Growth is Gravity, Not Heroic Climbing
Most of us think scaling is about growth. It isn’t, Scaling is about resetting the baseline of what feels normal.
From the outside, the word glitters and it conjures images of more. More customers, bigger revenue lines, new markets conquered. The charts slope upward, the stories sound heroic. But if you cut through the noise, scaling is not about expansion. It’s not about acceleration, it is about reprogramming. Reprogramming the invisible standards a system lives by.. the thresholds it refuses to fall below.
You’ve lived this truth, even if you haven’t named it. Take the case of how you work with money. If your “normal” is earning $5K a month, every part of your life organizes itself around sustaining that. Your routines, risks, sense of possibility shape themselves to keep you there. Raise it to $20K, and within months you’re operating.. spending, thinking, planning. That higher number becomes home. Now, drop back to $5K, and the air feels thinner, suffocating. You can still survive, of course, but survival isn’t the point anymore. The point is that your setpoint changed, and once it does, returning back feels like a collapse.
Scaling, in its purest sense, is nothing but the systemic version of this. Companies are organisms, and like all organisms, they operate on reference values.. internal definitions of “acceptable.” Every sales team, every roadmap, every supply chain runs on these invisible setpoints. They are not declared in OKRs or investor decks, but they are more powerful than any target. Because they determine what the system will protect.
This is why good leaders are often obsessed with goals but great leaders over setpoints. A goal can get hit and forgotten. A setpoint, once shifted, never lets the system return to what it once was.
And setpoints don’t live in a single place. They form layers like geological strata, each one shaping the layer beneath.
At the highest layer is intent.. the vision, the kind of company you are declaring yourself to be. Intent doesn’t tell you what to measure. It tells you what direction to walk. “We are the kind of company that wins this way.” Intent is not operational, it is identity.
Beneath that lie the strategic setpoints.. market share thresholds, customer retention levels, the density of talent you allow yourself to tolerate. These are the vital signs of the business. If they hold, the intent pulls closer. If they falter, the vision fades, no matter how hard people work day to day.
Underneath strategy live the operational setpoints.. the things leaders track in weekly meetings. Sales cycle times, Defect tolerances, Marketing velocity, Cost per acquisition, these are the pressure points that sustain strategy, but they don’t exist on their own. They’re constrained and recalibrated by the layers above.
And at the very foundation are the behavioral setpoints.. the ones dashboards never catch. How fast a rep replies to a lead. How a PM immerses in a user’s world before proposing a feature. How often do leaders interrogate their assumptions instead of polishing their metrics? These micro-habits are invisible. But they shape the execution quality more than any quarterly review ever will.
When a company is well-run, these layers don’t drift apart. The top layer.. the intent.. keeps rewriting the layers beneath it before the market forces a rewrite. That’s why great companies feel restless even in their peak years, they’re not tuned to what the present demands. They’re tuned to what the future will demand, they are living one step ahead of necessity.
And this isn’t corporate mechanics.. it’s human mechanics. Your life runs on the same architecture. If your “normal” health cycle is reactive.. work until you crash, then recover.. you’ll never sustain long-term output. If your “normal” learning rhythm becomes unstructured, slow, comfortable.. you’ll fall behind, no matter how talented you are. This is exactly what’s happening now in the age of AI.. Ninety percent of people aren’t “failing” because they lack intelligence. They’re failing because their setpoints haven’t shifted. They’re still operating at yesterday’s baseline while the world has ratcheted up.
But here’s the beautiful thing.. the moment you raise your setpoint.. when deeper focus, faster learning, and greater endurance become your automatic state.. the compounding begins. Now you’re not straining forward, you’re getting pulled by the gravity of a new normal.
The hidden force that makes this possible is the feedback loop. Every setpoint is meaningless without it. A feedback loop is the circuit that senses the gap between reality and reference, then moves to close it. When the loop is fast and strong, the system holds its baseline. When it’s slow or weak, the system drifts into mediocrity. This is true whether you’re talking about your fitness, learning, business unit, or entire company.
The art of scaling is the art of designing loops so tight, so natural, that deviation feels unbearable. The system doesn’t wait for someone to enforce discipline; it self-corrects because anything else feels wrong.
So scaling is not about heroic sprints toward arbitrary goals. It’s about engineering a living hierarchy of setpoints. Each layer attuned to the one above it, each sustained by feedback loops that never allow drift. Do this, and tomorrow’s “normal” becomes stronger than today’s “exceptional.”
That is when growth no longer feels like a climb.. it feels like gravity. A steady pull upward, silent but undeniable, because the entire system has already agreed: this is who we are now.