Copy the thinking, not the system

One interesting paradox of productivity social media: the most effective personal systems are deliberately non-scalable. They’re optimized for one person’s mental model.

It’s about what you want to do and how you want to do it.

But we always look at mentors trying to copy their results. We see their hindsight view of how they work and assume that’s the blueprint.

For years companies tried to copy the Spotify Model. Squads, tribes, chapters, guilds. The whole thing.

Just to realize that Spotify wasn’t even using it anymore.

It was a utopian vision of how work could happen at a specific moment in Spotify’s life. Not a universal framework.

By the time a system becomes famous enough to copy, it’s already been abandoned by the people who created it.

So when we look at how others do things, we need to understand their input. Their constraints. Their actual daily reality.

Not just the polished model they present at conferences.

Copy the thinking, not the system.