## Atomic Insight Will Larson inverts the obvious read of a team stuck firefighting: "You rarely get to this place by failing, rather it's almost always a sign that you're succeeding faster than you can sustain." Fire fixation isn't evidence of a bad team — it's what a good team's success looks like once growth outpaces the systems built to absorb it, which is exactly why it's dangerous: nothing about the symptom signals "something is wrong" the way a failure would. Larson illustrates with early Stripe: a small team accomplished a tremendous amount by moving so rapidly between projects that they left an "afterimage" behind them, appearing to be everywhere simultaneously — "as long as you don't ask what the team was working on at a given moment, they truly are doing everything. But if you do ask, then suddenly they're frozen into a single task, surrounded by a sea of unstaffed projects." The very velocity that produced the success is what later reads as the fire-fixation pattern; the common advice to "do things that don't scale" until product-market fit is exactly what sets this up, since the aftermath is often a strong case of it. **Cross-Domain Connections**: [[The Firefighting Reward Loop Outcompetes Durable Engineering Work]], [[WIP Limits Only Work Before Existential Fires Outnumber Your Team]] ## Source - [[Fire Fixation]] — Will Larson, *Irrational Exuberance*, 2019-03-23 — https://lethain.com/fire-fixation/