I worked my first job at Google for six years and then I quit. I liked the work. It was quantitive, client-facing, and highly analytical—a near-perfect combination that few jobs could match. It is a cliché because it is often true: my colleagues were among the smartest and kindest people I had ever met. Many of them held doctorates in physics, statistics, mathematics, electrical engineering, or computer science from world-class institutions. The scale of the impact was enormous. My final product launch, for which I was the sole engineer, generated more than $1.3 billion per year—more than the GDP of São Tomé and Príncipe. At some point, the large numbers became ordinary, and problems that had once seemed novel became routine OKRs. After so many iterations, launches, and idiosyncratic problems, what truly distinguished one from another? That doubt seeped into how I viewed the culture, the pay, and even the food—it was all cosseting. Was comfort reason enough to stay? I worked on problems to which I felt no real attachment. Sure, sometimes nestled inside were interesting mathematics and analytic relationships to reason, but what did I risk if a launch failed? What did I gain if one succeeded? For the individual employee, risk and reward are tightly bounded on an open set. When failure is systematically met with soft hands, those same hands cannot be expected to pass along the full rewards of success. As *The Power Law* observes, venture capitalists treat what an entrepreneur has given up in pursuit of an idea as evidence of conviction and potential upside. By that measure, I did not and could not give up much. Google, along with many large companies, absorbs the costs of failure and claims the greater share of success; employees receive stability in return. This is the `paradox of institutional scale`: the consequences of the work outgrow the consequences of having done it. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this, and one could certainly argue for it with respect to an individual's incremental value, but it doesn't change the story. If you wish to seize Fortuna, you must first place yourself within her grasp. _— The Ergodic Reader_