influence their survival. You and I might notice a drop of water if it landed on us; that same drop could mean the end of a fly’s life. 

The same effects and actions for different sized animals mean different problems. 

This principle applies to your creative work as well. There are many dimensions that can be sized—the size of the time slots available for your creative work, the size of your budgets, the shapes of your skills. There are also other external factors, like your circumstances and health, your commitments, how much time you need to spend earning an income. Your personality traits are yet another one; whether you get energy from moving fast or slow, the medium that speaks most to you, your extraversion or introversion, amongst many others.

All of this means that your creative work has a most convenient size as well. It needs to fit happily into your constraints.

For example, if you’re blocked, it might mean that your vision for your idea is too big or well-polished to execute. You’ll either have to shrink its scope or lower its fidelity. For example, even if you want to make a film, you may need to settle for writing a screenplay for now—like Donald Glover did when he recorded Because the Internet, making a short film and screenplay instead of a full-length movie.

For me, I’ve also wrestled with this tendency; my imagination expands and polishes up ideas very well. I just don’t have enough time and energy to do it yet. 

Instead, I learn from people like Hugh McLeod and Tyler Cowen. Hugh started doodling on the backs of business cards and started publishing them a few years later at Gaping Void, all while working a day job. Tyler writes every day at Marginal Revolution, while doing a weekly column for Bloomberg and writing books outside of that. Oh, and he’s also a professor at George Mason University.

I’ve found that to be the right size for my work so far. It gives me energy. It makes the rest of the day better. I have a day job at Figma, so I don’t need to worry about financial pressure or what I think the market wants, and I’m free to follow my curiosity.

When you find the right size for your creative work (think smaller!), that’s what it could feel like too.

P.S., There’s a follow-up to this post that will explore how the right size of your creative work can enable its growth, just like how a lot of articles can “grow” into books. My book, Creative Doing, started off much smaller.