Deep Life Reflections: Friday Five
Issue 106 - Gecko
Welcome to Issue 106 of Deep Life Reflections, where each week I share my thoughts on what I’m enjoying and thinking about.
This week I’ve been thinking about growth—and the cost of chasing it. Growth is hard-wired into our systems, our businesses, even our language. But that doesn’t mean it’s always the right path. To explore this idea, I’m reading Paul Jarvis’ Company of One—a quiet manifesto for staying small—and revisiting one of the 1980s’ sharpest portrayals of greed and ambition: Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. It all leads to a deeper question: is growth truly what’s needed or just what’s expected?
Join me as we explore this week’s Friday Five.
1. What I’m Reading
Company of One. By Paul Jarvis.
“We don’t need an attitude of world domination and crushing it in our work in order to make a great living or even have a substantial impact. Our work can start and finish small while still being useful—focused on moving toward being better instead of more.” – Paul Jarvis, Company of One.
Growth is one of the most celebrated words in modern life. It’s assumed to be good—morally, socially, even spiritually. If we’re not growing, we’re standing still. Or worse, failing. It’s hard to think of a word more positively associated with being human.
In business, growth isn’t just expected, it’s demanded. Organisations are built on the assumption that scale is the only direction. Bigger teams, bigger clients, bigger goals. It’s the default.
But growth doesn’t have to mean bigger—and success can still be achieved by staying small.
Paul Jarvis left the creative agency he worked for because they prioritised the next sale over the clients they already had. His goal was simple: find a new agency that better suited his desire to build relationships. But then his former clients started calling him. They wanted to know which new agency he was joining so they could move with him. It suddenly hit him for the first time—what if I did this alone?
It sounds like a typical story—leave the agency, go solo, apply the skills you’ve learned. But what makes Jarvis’ story so jarringly different is his commitment to stay small on purpose. To not scale. To not hustle. His book, Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business is a quiet manifesto against the idea that scale equals success.
Jarvis makes the case for just the opposite: that staying small offers more freedom, more time, and fewer of the headaches that come with traditional growth-oriented businesses. He’s still working with those same clients—just with more freedom and stronger relationships than ever. His focus is on being better rather than being bigger.
In 2010, Jarvis and his wife left their city life in downtown Vancouver for the remote island town of Tofino on Vancouver Island—population: under 2,000. He scaled down every aspect of his life, and with that came clarity. He realised he’d been quietly building a business “full of resilience, driven by a desire for autonomy and, on most days, enjoyment” for two decades—without consciously recognising the model he’d already built.
Importantly, Jarvis isn’t anti-growth or anti-revenue. He’s anti-default. He argues growth should be a choice, not a reflex—something to question. Not out of principle, but because it might not always be the best path. He’s advocating for being more intentional rather than blindly pursuing what is traditionally accepted as the only path.
Society has ingrained in us a very particular idea of what success in business looks like. You work as many hours as possible, and when your business starts to do well (or even before it starts to do well), you scale everything up in every direction. This is the engine of hustle culture. But research shows the only noticeable impact of this mindset is higher job stress, greater work-life conflict, and deteriorating health.
Jarvis believes an organisation’s default tendency to solve problems by adding ‘more’ to the solution is a problem in itself. It suggests anyone who stays small hasn’t done well enough to add ‘more’ to the mix.
Jarvis challenges this thinking, asking:
“What if staying small is what a company does when it’s figured out how to solve problems without adding ‘more’ to them?”
This reframes success not as accumulation but as clarity.
In this way, we all have the potential to be a company of one—whether you run your own business, or work inside someone else’s.
The question isn’t whether you can grow. It’s whether you need to.
2. What I’m Watching
Wall Street. 1987. Directed by Oliver Stone.
Lower Manhattan, 1985. It’s one of the longest bull runs in U.S. stock market history. Brick-sized mobile phones. Slick-backed hair. Striped shirts with white collars. Chunky beige monitors flashing green text on black screens. This is Wall Street—Oliver Stone’s hugely entertaining critique of unchecked capitalism, dressed up as a morality tale for the MTV generation.
Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is a hungry young trader desperate to make it. His idol is Gordon Gekko (an Oscar-winning Michael Douglas), a ruthless corporate raider who doesn’t believe in lunch, handouts, or a world without information—“the most valuable commodity I know”. When Bud finally gets his two minutes with Gekko, he’ll do anything to stay in the room—even if it means selling his soul.
His real-life father, Martin Sheen, plays his onscreen father too, and he’s the moral compass of the film. A union man, the embodiment of hard work. Blue-collar. Principled and proud. Gekko is the other kind of father-figure: magnetic, mythic, and dangerous. One offers values. The other offers victory. It takes Bud the full length of the film to realise which path is the right one.
It's been almost 40 years since Wall Street. While the technology and fashions are outdated, the ideology and motivations are evergreen. What drove people then drives them now. If anything, the divide between the haves and have-nots is even greater in 2025.
Michael Douglas is brilliant as the slick and smooth Gekko, delivering the film’s most famous (and misquoted) line: “Greed is good.” Except that’s not quite what he says. The real quote deserves closer inspection:
“The point is ladies and gentlemen, greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit…Greed, in all its forms—greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind.”
Gekko doesn’t sound like a villain. He sounds like a philosopher. That’s the brilliance of Stone’s writing. There is a logic to Gekko’s speech. It’s seductive because it contains just enough truth. He gives greed a new costume: progress. And who doesn’t want progress?
Gekko is immoral but he’s not stupid. He knows exactly what to say. Gekko is about taking. He worships growth not because it builds anything, but because it elevates him, feeding his ego. He doesn’t want to create; he wants to consume.
Depending on who’s watching, Gordon Gekko is either a role model or a parasite. That ambiguity makes him dangerous. Through Gekko, Wall Street gives a face and voice to unrestrained ambition and the transfer of power. As he says later in the film:
“Money isn’t made or lost. It’s simply transferred from one perception to another.”
It frames wealth not as something created but captured. A sleight of hand. The seduction of more, presented in a way that shows not only that it’s possible, but that not taking it would be the real crime.
The chameleon in full colour—blending into whatever story sells.
Stone was onto something.
3. What I’m Contemplating
There is a clear contrast in the two featured works this week. In Company of One, Paul Jarvis offers restraint, while in Wall Street, Gordon Gekko offers scale.
One says: better. The other: more.
That tension is everywhere in business today. Growth is still the default setting—often unquestioned, often glorified. But I admire those, like Jarvis, who’ve intentionally stayed small. Not out of rebellion, but because it works for them and their business. It offers more freedom, more focus, and potentially stronger relationships. It’s a different kind of success. And, critically, they are still financially successful.
That’s the approach I’ve taken with Deep Life Journey—working with a small number of coaching clients, building and nurturing each of those relationships with care, and avoiding scale for scale’s sake. I was always clear about my approach and I’m glad I had that clarity from the start. It’s the same with my newsletter. If it reaches more people, great. But I’d rather have 50 readers who value it than 50,000 who delete it unread.
I see many small businesses chasing growth and scale. LinkedIn is full of these posts. And maybe that’s the right move for them. But I think it’s worth asking two questions:
Is scale what’s really needed or just what’s expected?
Is the desire for growth ambition or insecurity in disguise?
Staying small comes with its own rewards.
The freedom to be selective.
To have more control.
To spend more of your time using your skills to help others—and be well paid for it.
In a world obsessed with more, there’s another way to grow.
4. A Quote to note
“There’s no such thing as perpetual growth. Yet, that’s what traditional business people crave. But what is growth meant to achieve? If Oxford University is so successful, then why isn’t there a branch in Washington, D.C.? If a symphony is successful with 120 musicians, why not even more so with 600? “To grow bigger” is not much of an effective business strategy at all.”
- Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco Partners
5. A Question for you
Where in your life are you chasing growth out of habit rather than intention?
Thanks for reading and being part of the Deep Life Journey community. If you have any reflections on this issue, please leave a comment. Have a great weekend.
James
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