I don’t remember where I heard this, but something like “If you want the best chance of being successful in business, you should sell hamburgers. People will always buy hamburgers.”

So the bulk of our smartest minds are currently focused on turning everything into hamburgers.

The big problem with focusing on Hamburgerification is that focused attention is a limited resource. Every moment you think about how to turn something into a hamburger is a moment that you aren’t playing, mastering a skill, cultivating empathy, connecting with other humans.

As an early employee at Facebook said: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.”

“How can we turn XXXXX into a hamburger” is a very specific problem. It demands a very specific type of thinking.

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a scalable business. I’m currently doing one myself. But not all businesses can or should be about massive scale.

But when all you have is a billionaire-or-bust sledgehammer, everything looks like a hamburger.