Some impacts are hard to scale spatially, or geographically, or culturally. But they can be persistent, and in time, they scale well. For example, if you’re a teacher of a classroom of 40, you might impact at the most 40 lives. And that is not easy to scale, because enlarging the class does not necessarily mean more lives are impacted though the education system might want to think that way.
I once asked talked about scaling Laksa (a Singaporean dish) in an article about the narratives of millennials. I wondered if it matters that we created products which didn’t scale at least during the moment they were created. If we create products only to ride waves of growth, than majority of the products and service offerings in the world would not exists. It is often seeking to serve a particular audience that an offering comes into play and then gradually finds either more audience or more application in order to scale.
So what is the right scale for the impact that we make, or the offering we’re trying to put out in the world? It is exactly the scale that keeps things going, that keeps you doing what you want to do. If you’re happy to keep doing supporting under-privileged kids one by one, go for it; make sure it pays you enough to keep you going as well. And it is the same for a business, you just need the smallest viable audience (a concept that is popularised by Seth Godin).
Sustainability is the right benchmark, not just for the environment, but also the scale of what we do.