I think the “passive impact” framing encourages us too much to start lots of things and delegate/automate them. I prefer “maximize (active or passive) impact (e.g. by building a massively scalable organization)”. This includes the strategy “build a really excellent org and obsessively keep working on it until it’s amazing”, which doesn’t pattern-match “passive impact” and seems superior to me because a lot of the impact is often unlocked in the tail-end scenarios.
You might argue that excellent orgs often rely on a great deal of delegation and automation, and I would wholeheartedly agree with that. But I think the “passive impact” framing tends to encourage a thinking pattern that’s less like “building massively scalable systems” and more like “quickly automate something”, and I think that’s worse.
Yeah, it’s an interesting question whether, all else being equal, it’s better to set up many passive impact streams or build one very amazing and large organization.
I think it all depends on the particulars. Some factors are:
What’s your personal fit? I think a really important factor is personal fit. Some people love the idea of staying at one organization for ten years and deeply optimizing all of it and scaling it massively. Others have an existential crisis just thinking of the scenario. Passive impact is a better strategy for when you like things when they’re small and super startup vibe and for if you find it hard to stay interested in the same thing for years on end.
What sort of passive impact are you setting up? I think obsessively optimizing an amazing organization and working hard on replacing yourself with a stellar person, such that it continues to run as an amazing org without you beats starting and staying on the same org probably. On the other hand, digital automation tends to decay a lot more without at least somebody staying on to maintain the project, and that would on average be beaten by optimizing a single org.
I think the “passive impact” framing encourages us too much to start lots of things and delegate/automate them. I prefer “maximize (active or passive) impact (e.g. by building a massively scalable organization)”. This includes the strategy “build a really excellent org and obsessively keep working on it until it’s amazing”, which doesn’t pattern-match “passive impact” and seems superior to me because a lot of the impact is often unlocked in the tail-end scenarios.
You might argue that excellent orgs often rely on a great deal of delegation and automation, and I would wholeheartedly agree with that. But I think the “passive impact” framing tends to encourage a thinking pattern that’s less like “building massively scalable systems” and more like “quickly automate something”, and I think that’s worse.
Yeah, it’s an interesting question whether, all else being equal, it’s better to set up many passive impact streams or build one very amazing and large organization.
I think it all depends on the particulars. Some factors are:
What’s your personal fit? I think a really important factor is personal fit. Some people love the idea of staying at one organization for ten years and deeply optimizing all of it and scaling it massively. Others have an existential crisis just thinking of the scenario. Passive impact is a better strategy for when you like things when they’re small and super startup vibe and for if you find it hard to stay interested in the same thing for years on end.
What sort of passive impact are you setting up? I think obsessively optimizing an amazing organization and working hard on replacing yourself with a stellar person, such that it continues to run as an amazing org without you beats starting and staying on the same org probably. On the other hand, digital automation tends to decay a lot more without at least somebody staying on to maintain the project, and that would on average be beaten by optimizing a single org.