Everything's bigger here

"Everything is bigger in Texas"~ Jeff Hutchins, 1998

An old high school swim teammate used to tell us that during practices on an almost weekly basis, and I remember thinking "Whatever". At the time, I thought it was a manhood deal, and part of the constant one-upsmanship process of 17 yr old boys. After living in Austin for almost two weeks now, I can see his point. Everything is supersized out here, examples being the UT football stadium, food, cowboy boots, cars, my neighbor's boobs, egos, the shopping centers...it's rather ridiculous.

But is bigger necessarily better? One can look at history and find plenty of examples where this is true, from the upward scaling of companies to attack size-biased markets to the recent UFC 100 title fight where the much larger Brock Lesnar took down Frank Mir. However,history is also rife with examples of times where diversity and flexibility were more important then flexibility, from smaller operationally efficient farm communities all the way to Michael Phelps outracing competitors who are bigger and stronger then he is. The answer, as it usually is, appears to lie somewhere in the middle, where there's a optimal combination of size and flexibility. The utilization at this point is such that you can get the best returns on investment in both departments without becoming detrimentally large or too flexible.

The point? As I currently sit under the concrete behemoth that is the UT stadium, I realize more and more that it doesn't matter how big you are (as a company or physically), what's in your wallet, or how many credentials you have on the wall. Conversely, there's not much value in becoming a free-spirited hippie and running around the world with no ties or growth plans either. I won't pretend that I know the optimal balance between the two, but that's what life's about...figuring out the balance and making it work for you. This whole post may be a hallucination brought on by the 110 degree, 95% humidity here in Austin, but I doubt it.