A Big Fish in a Small Pond: for many years I assumed it was better to be a big fish in a small pond than to try to be a big fish in the ocean. This can be decomposed into a series of mistakes, only part of which I learned to overcome so far.
1)It is based on the premise that social rankings matter more than they actually do. Most of day to day life is determined by environment, and being in a better environment, surrounded by better and different people is more valuable experientially and in terms of output than being a big fish in a small pond.
2)It encouraged blindspots. The more dimensions in which I was the big fish, the more dimensions nearby in vector space I failed to optimize. The most starking one: having a high linguistic IQ and large vocabulary made me care little about grammar and foreign languages.
3)One of the reasons for me to want to be big at a small pond was reading positive psychology showing most people prefer a 50k income in a 25k average world than a 75k in a 100k average. I was unable to disentangle “empirical study”, which serves to inform me into two very distinct sets. “Empirical study about how people actually feel in different situations” and “Empirical study about how people judge abstract counterfactual situations with numbers attached to them”. I was very proud of taking science seriously into my life (which in fact most people don’t), but I was taking the part of science that is specifically about people being wrong without noticing, in my reckless youth.
4)It has a unidimensional function Max(deltaBigness) which doesn’t capture the complexity and beauty of our actual multidimensional lives and feelings. There are millions of axes in which it is personally valuable to nudge, to push, to move, and to optimize, relative importance is a relatively unimportant one.
I think this depends on how exactly the big fish treat the small fish in the pond/ocean. For example, if you take a job where your colleagues are more skilled than you, which of the following scenarios is more likely?
a) You will have a lot of opportunity to learn from your colleagues: you will be able to watch them work, to see how they solve problems; if you make a mistake they will explain you what that was wrong and what you could have done instead. You will learn a lot, and a few years later you will be one of those experts.
b) You will be the at the bottom of the status ladder, and everyone will treat you accordingly. You will always get the worst work that everyone else wants to avoid (for a good reason), and also the worst tools because no one cares about you. Your more respected colleagues will pick any promissing projects first. A few years later you realize you are getting old and you were never allowed to touch anything remotely interesting.
I think both situations happen; and when the environment is abusive towards the lower-status people it is better to be the big fish in the small pond. Then use all the opportunity to learn, so you can later switch to a greater pond.
(Of course it would be better to find a supportive environment instead, but that is sometimes easier said than done.)
Exactly this. I am a big fish in a small pond. I have been seriously programming for about a year now and I am far and away the most technically skilled person at my (completely-non-technically-focused) business.
I have learned more in this past year than I did through all 4.5 years of college. I am given a tremendous amount of freedom in the approach I take to solving problems which allows me to constantly say to myself, “hey, the way I’ve been doing this before works...but I bet I can take an hour and learn a better way.”
Initially I was writing VBA macros to automate the more menial aspects of my job. That eventually became insufficient for what I wanted to do and I moved on to C# and wrote a sizeable WinForms application which expanded my automation to other departments within the company. This eventually led to a promotion to a more formally technical position and I now have the pleasure of learning the ropes of ASP.NET, JavaScript, CSS to continue the development of our online inventory tracking system—used by employees, clients and various business partners.
(I use “pleasure” a bit loosely as web programming is turning out to be far more absurd than anything I’ve done in desktop development. I’ve spent hours and hours working around various quirks that only affect specific versions of IE under certain circumstances. Which I’m sure is par for the course but holy hell what a culture shock.)
I have gotten better at dealing with internal bureaucracy and politics; I’ve learned how to speak slower and give effective, understandable presentations; and I’ve become proficient at learning the ins and outs of a business that I have no inherent interest in outside of the fact that understanding it allows me to design more effective software for the people I work with day in and day out.
While my situation is certainly not the norm, being a “big fish in a small pond” can open many doors for personal growth and learning if you are fortunate enough to find yourself in a job where you are able, willing and allowed to exploit your position to relentlessly learn and improve your skills throughout the course of everyday activity.
edit: more in the spirit of the thread, this sort of position can lead to a lot of undeserved self confidence and leads to some harsh wakeup calls when you run across a big fish in a big pond. It can also get rather lonely when you don’t have a mentor figure to turn to on a daily basis and more or less have to wing things you don’t quite understand yet. I’ve had several moments of intense embarrassment where, leaning on past successes, I pushed my position far too aggressively and ended up unnecessarily costing myself and my company time and money that could have been better spent elsewhere.
Yeah, being the big fish can give you great opportunity for autonomous growth, because there is no one to revise all your decisions. Or a great opportunity to sleep on your laurels. Different people will use the same opportunity very differently.
Re: JavaScript.
It has essentially two parts: the language itself (objects, functions), and the browser-specific stuff (DOM). My advice is to learn the language itself well, but use JQuery for everything DOM-related.
I tend to think like that and I tend to see how 1) is indeed a mistake. I would now prefer to be surrounded by brighter people than being the locally brightest. I am not sure I understand 2) and 3) is interesting I am not sure I understand 4) but maybe I can add a 5) it all comes from school socializing us to classroom sizes. We are used to thinking what matters to be the best of the local 30. Lesson: de-schooling, learning how comparisons over 30 people, say, eight billion, work. Our local school brightest would be nobody at MIRI.
On the topic of social rankings, it seems that physical attractiveness, which seems to cause higher social ranking, may actually be confounded by variables like confidence. Or alternatively, physical attractiveness confounds confidence. I’m sure there’s a statistical term for this, I just don’t know it. I’ve based this on personal experience. Here are some quotes from Quora answers from people who self-claim attactiveness to illustrate:
for men:
‘What a lot of guys don’t realize is that the power that comes from being attractive comes more from the internal things you develop by being attractive (confidence, charisma, boldness etc) and not physical attributes. I know guys with average looks who get with more girls than me, or are more captivating speakers, or more popular. I didn’t have to work at any of those things, but guys who did and did it well can often do it better.’
for women it may be very different. In fact, looking into this, it seems like at least one woman differentiates men’s interest into predatorial and admiratory:
‘There is enough and more sexual and romantic attention. You start taking it for granted and sometimes are a little afraid of it. The truth is that you become a little cynical and jaded because most of these men aren’t really interested in you as a person. You are either a conquest or a trophy. There are exceptions of course, but they are not so easy to come by. And some attentions that are forced upon you are intrusive and sometimes even violative (I have been stalked twice).’
Interestingly, she doesn’t pass any value judgements, implying either doesn’t change their social status...rather, she feels it lowers her social status, as if it devalues her non physical traits.
That being says, she goes on to say:
‘A lot of women, including me, say that they would be valued more for their mind than their looks. I have been thinking about this lately about why intelligence should be valued over looks, although the more immediate reaction is the opposite. Beauty is ephemeral. But the mind fades too. You are blessed/cursed with either by some random genetic lottery and neither determines what good you do in the world, how you treat people or your moral compass (everyone has their own moraltiy, that they fall short of). In a work situation, I’d obviously prefer my competence to be appreciated. But otherwise I wonder how it matters.’
Suggesting she’s not just buying into traditional values and has calculated that her beauty depreciates faster than her intellect, and she isn’t confident in her ability to trade for a man’s attention in the long term.
A Big Fish in a Small Pond: for many years I assumed it was better to be a big fish in a small pond than to try to be a big fish in the ocean. This can be decomposed into a series of mistakes, only part of which I learned to overcome so far.
1)It is based on the premise that social rankings matter more than they actually do. Most of day to day life is determined by environment, and being in a better environment, surrounded by better and different people is more valuable experientially and in terms of output than being a big fish in a small pond.
2)It encouraged blindspots. The more dimensions in which I was the big fish, the more dimensions nearby in vector space I failed to optimize. The most starking one: having a high linguistic IQ and large vocabulary made me care little about grammar and foreign languages.
3)One of the reasons for me to want to be big at a small pond was reading positive psychology showing most people prefer a 50k income in a 25k average world than a 75k in a 100k average. I was unable to disentangle “empirical study”, which serves to inform me into two very distinct sets. “Empirical study about how people actually feel in different situations” and “Empirical study about how people judge abstract counterfactual situations with numbers attached to them”. I was very proud of taking science seriously into my life (which in fact most people don’t), but I was taking the part of science that is specifically about people being wrong without noticing, in my reckless youth.
4)It has a unidimensional function Max(deltaBigness) which doesn’t capture the complexity and beauty of our actual multidimensional lives and feelings. There are millions of axes in which it is personally valuable to nudge, to push, to move, and to optimize, relative importance is a relatively unimportant one.
I think this depends on how exactly the big fish treat the small fish in the pond/ocean. For example, if you take a job where your colleagues are more skilled than you, which of the following scenarios is more likely?
a) You will have a lot of opportunity to learn from your colleagues: you will be able to watch them work, to see how they solve problems; if you make a mistake they will explain you what that was wrong and what you could have done instead. You will learn a lot, and a few years later you will be one of those experts.
b) You will be the at the bottom of the status ladder, and everyone will treat you accordingly. You will always get the worst work that everyone else wants to avoid (for a good reason), and also the worst tools because no one cares about you. Your more respected colleagues will pick any promissing projects first. A few years later you realize you are getting old and you were never allowed to touch anything remotely interesting.
I think both situations happen; and when the environment is abusive towards the lower-status people it is better to be the big fish in the small pond. Then use all the opportunity to learn, so you can later switch to a greater pond.
(Of course it would be better to find a supportive environment instead, but that is sometimes easier said than done.)
Exactly this. I am a big fish in a small pond. I have been seriously programming for about a year now and I am far and away the most technically skilled person at my (completely-non-technically-focused) business.
I have learned more in this past year than I did through all 4.5 years of college. I am given a tremendous amount of freedom in the approach I take to solving problems which allows me to constantly say to myself, “hey, the way I’ve been doing this before works...but I bet I can take an hour and learn a better way.”
Initially I was writing VBA macros to automate the more menial aspects of my job. That eventually became insufficient for what I wanted to do and I moved on to C# and wrote a sizeable WinForms application which expanded my automation to other departments within the company. This eventually led to a promotion to a more formally technical position and I now have the pleasure of learning the ropes of ASP.NET, JavaScript, CSS to continue the development of our online inventory tracking system—used by employees, clients and various business partners.
(I use “pleasure” a bit loosely as web programming is turning out to be far more absurd than anything I’ve done in desktop development. I’ve spent hours and hours working around various quirks that only affect specific versions of IE under certain circumstances. Which I’m sure is par for the course but holy hell what a culture shock.)
I have gotten better at dealing with internal bureaucracy and politics; I’ve learned how to speak slower and give effective, understandable presentations; and I’ve become proficient at learning the ins and outs of a business that I have no inherent interest in outside of the fact that understanding it allows me to design more effective software for the people I work with day in and day out.
While my situation is certainly not the norm, being a “big fish in a small pond” can open many doors for personal growth and learning if you are fortunate enough to find yourself in a job where you are able, willing and allowed to exploit your position to relentlessly learn and improve your skills throughout the course of everyday activity.
edit: more in the spirit of the thread, this sort of position can lead to a lot of undeserved self confidence and leads to some harsh wakeup calls when you run across a big fish in a big pond. It can also get rather lonely when you don’t have a mentor figure to turn to on a daily basis and more or less have to wing things you don’t quite understand yet. I’ve had several moments of intense embarrassment where, leaning on past successes, I pushed my position far too aggressively and ended up unnecessarily costing myself and my company time and money that could have been better spent elsewhere.
Yeah, being the big fish can give you great opportunity for autonomous growth, because there is no one to revise all your decisions. Or a great opportunity to sleep on your laurels. Different people will use the same opportunity very differently.
Re: JavaScript.
It has essentially two parts: the language itself (objects, functions), and the browser-specific stuff (DOM). My advice is to learn the language itself well, but use JQuery for everything DOM-related.
I tend to think like that and I tend to see how 1) is indeed a mistake. I would now prefer to be surrounded by brighter people than being the locally brightest. I am not sure I understand 2) and 3) is interesting I am not sure I understand 4) but maybe I can add a 5) it all comes from school socializing us to classroom sizes. We are used to thinking what matters to be the best of the local 30. Lesson: de-schooling, learning how comparisons over 30 people, say, eight billion, work. Our local school brightest would be nobody at MIRI.
On the topic of social rankings, it seems that physical attractiveness, which seems to cause higher social ranking, may actually be confounded by variables like confidence. Or alternatively, physical attractiveness confounds confidence. I’m sure there’s a statistical term for this, I just don’t know it. I’ve based this on personal experience. Here are some quotes from Quora answers from people who self-claim attactiveness to illustrate:
for men:
‘What a lot of guys don’t realize is that the power that comes from being attractive comes more from the internal things you develop by being attractive (confidence, charisma, boldness etc) and not physical attributes. I know guys with average looks who get with more girls than me, or are more captivating speakers, or more popular. I didn’t have to work at any of those things, but guys who did and did it well can often do it better.’
for women it may be very different. In fact, looking into this, it seems like at least one woman differentiates men’s interest into predatorial and admiratory:
‘There is enough and more sexual and romantic attention. You start taking it for granted and sometimes are a little afraid of it. The truth is that you become a little cynical and jaded because most of these men aren’t really interested in you as a person. You are either a conquest or a trophy. There are exceptions of course, but they are not so easy to come by. And some attentions that are forced upon you are intrusive and sometimes even violative (I have been stalked twice).’
Interestingly, she doesn’t pass any value judgements, implying either doesn’t change their social status...rather, she feels it lowers her social status, as if it devalues her non physical traits.
That being says, she goes on to say:
‘A lot of women, including me, say that they would be valued more for their mind than their looks. I have been thinking about this lately about why intelligence should be valued over looks, although the more immediate reaction is the opposite. Beauty is ephemeral. But the mind fades too. You are blessed/cursed with either by some random genetic lottery and neither determines what good you do in the world, how you treat people or your moral compass (everyone has their own moraltiy, that they fall short of). In a work situation, I’d obviously prefer my competence to be appreciated. But otherwise I wonder how it matters.’
Suggesting she’s not just buying into traditional values and has calculated that her beauty depreciates faster than her intellect, and she isn’t confident in her ability to trade for a man’s attention in the long term.