If things constantly need to be growing, I need to therefore be saying yes to as many opportunities as possible.

I need to be saying yes to basically everything.

I need to forsake my boundaries in the hopes that the ends justify the means.

I'm Jocelyn K. Gly, and this is Hurry Slowly, a podcast about pacing yourself, where I explore how you can be more productive, creative, and resilient through the simple act of slowing down.

My guest today is Paul Jarvis, a writer, designer, an educator from whom I have learned

quite a lot over the years. Paul writes a wonderful weekly newsletter called the Sunday Dispatches,

which I highly recommend, and he also teaches two excellent online courses. But the occasion of our conversation today is the release of his new book, Company of One,

which asks the question, what if the key to a richer, more fulfilling career, is not to think bigger, but smaller?

Against the backdrop of zero to a billion-dollar Cinderella startup stories

and relentless media messaging about exponential growth,

Paul's book is like a breath of fresh air,

advocating for the business sense, freedom, and straight-up sanity of staying small.

In this conversation, we talk about so-called vanity metrics and the downside of setting big,

hairy, audacious goals. Why an obsession with growth tends to make us forsake our boundaries,

and how defining what enough looks like in advance and even defining what more than enough

looks like in advance can help you feel less stressed and more satisfied with your work. Let's get started.

Growth, exponential scale, hustling, these have become the watchwords of what it means to run a business

here in 2019, but your new book, Company of One, rebels against this entire ethos and really

advocates instead for this idea of staying small and being very measured about how you grow your

business. So let's talk first about this idea of hustling. In the book, you cite some research by a psychologist named

Wayne Oates from back in the 1970s in which he found that there was basically zero relationship

between workaholism and greater financial reward or self-efficacy. Could you unpack that? I think that being productive is more

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