Monday morning, early. The door to the meeting room is unlocked and the room is empty. I like getting there first – it lets me see the room before it fills with the people I’m about to sit across from.
There’s a poster on the wall.
GO BIG OR GO HOME.
Text on a silhouette background, designed in-house by a design team that took this sort of thing seriously. Tastefully done – not a free stock-photo print, not a motivational-mousepad cliché, just a line in a clean font over a darker graphic that someone actually thought about. It’s there because someone wanted you to see it.
These meetings are where the bigger decisions land. On good days you leave walking on air. On bad days you leave wondering how you ever convinced anyone to let you in the room. Engineering gets off lightly compared to product and operations – those folks get the full treatment, every week, for the numbers, for the pivot, for everything that didn’t hit. I’ve seen people sit down for one of these meetings and come out changed in an hour.
But the poster works on me too, even when I’m mostly safe. Walking past it puts me in the frame before the room does. It doesn’t taunt. It isn’t trying to shame anyone into ambition. It’s just stating the ambition as the default – the thing you’re already trying to do, the thing everyone in the room is trying to do, named out loud on the wall so you don’t have to pretend otherwise.
There are other posters on other walls. Glass partitions covered in quotes, central pillars with a framed line on each of the four sides. A Steve Jobs “make a dent in the universe” somewhere near the entrance. Others I can’t name now but I’d recognize if I saw them again. All of them designed with the same care – a team that believed the words mattered and that the walls should say them out loud.
It’s a generic line on paper. Go big or go home. Every motivational poster printer sells it. In a coffee shop it would read as clichéd. In this room, surrounded by people who actually believed it and were actually trying – and occasionally actually failing at trying – it wasn’t.
On my better days, the line was the work. On my worse days, it was the question the work was trying to answer.
I get there early so I can read it once, quietly, before the room fills.