Sometimes You’re a Big Fish in a Small Pond

I won my college racquetball championship and started to get pretty cocky about it. I thought I was God’s gift to racquetball. A few years later I moved to Los Angeles and entered a semi-pro racquetball tournament. I figured, “I’ll win a couple of these minor league events, then move on to the pro circuit.” In my first match I got beat 21-1, 21-0. I told myself, “This guy must have been a ringer, some top pro moonlighting in the minor leagues of racquetball.” Then my opponent lost his next match 21-5, 21-6.

I learned an important lesson that day. I had been a “big fish in a small pond” at my college. We only had about 2,400 students and not that many of them even played racquetball. I had won a championship in a very small sample size, yet I had drawn the conclusion that I was ready for pro racquetball. I became overconfident because I had not taken into account the size of the pond I was swimming in.

When I was 35, I moved to Vail, Colorado, one of the great ski destinations in the world. Like a lot of new residents, I skied over 100 days a season those first few years. I was a pretty good skier and got better with all the practice. A friend from Chicago came for a visit and when we were skiing he said, “You are a fantastic skier.” I replied, “Thanks, by Chicago standards I am.” In the pond of tourists visiting Vail from Chicago, I am an excellent skier. However, almost everyone I met in Vail was orders of magnitude better than me. I wasn’t even in their league.

The phrase “Sometimes You’re a Big Fish in a Small Pond” helps me not become overconfident and cocky. It can also apply to a lack of confidence.

When I was growing up, I thought I wasn’t very smart, average at best. This lack of confidence in my mind led me to believe I would not be very successful, and I had better not tackle any big challenges. I had developed this view of myself partly because my two best friends growing up were incredibly smart. I met them when I was 5 and now I’m 73, and they are still two of the smartest people I have ever encountered. I drew the conclusion that I was dumb from a pond of 3 people!

When I expanded my pond to 2,400 in college, I was one of the smartest people. My confidence in my mind increased dramatically.

Before I moved to Los Angeles, I attended business school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the best universities in the world. I played on the club hockey team for those two years, which included graduate students in fields like nuclear physics, quantum science, and mathematics. Literally the best of the best. I was far from the smartest person in a room with those teammates.

I spent a lot of time with that group, playing over 80 games, practicing, and traveling. My view of my intelligence never changed. I knew I was smart, and hanging out with a bunch of genius-level people didn’t change that fact. I was just in a very unique “pond” for those two years.

None of You Hockey Players Are Rocket Scientists

When I was younger, I often formed an opinion of somebody based on their job rather than looking at the characteristics of the person. All doctors were smart, all garbage men dumb. All lawyers were clever, construction workers were not. A person with a PhD was better than one who never attended college. A janitor was just a lowly janitor, not fit for respect. Someone with an impressive job was impressive. I started looking at the person, not the job, after an experience I had.

During business school I played on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hockey club team. One of my teammates was a graduate student in rocket engine design. He spent three years at MIT and got his master’s. We became good friends and moved to Los Angeles together, where he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), one of the premier space science institutes in the world. Then he went to Stanford, where he spent four years getting his PhD in the same field.

My friend played on the Stanford club hockey team during his PhD years, and I was still living in Los Angeles. One day he called me and said, “We are short of players for the games this weekend with Berkeley. Can you come up and play with us?” After the first game we were at a bar and flirting with two young ladies. One of them asked me why I was in Palo Alto for the weekend and I told her about playing hockey for Stanford. She stopped flirting and moved on to someone else with the comment, “None of you hockey players are rocket scientists.”

The girls were long gone, not realizing my friend was actually a rocket scientist and one of the smartest, most interesting people they would ever encounter. They missed a great opportunity by assuming all hockey players were stupid.

Learn Enough to Defend Yourself Against Experts

I believe experts are often wrong, and it is important to learn enough about the subject to defend myself against them. There are several reasons for this:

• Some “expert” opinions are influenced by money rather than reality. For decades, the tobacco industry claimed that smoking was harmless or even beneficial. For years, drivers were told to change their oil every 3,000 miles, long after many manufacturers began recommending much longer intervals. All of this sold more cigarettes and oil.
• Experts do not always make it clear what they know with great certainty and what is merely their best judgment. If I fall and have a bone sticking out of my arm, a doctor can state with confidence that I have a fracture requiring immediate treatment. However, if I have chronic back pain and a doctor recommends surgery, the correct treatment may be considerably less certain. I find that some doctors state both conclusions in the same authoritative tone, as if neither one should be questioned.
• Experts have pressures of their own. Doctors may worry about lawsuits. Employees may have to follow company policies they do not completely agree with. Consultants and researchers may know who is paying for their work and what conclusions that client wants to hear. That does not automatically make their opinion wrong, but it gives me a reason to question it.

The less I know about a subject, the more likely I am to simply believe the expert. Suppose I have been experiencing severe headaches and a doctor tells me I need brain surgery. I know nothing about brain surgery, so I may be tempted to accept the recommendation without question. It is intimidating to start learning about something that complicated, but the phrase “Learn enough to defend yourself against experts” reminds me to begin. I can read, get additional opinions, use artificial intelligence to help me identify questions, and ask the doctor to explain the diagnosis, the alternatives, the risks, and how certain he is.

I am not trying to become a brain surgeon. I am trying to learn enough to make sure the brain surgeon is right—and not simply recommending the thing brain surgeons get paid to do.

Even Einstein Had a Limit

When I was in college I majored in mathematics. I took one math class each semester, for a total of eight over the four years. The first seven I understood and got an “A.” Then my last semester I took “Ring Theory,” and I was lost from day one. It was theoretical math, with no real-world application that I could see, and it just did not make sense to me. I went to the professor seeking some individual help, and continued to be lost. I asked him, “How come I just can’t get this? I got all these A’s before.” He said, “Don’t worry about it, even Einstein reached a limit and you have reached yours.”

At first I was insulted. “Hey, what do you mean I have a limit? No way, the mind can do anything.” That is just not the way it works. Almost everybody gets arithmetic, 2+2=4. As the topics get tougher everybody reaches a limit, where no matter how hard they try, they just can’t get it. Some may reach the limit at Algebra, or Calculus. For me it was Ring Theory.

Einstein came up with special relativity when he was only 26, and later general relativity, which works extremely well for gravity and large things like planets and stars. Quantum mechanics works extremely well for very small things like atoms and electrons. Einstein believed there should be one theory that could tie these worlds together. He spent much of the rest of his life trying to develop what he called a “unified field theory,” but he never succeeded. Even Einstein had a limit. This phrase helped me in college. If Einstein had a limit, it was OK for me to have one at Ring Theory.

I don’t mean to imply that limits can never be changed. It is possible to increase your limit by working hard, training, and learning. But you can only move it so far. If I work out and train I can become a faster runner, but no matter what I do I’m not going to win the Olympic 100-meter dash.

I apply the concept when I’m contemplating a big project or goal. I have a 53-acre ranch property in Colorado, and I started to think, “Hey, I’ll just take care of this myself, cut all the grass, fix all the fences, repair the equipment, etc.” Nope, beyond my limits, so I hired somebody.

However, it still bothers me that I was never able to figure out Ring Theory!

How to Be Happier with the Benefit of Hindsight

I spent a lot of time learning how to become more positive, helpful, optimistic, and “happier,” and the effort paid off. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe I could have greatly accelerated the process. Some of the things I did over the years were very helpful, and some were very damaging. I use the phrase “How to Be Happier with the Benefit of Hindsight” to remind myself of what worked and what did not.

The biggest mistake I made was not translating what I learned into action. I would read a self-help book and then spend hours writing a document analyzing it. I read almost everything Ayn Rand wrote and then generated 300 pages of analysis. I also did a tremendous amount of journaling, writing down my thoughts, experiences, and feelings. I didn’t reread the documents, and no one else did either.

The reading, analysis, therapy, and journaling also became ways to quiet down “the demon on my shoulder.” When I was doing any of these things, I was very focused and did not “hear” the negative self-talk. I also fell into what I now call “the therapy trap”—learning useful things in therapy but not applying them during the other 167 hours of the week. I did not DO what I had just learned.

I started making progress toward being a “happier” person when I started applying what I had learned in day-to-day actions. To remind myself what actions to take, I created short phrases, most of which are in this book. Improvement was all about changing minute-by-minute actions, such as redefining perfection and letting negative and self-critical thoughts come and go.

The title of this book is about action: If It Makes Sense to You, Try It. I could have added, “If it makes sense to you, try it, and if it helps you, keep doing it again and again.” The title is not “If it makes sense to you, document it, analyze it again and again, talk to your therapists about it 20 times, restate it in as many ways as you can, dwell on it, but never do anything about it.”

If it makes sense to you, try it.