Crushed Under a Flawed Metaphor
Rethinking the Iceberg of Effort
I think we all want to improve and be better in some way, whether in a job or a sport or just as human beings. To that end, it certainly makes sense to look for clues and inspiration in those who are closer to our goals than ourselves. After all, someone who is more successful than us along some path that fits our preferred definition of success should know something we don’t know or have overcome some obstacle that presently blocks our way. The story our intuitions tell us — that “Success is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration!” as Thomas Edison would say — has blossomed into the $11B industry we see now that pretends to put total control (and total blame) in the hands of the person seeking achievement.
And it’s all so very, very wrong.
Table of Contents
· The Broken Metaphor of Hidden Struggle · An Ocean of Circumstances ∘ Grew Up at the Right Address ∘ From Zero to IPO From My Parent’s Basement ∘ Not Transforming, Returning to Normal · Born This Way and Other Tales · Conclusions and Final Thoughts
The Broken Metaphor of Hidden Struggle
The iceberg metaphor appears each time one group tries to sell some keep working or embrace the struggle ideology to another. There are innumerable infographics with some cartoonishly proportioned, iceberg-like figure that shows some tiny public-facing percentage of success appearing above the water, and some huge unseen percentage of struggle below the water. The image of the iceberg brings with it the common wisdom that 90% of the object remains submerged and unseen, so we should expect our own effort and work likewise to be unseen. As a result, the iceberg metaphor carries with it a crushing weight in its contextually-ignorant oversimplification of achievement.
The use of the metaphor is undoubtedly well-intentioned (much of the time) and can be useful to encourage people just starting to keep making progress. This encouragement is a good thing, but only as a motivator for those who have not yet reached their personal capacity to grow. Over time, however, the image creates a sort of tunnel vision that can render its adherents blind to the real forces that empower or hinder outstanding success.
As with any incomplete metaphor, the iceberg of effort serves as a lazy, one-sided proxy for a much more complex, nuanced, and individual story. The metaphor supposes that all there is in anyone’s world exists in a singular package either above or below the water. It presumes effort is the only significant contributor to a good outcome not plainly visible to all, and that there is nothing else to success. This context-blind framing of achievement ignores that we are not merely the construct of our unseen struggles and choices. Both ourselves and the world we inhabit are far more complex than this.
If there is no ocean, there is no iceberg.
An Ocean of Circumstances
Situations and people are influenced and affected, and even created by circumstances, just as time and the seas inexorably make a chunk of continental ice float free to become an iceberg. Without the forces that dropped a centuries-old frozen block from a glacier into the deep blue sea and the currents that carried it far from where it began, what became an iceberg would yet be an indistinguishable part of a frozen continent. The iceberg became an iceberg because it fell into an ocean nearby and ready to catch it, not because it really wanted to meet a ship and worked long and hard to learn to swim.
Social media portrays innumerable iceberg cases wherein a life circumstance, often with a presumed disadvantage, is overcome seemingly by will alone to become a world-class success story. It could be the self-taught drummer who put out YouTube videos for a couple of years and was eventually picked up to play with a major act, a teen who wrote a blockbuster app to catalog and trade high-value collectible trading cards that leads to a record-breaking IPO, or a new mother who is walking across the stage as a professional bikini competitor less than a year after giving birth. From the iceberg lens, each of these appears as an endeavor of purest skill, effort, and dedication, but that ignores the endless expanse of important traits — big and small — that form the environment for each of these endeavors even to begin!
Grew Up at the Right Address
Consider the teen drummer and the environment that enables her to soar to modern stardom. Indeed, performing at a level respected by accomplished artists is commendable and not without personal sacrifice. However, having an environment that supports the vigor of a novice growing into the abilities of a skilled performer is the key enabler that could render any amount of talent and practice moot. Why? Well, leaving aside the not-cheap-and-a-barrier-on-its-own cost of owning and maintaining a drum kit, drums are loud. So loud, in fact, that the normal playing volume can cause hearing damage with fairly short exposures. Beginner drums and beginner enthusiasm are even louder and are obnoxiously unmusical. Any number of living circumstances (e.g., apartments, condos, subdivision tract homes, community noise ordinances) would prohibit the sustained noise and irritation level needed for someone to begin to show their talent. Barring the resources expended to provide a practice venue outside of the home, this drumming career would be ended in the very first days of practice — likely within minutes of a neighbor seeing the family take delivery of a drum kit.
The most obvious and overlooked requirement to our girl becoming the young drumming sensation on YouTube is that there has to be a YouTube and an Internet. Our drummer also has to have somewhat unrestricted access to it. Had our drummer been a teen in the 1980s instead of the 2010s, her maximum potential exposure would be to the few hundred people she could contact directly and the limited resources of her sphere. In the 2010s, potential exposure goes global in a way a prior generation scarcely imagined, but even that isn’t an egalitarian free-for-all. There are the minimum-acceptable-level basic computer equipment costs and setup that only a relatively small number of people ever consider. If you think good video production and streaming comes easily to everyone, consider our experience with Zoom-type calls over the last year of increased telework remote conferences. Now imagine that your ability to pursue a career depended on the quality of your coworkers’ calls.
To catch anyone’s attention with a positive, “she’s ready to play with the pros” impression, there are the cameras, lighting, sound processing, and other streaming accouterments. All of these things are necessary to cast the results of those years of environment-enabled percussion practice out to the world that has never met her, with sufficient production value to be a good career marketing vehicle. Finally, whatever does get uploaded has to compete with the 500 hours of videos uploaded every minute. Those few minutes then compete as an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the 1 billion hours of video watched every day, to maybe-just-maybe be seen by someone in the tiny group of producers and artists in the music industry with both the will and ability to give her a shot.
At this point, it’s easy to see that the odds of our young musician getting the tiniest opportunity at commercial success are beginning to make a gas station lottery ticket look like a good investment. Without supreme luck and a fully-supporting environment, our drummer has a whole lot of potential that goes absolutely nowhere. Sure, in a different time and place, our same drummer may have hit it big too, but that would be another time and another place, and another set of enablers altogether.
From Zero to IPO From My Parent’s Basement
Technology startups have been the rage for investors for many years, with new apps for niche markets showing up constantly. Many of these apps come from the ideas of students and teens not yet in the workforce, and a few grow to become cornerstones of everyday life. Facebook is a fantastically obvious example as the product of Mark Zuckerberg while attending Harvard. Of course, folks forget the while attending Harvard part of that descriptor and all of the expanded perspectives, resources, and connections that it brings. Do you think he learned how to hack Harvard security to steal student photos for his Facebook precursor, and then negotiate his way out of expulsion and a possible jail sentence during his spare time on campus? No. He had a lifetime of help and support.
Shift over to our young developer who built an app to catalog and sell high-value collectible trading cards. We can imagine these are Yu-Gi-Oh cards or Magic the Gathering cards, or any other sort of cards. The first component of the ocean supporting this effort is that there must be a market and sufficient interest in these cards. Add to this the non-guarantee that our developer also knows about this market, recognizes its potential, and is interested enough to take action. Perhaps our young developer lives in a family where mom is an investment banker, or dad is a tech entrepreneur. Imagine the conversations that they have — that this teen can learn from — that directly relate to an outsized technology success, which wouldn't be accessible to a similarly situated student whose parents are experts in carpentry or franchise management. What about just having access to the computers to learn and practice programming, or the time free from other obligations (e.g., a job or caring for young siblings) allowing for sufficient expertise to grow? From this intersection of opportunity and ideas as enablers, we still have a technological chasm to cross.
Like our drummer, a huge and unacknowledged trait of the world that allows this young app developer to ply his trade is the existence of the technology at all. Were he born twenty years earlier, he wouldn’t have app-friendly programming languages and tools, nor would there be the smartphones at the foundation of many such apps. Leaving the esoteric joke languages aside, many languages today are far easier and accessible than others. What if our developer only had something challenging like C++ (one of the hardest) to develop an app instead of the relatively easy to learn and web-friendly JavaScript (among the easiest)? Simply the existence of the technology and access to it marks the success of an app as environmentally dependent.
You can certainly see by now the need for there to be a company that exists with investment interest in such an app for there to be an IPO. There also needs to be the intellectual property structure and legal frameworks for it to happen and sufficient rights retained by the creator (rather than his parents or community) for the transaction to occur.
Not Transforming, Returning to Normal
Finally, we’ll look into the professional bikini competitor mom whose magical post-pregnancy transformation in just a few months is a trending topic on social media. On the surface, a bikini competitor may sound like some avid beachgoer who occasionally puts on some sequins to walk across a stage, but that’s far from the truth. Our bikini pro mom isn’t just someone who hits the gym really hard and shows good results; she’s a member of a tiny and elite group of gifted athletes.
For some necessary background: bikini competitors exist on the spectrum of professional bodybuilders. The only meaningful difference between them and the more Schwarzenegger-like physiques is their goals. Bikini athletes tailor their programs for a less mass-heavy build than other competitive classes. That is, they train and diet every bit as intense as any professional athlete, with an exacting focus on achieving a very specific and competition-driven physique over how much they can lift. It’s not easy, and even someone who genetically doesn’t have body fat still has to do the weight work to build a balanced and proportional physique. Consider that, though hundreds of thousands of gym enthusiasts and amateur competitors are willing to travel to conferences and competitions, there may be less than 1,000 total bodybuilding pros currently living. Our bikini pro mom is one of that handful.
So, our bikini pro mom was born with amazing genetics and a high capacity for the physical work equal to any professional athlete, which is just part of the minimum price of entry into the career-lifestyle that is professional bodybuilding. If she’s on par with other pros, she hits the gym 6 days per week for upward of four hours at a time, gets plenty of sleep, attends regular posing practice, and maintains a meticulous diet for every single meal, every single day, down to the gram of each macronutrient. Then there’s the somewhat unique status of bodybuilding as a sport, wherein one must already be fully dedicated and far better at it than any casual practitioner, and stay that way for a few years before they ever find out if they have what it takes to be anything more than an enthusiastic amateur. Can you imagine needing to play baseball at a solidly competitive level for 3–5 years before ever being allowed to try playing in a game? That’s bodybuilding.
By now, it becomes clear that this pro likely has years of pre-pregnancy competitive training. She likely maintained a toned-down version of her professional-level workout schedule and fairly strict diet all through her pregnancy. You see, this apparent post-pregnancy transformation was nothing as radical as it seems from the outside. This was a touch-up to return to long-loved habits and the former status quo, not some magical life revision.
Without digging too deep and rehashing some of the themes already explored, take a moment to consider the support systems in place in her life that allows her the time and resources to be a professional bodybuilder. What would need to be working in your favor to spend the equivalent time and energy of an extremely physical full-time job (at least) just working on your physique?
If there is no ocean, there is no iceberg.
Born This Way and Other Tales
Malcolm Gladwell and others have written extensively on the topic of circumstances, and anyone at the pinnacle of success can, if they are honest, trace a series of fortunate circumstances back through the arc of their life. There are sometimes huge opportunities that could only occur a handful of times in a generation. Bill Gates, for example, attended an elite private school with better computer access than most universities of the day. For others, it’s connecting with highly skilled trainers or mentors early in life, such as with Tiger Woods was coached by his father — reportedly a solid amateur golfer and excellent coach — until age 5, and then by professionals from there, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose father was a professional musician and instructor — he literally wrote the textbook on training the violin — who began formal training at a similar age.
Even the unquestionably talented and successful NBA great Charles Barkley has carried this message to aspiring athletes for years. Wanting teens to focus on being successful at what they can control rather than relying on luck, he has focused on the sheer odds against being found or recruited in any of the entertainment professions such as sports and music, even if they really, truly are skilled enough! In a talk at Miles College stressing the fact that all of the talent, skill, and practice alone doesn’t guarantee success, he noted:
The reason I made the [“I’m Not a Role Model”] commercial was I felt too many young black kids think they’re going to play in the NBA. … First of all, there ain’t but 400 of them (NBA players). You ain’t gonna be one of those 400 but you can be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, fireman, policeman. … [Playing any professional sport is a] lucky life miracle.
Conclusions and Final Thoughts
The stories of successes and failures in any endeavor are muddy and complicated things that remain somewhat opaque even to those ostensibly driving and directing the effort. Those in the business of marketing simple solutions to intractable problems capitalize on the unawareness of clients, and the continued push by well-intentioned but equally blind friends and allies reinforces our biases against reality. Yes, inexplicable luck can happen, but my hope here is to help you understand the smaller boons that lift someone in ways often unacknowledged in a popular narrative.
Consider simply having parents that can afford to support an adult returning to college full-time; the stream of hand-me-down computers that allow the budding software engineer to practice her trade, free from technology costs; the friend of the family who happens to be a Senator who can provide an invaluable nomination to enter a service academy. Over and over, we are told and sold that the success we see in anyone is just the tiny public peak of the mountain of their own effort that finally pushed above the water. Naturally, this ridiculous explanation leads many to conclude that only the effort and will to suffer through progress separate themselves from the success they see in others, implying that circumstances and luck are minority contributors. Failing to recognize context is a psychological trap within this metaphor. To overcome it, we need to remember that every floating bit of ice, no matter the size, has a whole ocean of circumstances keeping it afloat.
If it is your dream to succeed in endeavors presented by some as simple applications of consistent will and grit, pause to see what barriers you may have to overcome that were never before those you hope to emulate. Look not to where they cast light to show the way, but to where the shadows live to see what help lives in the darkness they may overlook or even downplay. Their path is not your path; their success is not your success; their sea is not your sea. You may have to work harder or just differently to leverage the aid and overcome the obstacles that none but you will experience. You never know; you may uncover support and help in your life that can help float you to your own successes.
If there is no ocean, there is no iceberg. Swim your ocean.