"You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction"
About this Quote
Toffler isn’t selling day-planners; he’s warning you about drift. “Big things” and “small things” sounds like generic motivational talk until you remember his actual obsession: acceleration. In a world where technology, work, and norms mutate faster than institutions can digest, the default setting is fragmentation. You can be busy all day and still end up somewhere you didn’t mean to go.
The line works because it frames scale as a moral and strategic problem, not a productivity hack. “While you’re doing” matters: Toffler refuses the fantasy that you first design a perfect life, then execute it. Real life is lived in interruptions, emails, errands, and incremental decisions. The subtext is that small actions are not neutral. They are votes cast for a future, often without you noticing you’re voting.
His phrasing also smuggles in a critique of modern labor: specialization encourages people to treat tasks as isolated units, divorced from consequences. Think about the engineer optimizing engagement metrics, the bureaucrat following procedure, the worker “just doing their job.” Toffler’s sentence is an antidote to that ethical outsourcing. If you don’t keep the “big” in view - purpose, impact, direction - systems will supply one for you, and it will usually be whatever scales, whatever sells, whatever’s easiest to measure.
Written by a futurist who chronicled “future shock,” it’s less pep talk than survival strategy: maintain a North Star, because the currents are getting stronger.
The line works because it frames scale as a moral and strategic problem, not a productivity hack. “While you’re doing” matters: Toffler refuses the fantasy that you first design a perfect life, then execute it. Real life is lived in interruptions, emails, errands, and incremental decisions. The subtext is that small actions are not neutral. They are votes cast for a future, often without you noticing you’re voting.
His phrasing also smuggles in a critique of modern labor: specialization encourages people to treat tasks as isolated units, divorced from consequences. Think about the engineer optimizing engagement metrics, the bureaucrat following procedure, the worker “just doing their job.” Toffler’s sentence is an antidote to that ethical outsourcing. If you don’t keep the “big” in view - purpose, impact, direction - systems will supply one for you, and it will usually be whatever scales, whatever sells, whatever’s easiest to measure.
Written by a futurist who chronicled “future shock,” it’s less pep talk than survival strategy: maintain a North Star, because the currents are getting stronger.
Quote Details
| Topic | Vision & Strategy |
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