Big Fish. Small Pond.
Write about something your parents always tell you.
My parents always used to tell me that it was better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. For me, this has become a summation of the kind of thinking I’ve had to unlearn to be happy and successful. I think there are a lot of things wrong with this view, particularly as a lesson for children, but this post isn’t about children and it’s not for parents.
This post is for anyone contemplating taking a big step in a new direction. Because while this message was overwhelming overt for me, it’s beat into almost all of us in one way or another, particularly through the public school system. Now as adults, it’s our responsibility to explore and unravel this limiting assumption so we can be free to chase our destinies. So this post is for:
- The high school senior wondering if they should even try to make it as an arts major.
- The behind-the-scenes leader wondering if they should finally demand that promotion.
- The up-and-coming artist considering moving to the big city to jump start their career.
- The undervalued job seeker who isn’t sure they should fight for the title and salary they deserve or just settle for the first offer.
And anyone who thinks that what they have right now is all they are worth simply because they haven’t yet proved they could win in a different situation.
For all of us, let’s unravel why, just maybe, you are worth it.
Risk-Averse instead of Exploratory
The first thing wrong with the “big fish in a small pond is better” approach is that it engenders a risk-averse attitude towards anything you take on in life. This is saying you need to find something you know you can win, or an environment you know you can dominate, and then just do that. Basically, don’t even think about pushing outside of those boundaries because you might just end up being a little fish.
There is very little in life that fits into this box. As you are growing up, before you have your own life experiences and education, about the only things you can look at and feel like your might know how to win are the things your parents do. This leads you to following the footsteps of things you’ve already seen done, instead of finding the thing that is the best fit for your interests and talents.
Occasionally, you might actually be a good fit for the professions your parents or people in your community had, but everything changes with time. The way they did things to become successful is not going to be exactly repeatable today so confining yourself to that box of only what you know will work because you’ve seen it work is actually untrue and almost self-defeating.
This is the hardest piece to unlearn or notice because it presents as an unconscious limiting of your own thoughts and the options you allow yourself to consider. Wehn you are first learning, you think anything is possible — I’m going to be veterinarian AND a rock star — but then you are slowly influenced to only consider options that make those around you comfortable either because they already exist or because you can “prove” they’ll be successful by answering some arbitrary set of questions that they have deemed indicative of success. You’ll start looking to answer those questions too before considering any options, and throwing out anything that doesn’t fit.
The only way to overcome this is to consciously question yourself. Ask if the answers to those questions are even indicative success anymore or in your situation. Are they what you want?Ask if the options you are considering are really the only options. Or are you just trying to find a path to what you want that comes off as “normal”?
Winning instead of Learning/Growing.
Furthermore, that’s not how children learn. As adults we have the mental focus and attention span to make ourselves learn things by rote memorization, but even as adults it’s not a comfortable process. Our brains are designed to learn by exploring, and “Big Fish->Small Pond” teaches us that’s a waste of time. Instead, it implicitly that the only goal worth going after is winning — that if you can’t be the biggest fish in the pond then you are failing.
Placing singular value on winning above learning and exploring discourages you from investing in yourself or your business/vocation. This view doesn’t allow you to value learning, or to see moving from a less masterful and valuable level of your profession into a more masterful and valuable level as success. It discounts all the value that you could provide to the world in doing that simply because it doesn’t ensure you will have won and gotten in charge at the end of the day.
Even worse, once you do get in charge, this view forces you to be incredibly conservative in how you leverage your power and authority. If you lose your seat of power, your whole sense of purpose and personal value will fall apart. Instead of making choices that could expand the ecosystem and the total value available, you are going to try to cut off new opportunities in favor of protecting your own position.
Optimizing for your own value at the expense of others’ doesn’t actually ensure you’ve created value in the world at the end of the day. You could actually have been a net negative, and all for the sake of your ego!
This piece manifests in two ways that are like two sides of a coin. One is never being willing to take a step back to move forward. You want to feel like your decision is obvious and certain when nothing is. You want to be able to answer those “questions of success”, and you are afraid that giving up anything can be considered a failure. So you look at the costs of everything instead of the opportunities. You’ll say things like, “Oh, I can’t move to the head office in the big city because the cost of living is higher there and they aren’t giving me a raise,” ignoring the fact that your hard work now has a much greater effect on the company, and you are way more likely to get a raise or promotion in the next year by being noticed at the head office. Or even that being in a big city with more than one company means you will have the opportunity to move into a better position at another company and negotiate for a higher salary. You want everything to come together and be perfectly convenient so you can feel more sure of your choice.
The other side of this is what drives that absolute need to feel certain in your decisions — it’s this constant, subtle insinuation that you are already a failure because you haven’t won yet. This puts a huge amount of downward pressure on your energy and your ability to persevere through obstacles. It can make anything beyond the basic effort to keep going seem like it’s already a lost cause, and makes it really hard to take those big leaps to new levels. Which is sort of ironic because if you never do that this can often just become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Again, you have to willing to be uncomfortable and question yourself. Nothing is certain, so it’s a waste of time trying to prove to yourself your decision is. Accept the fear of the unknown, track your feelings of fear back to their basis and see if they are rooted in something true.
A lot of times they are — there are way more bad decisions for you out there than good ones. But a lot of times you are also just afraid you are going to look back and regret that you don’t have a two bedroom apartment anymore to keep all your shit in. Or people won’t think you are making it because didn’t buy the newest model of car. Because that’s how people around you answer the questions of success and (^see above) you are limiting your possible versions of success to what they have.
Let’s just be clear. There are a million billion bazillion legitimate ways to live and be happy. You’ve found one that works for you right where you are in a place with limited opportunities to reach you goal. You can find one in a new place with no car and less stuff and 10x times the opportunity too.
Conquest instead of Cooperation
Finally, this view forces you into the mindset that the only way you can be happy and get what you want is to be in charge. It belittles cooperation and all the opportunities for mutual benefit that exist in a large pond in favor of the assurance of power that can be captured in a simpler ecosystem.
I think this is the aspect that completely negates this phrase at the end of the day. My parents told me this because they wanted me to understand how to “really make a difference in the world” and that it’s hard to do in a big city because “you are just a small piece of the puzzle.” But the truth is that even as a small piece of a larger puzzle, you can make a huge impact in cooperation with others.
Working in a small environment does not guarantee impact. In fact, while you may more easily be able to draw direct lines from your actions to outcomes, the smallness of your playing board and its lack of connections to the wider world often minimizes the effect your actions could have had.
The best things are usually built with others.
Since every person wants to feel like they are “winning” and beating all the smaller fish, this comes out in a lot of passive aggressive behavior like never asking for help and tearing others down to legitimize your chosen path to success. However, it all stems from not being willing to recognize things you only contributed to as your own success and therefore significantly undervaluing yourself.
This makes you feel like you are losing. This pushes you to be aggressive in trying to prove yourself. This makes you push away others contributions to ensure you are in control of the situation and can “claim” it. Since one single, unconnected person really can’t accomplish that much, it’s actually quite difficult to prove that your effect was meaningful — even if you did everything you could and made all the best decisions possible in the situation — so at the end of the day you don’t find that security of “winning” that you thought you would.
So you turn to trying to prove yourself and your choices right by tearing down any other paths and belittling others that consider them. And now you’ve become part of the toxic ecosystem that makes people limit the choices they’ll consider to just what makes others comfortable, instead of what can actually get them where they want to go.
How do you know when you’ve succeeded? You don’t.
I regret the things I gave up to prove myself to someone else every day. And the list is long: Singing, Dancing, Music Theatre, Reading, Video Games. Things I loved that I cut out of my life to try to be a little more impressive in the classroom, to build my resume just a little bit more, hoping that at the end of it all someone would finally open the door to my dreams. But it was all a never-ending hall of hoops and mirrors and pointless requirements.
The last five years have also been nothing but sacrifice. Long hours, no money, working on Christmas, the first three years of my marriage tied up in a consulting company, 12 moves in the last 4 years…and don’t get me wrong, there is so much I would do differently — would do better — knowing what I know now. But at least for the first time, I can look back on sacrifices without regret. They were made in direct pursuit of my goals, not for anyone else’s pleasure or approval. So what’s the difference, then?
My mom also used to tell me that she never looked at the monthly statements for their stock portfolio. It went up & down all the time, but regardless, it was the best way to invest and until they were closer to retiring and cashing out “it was only a loss or gain on paper”. This is the advice I wish I would have applied growing up, and what I’d recommend following instead when you are thinking about:
- Starting on an uncertain career path
- Asking someone to validate what you think you are worth
- Moving to a new city
- Fighting for the path you want instead of what’s readily available
All of these things are going to be hard. They might take sacrifice. They might entail change.
You are probably going to go from a situation where you were perfectly comfortable and knew every corner, to one where you are going to not know things a lot. To have to try and do poorly and try again a lot. To be uncomfortable and maybe even be in the wrong and be bad at what you are doing a lot.
And that’s ok. That’s what it takes to move to a new level. To discover the limits of your potential. That’s what it takes to learn and grow. Don’t consider that failure. Until you are ready to cash out, it’s only a loss on paper.
Failure is fighting to prove you are right instead of fighting to figure out what’s right. Failure is wasting time trying to keep yourself comfortable instead of exploring what’s out there. Failure is avoiding learning because it can be hard and sometimes painful. Failure is giving up on growing.
Don’t let anyone else tell you what you are and aren’t worth. What you can and can’t do. Not just any individual person, but also your environment and the ecosystem in which you currently work. Don’t think because you haven’t already moved to the city and made it, that proves that you can’t do it. Very, very few people in this world live in an environment where people just hand them opportunities and say “I think you can do this.” Unless you are reading this from Eton or Harvard, you are probably not one of them.
No kind-hearted mentor is going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you now is the time. The world is never going to give you the permission you think you need to go after your goals. The timing will never be perfect. You make the timing work by accepting the sacrifices it’s going to take and refusing to see them as failures, even if they are a “step back” in life to a smaller place, or less money, or more anonymity. You make the timing perfect by taking advantages of the opportunities available to you at any given moment until you reach your goal.
I am not the biggest fish in the pond anymore. As a manager, day-to-day I can rarely point to anything I’ve personally built — the work is all done by my team. I am not the best at what I am trying to do by far. There is a real, almost definite chance that I never will be. Nobody would look at where I’m at and say I’m “winning” in the super binary sense of actually beating everyone else.
But I’m certainly not failing, either. I’m in a place I love, doing something I like to do, in a way that has more of an impact than just proving to someone else I’m good at it. I have a real chance to make the internet better by the end of the year, particularly in 3rd world countries. I’m finally in a position that challenges me because the questions are legitimately difficult, not because someone has made the environment hard to bear. I’m finally surrounded by people who are as genuinely interested in being challenged as I am and want to work together instead of fight for social scraps. My opportunity to grow and learn in my current position is limited almost exclusively by the amount of time I can commit to it.
When I cash out at the end of the day, I am not going to be able to say I won anything. All I’ll likely be able to point to is that I moved up-and-to-the-right from Point A to Point B with my abilities (and a lot of help). It definitely lacks the psychological assurance of a good, clean win. But while I’m not sure I’ll ever win, I am 100% more certain that all the effort I’m expending is going towards more than just making myself feel comfortable and that I’m not just shoveling other people under the bus to do it. I am 100% more certain that the impact I will have had at the end of the day is an impact that 100 years from now will have grown into a real, measurable, positive thing. And that’s a different kind of certainty — one that really CAN’T be certain — but it’s the one I’d rather have.
Big Fish. Small Pond.
Write about something your parents always tell you.
My parents always used to tell me that it was better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond. For me, this has become a summation of the kind of thinking I’ve had to unlearn to be happy and successful. I think there are a lot of things wrong with this view, particularly as a lesson for children, but this post isn’t about children and it’s not for parents.
This post is for anyone contemplating taking a big step in a new direction. Because while this message was overwhelming overt for me, it’s beat into almost all of us in one way or another, particularly through the public school system. Now as adults, it’s our responsibility to explore and unravel this limiting assumption so we can be free to chase our destinies. So this post is for:
- The high school senior wondering if they should even try to make it as an arts major.
- The behind-the-scenes leader wondering if they should finally demand that promotion.
- The up-and-coming artist considering moving to the big city to jump start their career.
- The undervalued job seeker who isn’t sure they should fight for the title and salary they deserve or just settle for the first offer.
And anyone who thinks that what they have right now is all they are worth simply because they haven’t yet proved they could win in a different situation.
For all of us, let’s unravel why, just maybe, you are worth it.
Risk-Averse instead of Exploratory
The first thing wrong with the “big fish in a small pond is better” approach is that it engenders a risk-averse attitude towards anything you take on in life. This is saying you need to find something you know you can win, or an environment you know you can dominate, and then just do that. Basically, don’t even think about pushing outside of those boundaries because you might just end up being a little fish.
There is very little in life that fits into this box. As you are growing up, before you have your own life experiences and education, about the only things you can look at and feel like your might know how to win are the things your parents do. This leads you to following the footsteps of things you’ve already seen done, instead of finding the thing that is the best fit for your interests and talents.
Occasionally, you might actually be a good fit for the professions your parents or people in your community had, but everything changes with time. The way they did things to become successful is not going to be exactly repeatable today so confining yourself to that box of only what you know will work because you’ve seen it work is actually untrue and almost self-defeating.
This is the hardest piece to unlearn or notice because it presents as an unconscious limiting of your own thoughts and the options you allow yourself to consider. Wehn you are first learning, you think anything is possible — I’m going to be veterinarian AND a rock star — but then you are slowly influenced to only consider options that make those around you comfortable either because they already exist or because you can “prove” they’ll be successful by answering some arbitrary set of questions that they have deemed indicative of success. You’ll start looking to answer those questions too before considering any options, and throwing out anything that doesn’t fit.
The only way to overcome this is to consciously question yourself. Ask if the answers to those questions are even indicative success anymore or in your situation. Are they what you want? Ask if the options you are considering are really the only options. Or are you just trying to find a path to what you want that comes off as “normal”?
Winning instead of Learning/Growing.
Furthermore, that’s not how children learn. As adults we have the mental focus and attention span to make ourselves learn things by rote memorization, but even as adults it’s not a comfortable process. Our brains are designed to learn by exploring, and “Big Fish->Small Pond” teaches us that’s a waste of time. Instead, it implicitly that the only goal worth going after is winning — that if you can’t be the biggest fish in the pond then you are failing.
Placing singular value on winning above learning and exploring discourages you from investing in yourself or your business/vocation. This view doesn’t allow you to value learning, or to see moving from a less masterful and valuable level of your profession into a more masterful and valuable level as success. It discounts all the value that you could provide to the world in doing that simply because it doesn’t ensure you will have won and gotten in charge at the end of the day.
Even worse, once you do get in charge, this view forces you to be incredibly conservative in how you leverage your power and authority. If you lose your seat of power, your whole sense of purpose and personal value will fall apart. Instead of making choices that could expand the ecosystem and the total value available, you are going to try to cut off new opportunities in favor of protecting your own position.
Optimizing for your own value at the expense of others’ doesn’t actually ensure you’ve created value in the world at the end of the day. You could actually have been a net negative, and all for the sake of your ego!
This piece manifests in two ways that are like two sides of a coin. One is never being willing to take a step back to move forward. You want to feel like your decision is obvious and certain when nothing is. You want to be able to answer those “questions of success”, and you are afraid that giving up anything can be considered a failure. So you look at the costs of everything instead of the opportunities.
You’ll say things like, “Oh, I can’t move to the head office in the big city because the cost of living is higher there and they aren’t giving me a raise,” ignoring the fact that your hard work now has a much greater effect on the company, and you are way more likely to get a raise or promotion in the next year by being noticed at the head office. Or even that being in a big city with more than one company means you will have the opportunity to move into a better position at another company and negotiate for a higher salary. You want everything to come together and be perfectly convenient so you can feel more sure of your choice.
The other side of this is what drives that absolute need to feel certain in your decisions — it’s this constant, subtle insinuation that you are already a failure because you haven’t won yet. This puts a huge amount of downward pressure on your energy and your ability to persevere through obstacles. It can make anything beyond the basic effort to keep going seem like it’s already a lost cause, and makes it really hard to take those big leaps to new levels. Which is sort of ironic because if you never do that this can often just become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Again, you have to willing to be uncomfortable and question yourself. Nothing is certain, so it’s a waste of time trying to prove to yourself your decision is. Accept the fear of the unknown, track your feelings of fear back to their basis and see if they are rooted in something true.
A lot of times they are — there are way more bad decisions for you out there than good ones. But a lot of times you are also just afraid you are going to look back and regret that you don’t have a two bedroom apartment anymore to keep all your shit in. Or people won’t think you are making it because didn’t buy the newest model of car. Because that’s how people around you answer the questions of success and (^see above) you are limiting your possible versions of success to what they have.
Let’s just be clear. There are a million billion bazillion legitimate ways to live and be happy. You’ve found one that works for you right where you are in a place with limited opportunities to reach you goal. You can find one in a new place with no car and less stuff and 10x times the opportunity too.
Conquest instead of Cooperation
Finally, this view forces you into the mindset that the only way you can be happy and get what you want is to be in charge. It belittles cooperation and all the opportunities for mutual benefit that exist in a large pond in favor of the assurance of power that can be captured in a simpler ecosystem.
I think this is the aspect that completely negates this phrase at the end of the day. My parents told me this because they wanted me to understand how to “really make a difference in the world” and that it’s hard to do in a big city because “you are just a small piece of the puzzle.” But the truth is that even as a small piece of a larger puzzle, you can make a huge impact in cooperation with others.
Working in a small environment does not guarantee impact. In fact, while you may more easily be able to draw direct lines from your actions to outcomes, the smallness of your playing board and its lack of connections to the wider world often minimizes the effect your actions could have had.
The best things are usually built with others.
Since every person wants to feel like they are “winning” and beating all the smaller fish, this comes out in a lot of passive aggressive behavior like never asking for help and tearing others down to legitimize your chosen path to success. However, it all stems from not being willing to recognize things you only contributed to as your own success and therefore significantly undervaluing yourself.
This makes you feel like you are losing. This pushes you to be aggressive in trying to prove yourself. This makes you push away others contributions to ensure you are in control of the situation and can “claim” it. Since one single, unconnected person really can’t accomplish that much, it’s actually quite difficult to prove that your effect was meaningful — even if you did everything you could and made all the best decisions possible in the situation — so at the end of the day you don’t find that security of “winning” that you thought you would.
So you turn to trying to prove yourself and your choices right by tearing down any other paths and belittling others that consider them. And now you’ve become part of the toxic ecosystem that makes people limit the choices they’ll consider to just what makes others comfortable, instead of what can actually get them where they want to go.
How do you know when you’ve succeeded? You don’t.
I regret the things I gave up to prove myself to someone else every day. And the list is long: Singing, Dancing, Music Theatre, Reading, Video Games. Things I loved that I cut out of my life to try to be a little more impressive in the classroom, to build my resume just a little bit more, hoping that at the end of it all someone would finally open the door to my dreams. But it was all a never-ending hall of hoops and mirrors and pointless requirements.
The last five years have also been nothing but sacrifice. Long hours, no money, working on Christmas, the first three years of my marriage tied up in a consulting company, 12 moves in the last 4 years…and don’t get me wrong, there is so much I would do differently — would do better — knowing what I know now. But at least for the first time, I can look back on sacrifices without regret. They were made in direct pursuit of my goals, not for anyone else’s pleasure or approval. So what’s the difference, then?
My mom also used to tell me that she never looked at the monthly statements for their stock portfolio. It went up & down all the time, but regardless, it was the best way to invest and until they were closer to retiring and cashing out “it was only a loss or gain on paper”. This is the advice I wish I would have applied growing up, and what I’d recommend following instead when you are thinking about:
- Starting on an uncertain career path
- Asking someone to validate what you think you are worth
- Moving to a new city
- Fighting for the path you want instead of what’s readily available
All of these things are going to be hard. They might take sacrifice. They might entail change.
You are probably going to go from a situation where you were perfectly comfortable and knew every corner, to one where you are going to not know things a lot. To have to try and do poorly and try again a lot. To be uncomfortable and maybe even be in the wrong and be bad at what you are doing a lot.
And that’s ok. That’s what it takes to move to a new level. To discover the limits of your potential. That’s what it takes to learn and grow. Don’t consider that failure. Until you are ready to cash out, it’s only a loss on paper.
Failure is fighting to prove you are right instead of fighting to figure out what’s right. Failure is wasting time trying to keep yourself comfortable instead of exploring what’s out there. Failure is avoiding learning because it can be hard and sometimes painful. Failure is giving up on growing.
Don’t let anyone else tell you what you are and aren’t worth. What you can and can’t do. Not just any individual person, but also your environment and the ecosystem in which you currently work. Don’t think because you haven’t already moved to the city and made it, that proves that you can’t do it. Very, very few people in this world live in an environment where people just hand them opportunities and say “I think you can do this.” Unless you are reading this from Eton or Harvard, you are probably not one of them.
No kind-hearted mentor is going to tap you on the shoulder and tell you now is the time. The world is never going to give you the permission you think you need to go after your goals. The timing will never be perfect. You make the timing work by accepting the sacrifices it’s going to take and refusing to see them as failures, even if they are a “step back” in life to a smaller place, or less money, or more anonymity. You make the timing perfect by taking advantages of the opportunities available to you at any given moment until you reach your goal.
I am not the biggest fish in the pond anymore. As a manager, day-to-day I can rarely point to anything I’ve personally built — the work is all done by my team. I am not the best at what I am trying to do by far. There is a real, almost definite chance that I never will be. Nobody would look at where I’m at and say I’m “winning” in the super binary sense of actually beating everyone else.
But I’m certainly not failing, either. I’m in a place I love, doing something I like to do, in a way that has more of an impact than just proving to someone else I’m good at it. I have a real chance to make the internet better by the end of the year, particularly in 3rd world countries. I’m finally in a position that challenges me because the questions are legitimately difficult, not because someone has made the environment hard to bear. I’m finally surrounded by people who are as genuinely interested in being challenged as I am and want to work together instead of fight for social scraps. My opportunity to grow and learn in my current position is limited almost exclusively by the amount of time I can commit to it.
When I cash out at the end of the day, I am not going to be able to say I won anything. All I’ll likely be able to point to is that I moved up-and-to-the-right from Point A to Point B with my abilities (and a lot of help). It definitely lacks the psychological assurance of a good, clean win. But while I’m not sure I’ll ever win, I am 100% more certain that all the effort I’m expending is going towards more than just making myself feel comfortable and that I’m not just shoveling other people under the bus to do it. I am 100% more certain that the impact I will have had at the end of the day is an impact that 100 years from now will have grown into a real, measurable, positive thing. And that’s a different kind of certainty — one that really CAN’T be certain — but it’s the one I’d rather have.
