Build Something Grand

more grandness, less bigness

I’ve learned a significant life lesson after living in New York City for the last 9 years. That is, there are two ways of building a train station. It can make a traveler feel like they are soaring, high in the sky, like a majestic bird of prey. Or, it can make someone feel like their souls have been savagely eaten by a bird of prey.

Not exaggerating. Just ask the commuters and visitors passing through Grand Central and Penn Station.

At Grand Central, tourists snap photos in front of the iconic clock while commuters quickly make their way to the platforms launching them to their destinations.

Smiles are exchanged. Steps echo and fill the space. People walk with purpose. The materials, structure, color, sounds of hustle and bustle — everything works to create an expansive and liberating setting.

Penn Station, on the other hand, feels like it was constructed to crush any positive feelings one might have toward travel and discovery.

With its low ceilings, poor fluorescent lighting, and wafting, intermingling smells of fast food, Penn Station instigates thoughts of an expanse unmoored from solid ground. Blackened gum covers the floors. Yuck!

Travelers zip around frantically. No tourists visit to take photos. A collective lurching happens as everyone moves to the nearest exit and a way out!

Both stations are big. But only one of them is grand.

Ain’t Life Grand?

I hope it is. As an entrepreneur, I need more grandness in my life.

All entrepreneurs need more grandness in their lives. I think bigness might have quietly taken its place without any of us knowing it.

Remember the controversy stirred up in the early 2000's when Google took on an immense book scanning project with the ultimate goal of digitizing all books ever written in the English language?

Google’s Ngram Viewer is one of the tools made possible by this project. The viewer can track how often a word appears in print as a percentage of all printed words in a given year.

Check out what happens when we type in the words grand and big.

With a relatively brief exception around 1700, as the term grand appeared more in print, the term big appeared less. Now, as the term big appears more in print, the term grand appears less.

grandness and bigness

Many people I interact with often say think big. What they really mean is have a grand vision. Grand visions inspire, motivate, attract. They are worthy of our time and energies.

It might challenge us to think big, but bigness does not satisfy us as entrepreneurs or as people. More often, raw bigness intimidates or stifles. Think of big bureaucracies; big, monstrous spaces; big, souless retail stores; big, inflexible governments.

Smallness is not the answer.

The solution to a big bureaucracy is not a small, overworked team, with no efficiencies. The solution to big government is not small government with limited resources to scrape by for the common good. The solution to a big retail store is not a small retail store unable to connect easily with the best, most useful goods.

Grand ideas break us out of a big-small way of thinking.

Grand ideas can happen in big or small ways, during big or small projects, and tackle big or small challenges. They allow us to think in terms of magnificence instead of magnitude.

As entrepreneurs, and as professionals seeking more purposeful work, have we given ourselves permission to think grandly? I don’t know. Some days I wake up to find myself in a desert of big ideas, when what I really thirst for are grand ones.

a scale of worthiness

Over the last 9 years, I’ve walked through Grand Central countless times. For my first 3 years in the city, it was my main subway stop.

During those first years, I took time to walk through the main concourse when I got off the subway — that big, high ceiling’d room that most people think of when they imagine the station.

It was such a Big Apple experience.

It encouraged me to start my day with a positive outlook. Whatever I had to face at work — excel spreadsheets, scheduling, mundane report writing — I knew I was practicing my craft in the coolest place around. I was reminded that I existed in a world bigger than my cubicle. I was inspirited to think of my work as contributing to a grander vision.

Designers and architects must have operated on a scale of worthiness when constructing Grand Central.

They must have tasked themselves with creating a terminal that functioned as a transit thoroughfair while being worthy of its central location in New York City. They didn’t just set out to build a big train station. Their goal was to create a grand one.

We can do the same.

What is your grand vision? What is worthy of the time and energies invested by your efforts and the efforts of your team, customers, supporters? What grand vision for your business, organization, project will motivate you to look at obstacles in your path as opportunities to discover creative solutions?

Whether our challenges feel too big, or our positions feel too small, we can choose to think grandly. Through doing so, we will accept a responsibility to act in expansive and fearless ways.