{"id":4252,"date":"2019-11-28T08:47:28","date_gmt":"2019-11-28T12:47:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=4252"},"modified":"2022-03-11T15:38:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T19:38:02","slug":"what-is-scalability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/what-is-scalability\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Scalability? (And Why Should You Care?)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What is scalability? How does scalability affect our lives? When is scalability a good thing? When is it a negative thing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scalability is the characteristic or ability of a company or process to grow and adapt to changing demands. In the scalable parts of our lives, physical limits don\u2019t apply and effects tend toward incredible extremes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ll further explore the scalability definition above, cover how scalability affects our lives, and cover which areas of our lives are most impacted by scalability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

What Is Scalability?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One reason that Black Swans<\/a> are so profoundly disruptive is that they occur in the \u201cscalable\u201d parts of our lives\u2014where physical limits don\u2019t apply and effects tend toward incredible extremes. When a particular thing\u2014an income, an audience for a particular product\u2014is \u201cscalable,\u201d it can grow without any additional expenditure of effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To answer the question, What is scalability?<\/em> let’s look at careers as an example.
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\u201cMassage therapist,\u201d for example, is a \u201cnonscalable\u201d profession. There is an upper limit on how many clients you can see\u2014there\u2019s only so much time in a day, and therapists\u2019 bodies fatigue\u2014and thus there\u2019s only so much income you can expect from that profession.
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\u201cQuantitative trader,\u201d however, is a \u201cscalable\u201d <\/em>profession. It takes no additional energy or time to purchase 5,000 shares of a stock than 50, and your income isn\u2019t limited by physical constraints.
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Artists, too, are in a scalable profession (at least in the age of digital reproduction). For instance, a singer doesn\u2019t need to perform her hit song each time someone wants to hear it. She performs it once for the record, and that performance can be disseminated widely.
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What is scalability?<\/em> It’s the ability of something to grow with increased resources. The problem with scalability is that it creates vast inequalities. Let\u2019s look at the singer example again:
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