Thinking Big vs Thinking Small

When you type “Thinking big” on Google translator, you get the result "Bari soch” and for “Thinking small”, unfortunately you get “Chhoti soch”. We see these two phrases dramatically, if Hindi is our mother tongue. The former is seen with great respect while the latter as to be a taboo. There is technology behind the scene which is translating the words here and getting us the results, but luckily our heads don’t go the same way. The greatness of mankind lies in this fact that it created a communication tool called language, but it keeps defying the same by not taking it literally every time. Here, Thinking big or small is not at all about Bari or Chhoti soch. It’s a lot more different from that. 

What if a child recognises its mother standing at the door but haven’t learnt walking or what if he can walk but his mother is no where around. These two situations clearly capture the essence of Thinking big vs Thinking small. The former situation tells that the child has a goal but doesn’t have the necessary means which are the small footsteps and the latter shows the vice-versa. It doesn’t matter how big your idea is, how much beyond normal conventions you can think unless you take care of the complexities and details of that big picture. On the contrary if you are too much engrossed in the complexities and details, your mind might never show you the big horizons and this is what the Marketing management defines as Myopia. There is a lot of buzz around the word Glocalisation which means to do business according to both local and global considerations. Glocalisation is the perfect example of thinking big and thinking small going hand in hand. You have a brand which aspires to be a global one and this is something which we can relate to thinking big kind of aspiration, but at the same time unless you understand the market where you want to enter, unless you think those minute details about who your prospective customers are, you are very likely to end up as a big failure albeit big investments. We have a lot of examples of such global brands like L’oreal who have done a great job across the world by acting locally. Take an example of the iconic Steve Jobs. He had a vision but along with great care and love for that vision, he was very much involved in the microscopic designs of Apple products. If he hadn’t had been that way, probably we would never had got the Macintosh or the iPhone which is a completely different experience to indulge in as far as technology is concerned. So we can see that you might have a great vision or an idea, but unless you get into the intricacies of what your idea would look like and how it has to be manifested, that idea will be no more than just an impulse in your nervous system.

In a nutshell, I would like to say that being humans, it is our basic instinct to look things differently, to revolutionise old dogmas with a new meaning. Then why not to look at this phrase of “Thinking big vs Thinking small” in a completely different way. Let us think both big and small so as to change the way “we do the thinking”.