Name: Make No Small Plans
Rating: 4.1 (289 reviews)
Author: Elliott Bisnow

Make No Small Plans summary

Elliott Bisnow

Lessons on Thinking Big, Chasing Dreams, and Building Community

4.1 (289 ratings)

22 mins

What is Make No Small Plans about?

Make No Small Plans (2022) is the inside story of how a group of young entrepreneurs created one of the world’s most exciting platforms for global events and conferences – the Summit Series. This isn’t just a chance for them to recount their company’s history, though. Packed with actionable takeaways and business wisdom, this is a book designed to inspire readers on their own entrepreneurial journeys.

Table of Contents

What’s in it for me? Insights into the Summit story.

If you’ve been following modern entrepreneurship, tech, and business culture, you’ve probably heard of Summit.

Summit started with an idea: great things happen when you bring people together and get them talking. That’s not a new idea – it’s why global movers and shakers head to places like Davos and Aspen, after all.

But the guests at those kinds of events are typically already established. They’re presidents and Pulitzer prize winners or the CEOs and CFOs of giant corporations.

What about the next generation, though – the people building the apps and start-ups set to revolutionize tomorrow’s world? What if you brought them together and got them talking?

In 2008, four 20-something entrepreneurs with little hands-on experience and just two college degrees between them decided to find out. Their book, Make No Small Plans, is the story of what happened next.

The short version is that they built Summit, an event company that has become known as a kind of Davos for young entrepreneurs and a hothouse for up-and-coming talent.

Summit’s first iteration, a ski trip in Utah, was a far cry from the kind of events it hosts today. Back then, there were just 19 guests in a poky rented house with shared bedrooms. The beer ran out within half an hour and the shoestring budget barely covered the skiing equipment. But it didn’t matter.

Once those guests got to talking, sparks started flying. They traded ideas, hatched deals, and made plans for the future. Most importantly, they forged lifelong friendships.

After Utah, Summit snowballed. Today, it hosts events all over the world and its list of guest speakers includes the likes of Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Al Gore, and many other recognizable names. The scale of the Summit operation may have changed, but the company’s values remain the same. As the founders’ manifesto puts it, “We believe that the more great people you meet, the more great people you will meet.”

In this Blink, we’re going to learn about the story and spirit of Summit. We’re not going to try to tell you the long version – that’s best left to the authors of Make No Small Plans. Instead, we’ll be zooming in and focusing on five snapshots that capture the philosophy, ideas, and values of these remarkable entrepreneurs.

Along the way, you’ll also learn

why no idea should go unspoken;
how to build meaningful business relationships; and
why it pays to keep things surreal.

Passion sees you over the line when the going gets tough.

People say, do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life. It’s an idea that’s been knocking around so long it’s virtually become conventional wisdom.

Thing is, though, it’s not quite right.

The thinking here is that the things you care about – call them passions, or hobbies – are easy because you want to do them. Work, by contrast, is a chore. A slog. Something you have to do which you’d rather not. Time flies when you’re having fun but the office clock turns unbearably slowly. If doing something you loved also earned you money, it follows, it wouldn’t really be work.

But there’s another way of looking at things. The thing about passion projects is that they make you want to keep going deeper. You keep discovering more complexity. More room for improvement. You also become more critical and more attuned to shortcomings. In short, they turn you into a perfectionist.

It’s the same whatever the activity. Tennis. Playing the guitar. Writing code. You want to get better, but improvement is painful. Playing scales a thousand times sucks. Spending hours practicing your backhand is a chore. Building the 100th basic website is boring.

But you persevere. Put in the hard yards. Complete the drills. It’s precisely because you care that you’re capable of doing the work. Put differently, if you do something you love, you’ll work every single day of your life. And that’s a good thing! Because you’ll be doing something that matters. That expresses your values. That moves you toward your authentic goals.

It’s not a question of work versus passion, then – that’s a false dichotomy. It’s care and interest. If you care, you’ll do the work; if it connects with who you are, if it interests you, the hard and boring parts of the process mean something. That’s what sees you through. That’s what keeps you pushing.

This idea isn’t neatly packaged in Make No Small Plans – it isn’t given a chapter or section of its own. But it shines through on every page and in every story the authors tell. Of course, on its own, that caring isn’t enough for success – there’s so much more that goes into something as complex and big as building a global company. But it’s absolutely foundational. Everything else gets built on top of this commitment.

Key ideas in Make No Small Plans

About the Author

Elliott Bisnow, Jeff Rosenthal, Jeremy Schwartz, and Brett Leve are the cofounders and co-owners of Summit Group, an organization dedicated to fostering a global community of business and thought leaders. They’re also active investors through the Summit Action Fund, an investment vehicle that has backed up-and-coming start-ups like Uber and Warby Parker at critical moments in their development.