The Real Iceberg Theory: Success In The Age Of Social Media
Ernest Hemingway had this theory about writing:
“If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.
“The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”
Hemingway’s approach has since been dubbed the Iceberg Theory. He believed a good writer doesn’t have to crowd the page with needless details. If the writer knows their subject well enough, they will write only that which is necessary to the reader, exposing just the tip of the iceberg, which is propped up by the burly, submerged weight of their knowledge.
Success works the same way. Success is one giant iceberg.
There’s another quote by Hemingway that I’ve always loved. It was in a letter to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby.
“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway told Fitzgerald. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”
That’s the real Iceberg Theory right there. I call it the Iceberg Illusion.
When it comes to success, we usually only get to see the tip of the iceberg. We see the stars at the movie premiere, not the hundreds of failed auditions they attended.
We see LeBron making a three-pointer, not the thousands he missed whilst practicing.
This article you’re reading right now went through dozens of edits and rewrites before it even came close to being fit to share with you.
In Hemingway’s case, all we get to see is For Whom The Bell Tolls or The Old Man and the Sea. We don’t see the pages upon pages upon pages that Hemingway wrote which only made it as far as his wastebasket.
Hemingway toiled away at those pages just as hard as he did at anything that made it into The Old Man and the Sea, but he understood those pages weren’t up to scratch and rewrote and reworked them until they became one of the greatest works of literature in history.
If you’re not familiar with The Old Man and the Sea, it’s the book that netted Hemingway a Nobel Prize for literature. It’s about 100 pages long and widely regarded by literary critics as flawless.
If we go by Hemingway’s math, he went through 9,900 pages of shit that wasn’t fit to publish in order to achieve his 100 pages of unbridled genius. Those 100 pages are just the tip of the iceberg, the bit you see from land, but holding it up is a giant mound of submerged ice that no one pays any mind to.
You’ve probably heard corny aphorisms like, “People see the glory, not the story.” There’s a reason sayings like that catch on. There are no icebergs that are just the tip. If you want success, get ready to start throwing a lot of shit in the wastebasket.
When you watch a movie, you’re watching hundreds upon hundreds of shots seamlessly and symphonically edited together to create a complete whole. A single shot of one person talking is like a lone violin playing notes amid a grand orchestra.
But that single shot was just one of a handful of useable takes the director and the editor had to choose from.
In order to get that one shot — that one shot that made up maybe a couple of seconds of total screen time — the director had to do dozens of takes that took up hours of everybody’s time.
Sometimes the actor would forget their lines or flub the dialogue or laugh. Sometimes the director just wasn’t getting what they needed from the actor or the scene. Sometimes there were technical issues.
But for whatever reason, they ended up with a few useable takes and a whole bunch of failures.
You may have heard that in order to be successful, you have to make a friend of failure. But how do you do that? Patience.
Meditate over these words from marketing and entrepreneurial guru Seth Godin:
“People always look for excuses. My favourite one is, ‘Well that’s easy for you because you have a really popular blog.’ As if my really popular blog was something I won in the lottery.
“I had a really unpopular blog for three years in a row where 10 or 20 people were reading it. When I got started in the book business, I received 900 rejection letters.
“So you don’t look at the end result — at the Richard Bransons and Maria Popovas — and say, ‘Well they have that thing that I don’t.’ They got that thing by showing up.
“I am really focused on helping people understand that not showing up is a failure of will more than it is a failure of birth.”
Remember how Hemingway needed almost 10,000 pages of unprintable shit to get to 100 pages of flawless genius? He never would’ve gotten to those 100 pages of genius if he hadn’t written those 10,000 pages of shit.
In other words, if you only try something difficult once, your chances of success are slim to nil.
Writing The Old Man and the Sea was thus the process of Hemingway increasing his odds of striking gold, or in this case genius, by writing page after page of shit. Sound exhausting? Too bad.
By failing more, you increase your chances of succeeding. Let’s say you want to get into the YouTube game. Making just one video and hoping it goes viral is handicapping your chances of success.
But if you make dozens and dozens of videos, you’re increasing your chances of one of them going viral. It’s the same for just about anything.
Handing out just one resume severely limits your chances of scoring an interview. If you really want that job, you have to be applying to dozens of employers.
But what if you make hundreds of YouTube videos and you still haven’t gone viral? Like I said, patience.
This is especially important to remember in an age when, for most westerners, social media has effectively expunged struggle and strife from our worldview.
We tune into Instagram and Facebook and gorge ourselves on a diet of glossy images bearing pristine landscapes and beautiful people living blissful, perfect lives.
These glamorised snapshots are fun to look at and the lives we see are certainly worthy of envy, but it’s crucial to remember that many of the stories we see being played out on social media are tantamount to fiction, and that success — that is, the acquisition of your own dream life — will not come without equal measures of hard work and patience.
Just ask Seth Godin, he had 20 readers on his blog for three years before it became a go-to destination for entrepreneurs and marketers.
Obviously he spent much of those three years experimenting with content and attempting different strategies to increase the blog’s popularity, but you can bet most of them weren’t successful.
But he tried, he was persistent, and he was patient.
You’ve heard all the stories:
- The Beatles got rejected from a record label who said their sound was on the way out.
- J.K. Rowling got rejected by dozens of publishers.
- Steven Spielberg was rejected from USC film school three times.
- Tim Ferris was rejected by 25 publishers.
- Sylvester Stallone’s script for Rocky was knocked back 1,500 times.
- Col. Sanders’ chicken recipe was turned down 1,009 times.
- James Dyson made 5,126 prototypes of his vacuum cleaner.
And so on and so on.
In case it still isn’t clear, whether or not you’ll be successful is ultimately a question of how many times you are willing to try.
Ask yourself: How willing are you to put in the work that no one will see? How willing are you to focus on the part that remains submerged under water, as everyone else marvels at one eighth of what it took to make it?
Be honest, do you really want to be one of the icebergs or do you just want to keep hitting ‘like’?
Like what you read? See more of it on my blog, hit me up at my website, or follow me on Twitter.
