Bigger Fish, or Bigger Pond?

MAUGHAN: Can we not do that on the air together? 

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DUCKWORTH: I’m Angela Duckworth.

MAUGHAN: I’m Mike Maughan.

DUCKWORTH + MAUGHAN: And you’re listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show: Would you rather be the worst person on the best team or the best person on the worst team?

DUCKWORTH: What am I? I am this vanilla kid from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, whose greatest accomplishment was being captain of an extremely mediocre cheerleading squad.

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MAUGHAN: Angela, I am super excited for our conversation, because while there are no stupid questions, I think some questions are maybe more intriguing than others, and I feel like this is one. This comes to us from Lucas. He wrote in and asked, “Which has more upside: to be the best person on the worst team or the worst on the best team?” And then — and then he clarified: “Assume you could be the actual best or assume you are the literal worst.”

DUCKWORTH: I love this question, because immediately the mind goes to, “Why can’t I be the best on the best team?”

MAUGHAN: Immediately the mind of a super-competitive person goes to that.  

DUCKWORTH: I think the question Lucas asks is so good, because there are upsides to both. So, let’s walk through the possibility of being the best player on the worst team.  

MAUGHAN: This is a very interesting thing, I think, in terms of professional sports. I also think in the business world. I mean, I’ll just give you a quick example on that. I’ve got a, a very good friend who could never quite scale with the businesses he was in. And so, he’s constantly been looking for a smaller pond. 

DUCKWORTH: What does that mean, “He couldn’t scale with the businesses he was in”? 

MAUGHAN: As the businesses grew, they kind of grew on top of him instead of he got promoted with them.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, okay. So, they were growing and then he was maybe not growing as quickly.

MAUGHAN: He stayed maybe a mid-level manager, but so he was constantly looking for a smaller pond, because, I think, being respected, being the person at the table, being a decision maker, mattered so much to him that he would rather work at a really small, inconsequential company and be “the person” than be at this big company making a big impact on society or whatever.

DUCKWORTH: So, it’s a kind of big fish–little pond dynamic that he was looking for.

MAUGHAN: Yeah, and continually looking for smaller and smaller ponds until today, he literally just has one business partner.

DUCKWORTH: Oh, he really is in a puddle! That’s — Is he bigger than the only other fish in the puddle?

MAUGHAN: I’m not going to comment.

DUCKWORTH: I’m not kidding. I reflexively think to myself like, “Well, can’t you eventually be the best on the best team? Or at least be as good as the people on the best team?” But —

MAUGHAN: Which is, I think, what a really competitive person goes for. I mean, if you want to go to basketball, for example, I think a Kobe Bryant would’ve come in and said, “I’m fine being the worst on the best team, because I know that within a few years I’m going to be the best on the best team.” But he wants to surround himself by people who are so good that he can constantly be learning, and growing, and developing. And he knows that his work ethic is going to get him to the place where he’s going to be the best.

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, I’m not somebody who knows a lot about basketball. I’m not somebody who knows a lot about any sport, but I am obsessed with people like Kobe Bryant. You know, I watched his autobiographical Oscar-award-winning documentary, Dear Basketball, and I, I’ve watched plenty of interview footage. And I think this question of the psychology of “big fish–little pond/little fish–big pond” is so interesting because it gets to, like, who we are —  how ambitious are we? What is our self-worth based on? And also, what do we expect of ourselves in the future? So, let me just say, there is a ton of research on what is literally called the “big-fish—little-pond effect.” And it goes back decades, actually. And I think the psychologist who really started it all is named Herbert Marsh. And he had a paper where he just observed this phenomenon. Now, he’s an educational psychologist, so he was thinking about this initially in the school context, right?   As you know, Mike, we sent our two daughters — Jason and I sent Amanda and Lucy — to a magnet school in the Philadelphia public schools. So, it’s academically selective. It was a small school, but it was, quote-unquote, a “big pond” in the sense that it was “creaming the academic crop,” you could argue, from the whole city.

MAUGHAN: Right, so they’ve been competing against “the best” since high school —

DUCKWORTH: Since middle school even, yeah.   

MAUGHAN Okay. Because, like, Malcolm Gladwell — others have written about this like he did in David and Goliath. He coined this term, I think, “elite institution cognitive disorder,” where basically, we let elite institutions mess us up. And he’s saying, you know, “All these kids want to go into STEM, half of them drop out by their second year.” And it’s largely, he posits, because this person has been the best at their high school. They’ve always been the smartest. They show up at Harvard and suddenly, just statistically, they’re very average or even maybe below average, which is a feeling they’ve never had before. 

DUCKWORTH: Well, half of them have to be below average, right? Like, literally half of them have to be below average. And I think you could also argue, based on how they got into a place like Harvard or just a, you know, Philadelphia magnet school, you were not below average or even close to average to have gotten into the pond in the first place. And I really do think everybody has a story like this. Everybody, I guess, leaves the confines of their family, for example, and you’re like, “Oh, wait, I don’t have the most beautiful singing voice? I’m not the fastest or most interesting?” And when Herb Marsh made this observation, which, no pun intended, “spawned” quite a large literature —

MAUGHAN: I love that his name is “Marsh.” We’re talking about spawning and big fish and little fish.

DUCKWORTH: I did not make that connection, but so true. I mean, the, the original paper was called: “Determinants of Student Self-Concept: Is It Better to Be a Relatively Large Fish in a Small Pond Even if You Don’t Learn to Swim as Well?” And I think that title contains the trade-off, right? So, we’re talking about self-esteem and self-concept, but the reason I think a Kobe Bryant wants to be on the best team — and some people actually seek to become the worst player on the best team, only in the sense that they want to level up to a team that they can’t yet hang with so that they can improve their skills. I mean, that’s the trade-off. You do learn from peers who are better than you. And you don’t only learn from them because you’re watching them; you’re learning from them because you’re playing against them, for example, in practice. So, there is a tradeoff.

MAUGHAN: Here’s what I’m curious about, though. And maybe this all just goes back to grit, but I feel like the answer to this question that Lucas is asking depends on some of the individual’s personality traits. If they’re highly-competitive, super gritty, I would imagine that being in a bigger pond is okay, because when I walk into that Harvard classroom and suddenly I’m below average for the first time in my life, if I have the grit and determination to say, “I’m going to figure this out,” versus — flip that, and I walk in, and it crushes me a little bit, and I don’t know how to handle the adversity, then it’s better for that individual to be in a smaller pond. I mean, am I off there? Tell me how that impacts things. 

DUCKWORTH: Well, let me make this hypothetical anecdote about going to Harvard real, because I went to Harvard, and it was 1988. I’m trying to remember what it was like to be 18 years old. I think I had confidence. I don’t think I thought I was going to be the smartest kid at Harvard, but I guess I must have felt pretty good about myself having been admitted. And I got to my dorm, and I remember we lived on the second floor of Grays West. That was our assigned dorm room. And I’m unpacking my boxes and my suitcases, and I’m meeting my roommates. And in succession, let’s see, Caroline flew private planes across the country by herself, had started a company, was blonde and beautiful, and a poet and a writer.  

MAUGHAN: So, wait, she entered her freshman year at 40, is that what you’re saying? How do you accomplish all that by 18? My gosh!

DUCKWORTH: I mean, it felt like that. I’m like, “Hi, I’m from Cherry Hill, New Jersey,” and, like, I just felt like a teeny, teeny fish. So, that was Caroline. Then there was Darcy, who was, like, an award-winning physicist.

MAUGHAN: Wait, wait, has become an award-winning physicist, or at 18 was an award —.

DUCKWORTH: No, just at the age that she was, like, she had won all these, like, physics and math prizes. And then there was Sally, whose father was an editor at The Washington Post. And so, like, everything that came out of her mouth was like an epigram — you know, wise words cleverly said. And she was a varsity rower. So, anyway, one after the other, I’m meeting classmates who are just extraordinary. And I remember writing in my journal that I felt like vanilla ice cream in an ice cream shop where there were all these mix-ins. It’s like, “Oh, look over there! Fudge chunks with peanut butter and a ribbon of caramel. And look over there! Fresh strawberries with rhubarb.” What am I? I am this vanilla kid from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, whose greatest accomplishment was being captain of an extremely mediocre cheerleading squad. Like, what am I doing here? And you asked, Mike, the question of: does it depend on, I guess, your personality, your character? Like, are you gritty? And do you have a kind of, like, Kobe Bryant reaction or not? I mean, I want to say that I didn’t have the Kobe Bryant reaction, like, “Well, I’m just going to dominate, and at the end of the year I’ll be better than all of these roommates and I’ll be better than these classmates.” I did have, I think, an adaptive reaction that was another kind of ambition, and that was, I somehow figured out in that very first semester how not to “play a game” with these other people who I thought were better “athletes” than me, so to speak. I had this very intentional shift to like, “Okay, here are all these people who are extraordinary. They’re doing their thing. And I am just going to do my thing.” And I ended up getting really into public service, and tutoring, and education, and that’s, in a meandering way, what led me to what I’m doing now. So, I kind of feel like the Kobe Bryant response is a kind of macho, competitive response, which is admirable, but it was not the kind of ambition that I had. I didn’t want to beat anyone.

MAUGHAN: Well, but it sounds like you flipped the script where you had the maturity to say, “I don’t have to compete with them on A, B, C, or D. I’m going to write the rules of my game, and I’m going to go my own direction.” But you don’t have to compete directly with people. There’s this children’s book that my sister gave my grandmother many years ago called I Love You the Purplest. And basically, all the grandkids are like, “Grandma, do you love me the most? Do you love me the most?” And the grandma responds, “I love you the reddest. I love you the bluest,” whatever, right? Instead of a stack rank, “I love you all differently.” It sounds like you, in a similar vein, decided, “Hey, I’m going to compete a little differently.” That reminds me of a story of a dear Freakonomics friend, Steven Levitt. And if you’ll remember, he shows up at M.I.T. and realizes really quickly — his own words, not mine — that he is for sure below average compared to all of his classmates. And his dad said to him — and this is a quote from Steve Levitt quoting his dad — “Look, if you’ve got no talent, you need to do something nobody else is doing.” And so, that’s when he decides, “I’m going to do something different.” He starts studying crime. One of the old adages of marketing is you have to be 10 times better or different, and it’s easier to be different than 10 times better. And so, Levitt — this is what’s so interesting about his experience, is he says, “Look, I’d always been top of my class. I show up to M.I.T., I’m at the bottom of my class.” But for him, it wasn’t this crushing thing. He said, “I didn’t feel bad about myself. I felt awe about the people around me. I knew I would always be the dumbest person in the room, but what a privilege that was.” And he said it gave him this amazing sense of freedom, because once he realized he couldn’t compete against them, he was just free to do whatever he wanted. And if you look at that, what happened is Levitt has then become a much more well-known economist, you might say, his work has been much more influential than maybe others of his classmates’, because he just had this freedom when he said, “If I can’t compete, I’m going to do something different, and I can just be free to be me.”

DUCKWORTH: In that story is Levitt being actually — you know, to have been admitted to the M.I.T. PhD in economics — like, pretty smart guy. And by the way, I’ve taken an I.Q. test with Levitt and Dubner on the air. Did you know that?  It was humiliating.

MAUGHAN: Can we not do that on the air together?

DUCKWORTH: It was definitely Dubner’s idea, so not my idea. But Dubner says, like, “Hey, like, I want to play with this, you know, cognitive game. And we’re just going to record it on the air for a podcast. The three of us will — will, like, take one problem at a time.” and I — I think I almost immediately knew that I would not do well in this, you know — see prior story, like, I was like, “Whatever, I’m playing my own game.” Sure. And wow, Levitt is really smart. That brain of his is working just fine. But in this story that he tells, when he came home during his first year, he was really discouraged. And Levitt had this epiphany, because he was reading a book about crime.

MAUGHAN: Yeah, it was by David Simon. It’s called Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets. And at the same time, he said his favorite T.V. show was Cops, if you remember Cops, where they would follow these police officers. And that’s where, when his dad said this thing, “You’ve got no talent. Do something nobody else is doing,” that’s when he said, “Here’s my other thing, here’s — ” to your point of grit, like, passion and perseverance.

DUCKWORTH: And  to your point of marketing, right? He was like, “I’m going to do something that nobody else is doing. So, look, we started talking about worst player, best team. The opposite, like, big fish–little pond. We’re all fish, and we’re all in ponds. And we look at the other fish and we compare. And I think what this very classic research by Herbert Marsh and others shows is that can sometimes make us feel worse if there’s a big pond and lots of fish. The other fish seem to have shinier scales and to swim faster than us. Right? So, that can lead to a lower self-concept, which, by the way, has consequences. Like, when you don’t think of yourself as somebody who’s great, you actually set less ambitious goals. And controlling for all the other things that you would want to control for, including ability, you do worse. So, it actually matters to have a lower self-concept. But there are advantages to being in that bigger pond with fast, shiny fish, including getting better — like Kobe Bryant would. And at the end of the day, I think the most prescriptive recommendation you could be is, like, of course you’re going to compare.   And there you would ask, “If I inventory all the things that I as a fish can do, what am I best at relative to other things? Let me do that. Let me race my strengths.” We’ve all kind of, like, stood on the precipice. Like, Steve Levitt stood there his first year of graduate school at M.I.T. and he had a choice. “Do I just keep going and do what everyone else is doing? Or do I make a detour and study crime that nobody was applying economic principles to?” I’m going to work really hard at it, but I’m going to do something that’s not the game that everyone else is playing.”  

MAUGHAN: Yeah. So, here’s what I would love to hear from our listeners. Would you rather be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? And why? So, tell us your name, where you’re from. Record a voice memo in a quiet place. Put your mouth close to the phone and email it to us at NSQ@freakonomics.com. And maybe we’ll play it on a future episode of the show.  

Still to come on No Stupid Questions: Mike drops some shocking facts about big fish and their habitats.

DUCKWORTH: That’s disgusting and cool.

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Now, back to Angela and Mike’s conversation about best players and big fish.

MAUGHAN: So, on this concept of big fish–small pond, small fish, big pond —.

DUCKWORTH: Big fish–little pond. I don’t know why it’s always that way, but it’s literally abbreviated in psychology as B.F.L.P.  

MAUGHAN: All acronyms like that need to just go away because they’re just exclusive. But here’s an interesting question. I mean, I think if you look at it on a very practical level, going back to basketball, briefly — there are questions of: would you rather be, basically, a Hall of Famer or win an N.B.A. championship? Now, I think any Hall of Famer in the N.B.A. would say, “I want to do both.” But there are people like Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, John Stockton, who are among the 75 best players of all time, legends in the sport, but who never won a championship. On the flip side, there’s this guy, Elijah Bryant, who played a total of 12 games in the N.B.A. in his entire career. He played just a few minutes in the N.B.A. finals. He was signed by the Milwaukee Bucks in 2021 in May. Just so you know, that’s, like, the very last game that year of the regular season. He played one game in the regular season, played in 11 playoff games, averaging four and a half minutes per game. But he won an N.B.A. championship.

DUCKWORTH: So, he was the worst player on the best team that year. 

MAUGHAN: Yeah, but that was the only time he was even in the N.B.A. I mean, they signed him briefly for the next year, but cut him before it even started. And so, Elijah Bryant can say, “I’m an N.B.A. Champion,” but I think I, and most people would be like, “Well, kind of.” 

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, kind of.

MAUGHAN: Or there’s this other guy, Patrick McCaw, only person ever to win three N.B.A. Championships in his first three years on two different teams. He won two with the Warriors, one with the Raptors. He is paid basically the lowest you can get paid in the N.B.A., doesn’t shoot particularly well, but has three N.B.A. championships. So, I know Charles Barkley would love to say, “I’m an N.B.A. Champion.” In fact, Karl Malone was with the Utah Jazz most of his career, and then went to the Lakers the last couple years because he wanted to have a ring. So, it’s not an “either/or.” I think anyone would say, “Obviously, I want both.” But I would say if I had to choose between those, I would rather have had the career of a Charles Barkley with no ring than have the career of a Patrick McCaw or Elijah Bryant with one to three rings. That said, I’m not going to ever have either, but you know what I’m saying. So, in that construct of big fish–little pond/little fish–big pond, I’d rather be the big fish. I’d rather have been really good at my job, contributed really, really meaningfully, even if it didn’t end up with the ring.

DUCKWORTH: So, Charles Barkley never won a championship?

MAUGHAN: No, and if you ever watch T.N.T. where he and Shaquille O’Neal are going back and forth, they’ll always make jokes and Shaquille will say, “Hey, we just ordered a bunch of onion rings, but Charles can’t have any, because he doesn’t like rings.” Stuff like that. He loves to mock him for never making it to the top.

DUCKWORTH: That sounds like the kind of thing that people say on those sports shows that I never watch. I think the thing that I’m bristling at a little bit is, we make these choices, but our lives are movies, not snapshots. So, yeah, what is it like to be the big fish in the little pond, the little fish in a big pond right now? But what is it going to mean in my future? I think that’s where I’m kind of vibing with what I think a Kobe Bryant would say, which is like, “It’s all about where this is going.” So, I’m much more interested in what the effect of this pond and these other fish are going to be on my future me. And I think there I am — you know, it’s very hard for me to pretend that I’m an N.B.A. basketball player, but like, if I were that player who kept getting traded to like amazing teams who win championships, I’d just be so desperate to learn from them, right? Because that is the other edge of the double-edged sword. When you’re in a big pond with lots of fish who are great, you might feel worse about yourself. That’s the “big-fish—little-pond effect.” But at the same time, there’s a huge upside of being with people who are better than you, and that is that you improve. So, I guess I’m kind of cheating in the sense that, like, I also refuse to make that choice in the sense that I don’t want to think about being on a championship team for this final season. I’d want to think, how’s this going to help me next season?

MAUGHAN: Right. Uh, Lucas — Kobe Bryant and Angela Duckworth fundamentally reject your question and will become the best person on the best team. Angela, I want to end with a lesson from science and from the animal kingdom. And it may not be totally psychologically perfect, but I love the idea. So, there are fish — since we’ve been talking about fish — there are many species of fish that are called “indeterminate growers,” which means that they’re going to grow as big as the space available to them.

DUCKWORTH: Oh my gosh, I love this idea.

MAUGHAN: So, goldfish, right? I had goldfish growing up. I think most children have goldfish.

DUCKWORTH: I had goldfish for like, two days. They always die so fast. What the heck? You take them home and they’re like, dead. It’s very sad.

MAUGHAN: Ah, shoot. This is something they probably didn’t tell you. You have to feed them.

DUCKWORTH: No, I feed them!

MAUGHAN: I’m just kidding. 

DUCKWORTH: I feed them. And I give them love.

MAUGHAN: Goldfish are fascinating. I’m guessing you kept them in a small tank and they stayed pretty small, right?

DUCKWORTH: Well, they died, but yeah. Had they lived — yes.

MAUGHAN: So, goldfish are part of this family, if you will, of indeterminate growers. And — first of all, this is illegal in most states, so please don’t go do it — but if you dump them into a pond or a bigger lake, they grow, and grow, and grow. And so in 2021 in Minnesota, officials kept finding these giant goldfish in waterways. They were growing to the size of a football.

DUCKWORTH: Wait, goldfish the size of a football? That’s disgusting and cool.

MAUGHAN: And four pounds.

DUCKWORTH: Whoa. Really? Like, the same goldfish that you get, like, at the fair in the little plastic bag?

MAUGHAN: Yes. So, this idea of indeterminate growth. If you give them the space, they will grow from this two-inch little fish in your little fishbowl to a four-pound, football-sized goldfish. And so, here’s the lesson, I think. 

DUCKWORTH: Yeah, what’s the metaphor, Mike? Give it to me.

MAUGHAN: You grow as big as the space you’re in. Because while we’re products of our genes, of course, we’re also products of our environments. So, this is what I would say. I don’t think there’s a good answer to this question. I think that you pick which pond works best for you, and if you are a type of person who is driven by being around excellence and that helps you become something better, then you know which pond is better for you. If you’re the type of person who maybe gets crushed by insecurity or other things like that, I think then maybe — like my friend picking smaller ponds, or what you called “a puddle”, he’s actually quite successful in what he does now! He’s doing well financially. He’s doing well mentally. He’s doing well professionally. Because he picked the pond that was better for him. And so, in this world of fish that are indeterminate growers, grow as big as you want. And like Angela did in rejecting Lucas’ dichotomous question, maybe you can create your own question and, and go your own direction.

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No Stupid Questions is produced by me — Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now here’s a fact-check of today’s conversation:

In the first half of the show, Angela references Dear Basketball, the 2017 animated film that was written and narrated by the late Los Angeles Lakers player Kobe Bryant. She refers to the film as an Oscar-award-winning documentary. At the 90th Academy Awards, Dear Basketball actually won in the category of best animated short. That year, Icarus won best documentary feature, and Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405 won best documentary short. Later, Mike shares the plot of I Love You the Purplest, a children’s book which he says includes children asking their grandmother who she loves most. While Mike’s sister may have gifted the book to their grandmother, the 1996 story written by Barbara M. Joosse and illustrated by Mary Whyte is actually about two brothers competing for the attention of their mother.

Then, Angela recalls what she refers to as the “humiliating” experience of taking an I.Q. test on air with Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The show she’s referring to is Freakonomics Radio Episode 472, “This Is Your Brain on Pollution,” which we’ll link to in the show notes. The friends play three games as part of cognitive training program Lumosity’s “fit tests.” The games are said to measure mental flexibility, memory, and attention, respectively — but they are not comprehensive I.Q. tests. Finally, Angela says that, growing up, her pet goldfish would only survive for a couple of days. According to the Australian animal-welfare organization RSPCA Australia, the natural lifespan of a goldfish averages about 10 to 15 years. We’re not sure what was going on with Angela’s fish, but listeners who want their goldfish to live long, healthy lives should avoid traditional fish bowls. Larger tanks with cleaner water can help your goldfish grow old and football-shaped. That’s it for the fact-check.

Before we end today’s show, let’s hear some thoughts about last week’s episode on deepening connections with the people you care about.

Barry: Hi, NSQ. This is Barry from Philadelphia. So, I’m a widow, and several years back I met another widow, and we began dating and developing a relationship. In my case, what happened was I found out that she really liked to dance, and we’d never done that. So, I volunteered to go dancing with her, even though it was pretty much way off of my radar and not in my skill set. So, I think she really appreciated that. So we did go dancing, and I actually enjoyed myself and obviously because it was her. Similarly, she had stopped snow skiing many years before, and she knew it was important to me. But after I knew her for a few years, she said, “Hey, I’m thinking about taking up skiing again.” And then we ended up taking some ski trips together. So, I think this whole thing made us just closer, because we were each willing to get out of our comfort zone and go towards the other one’s wishes a little bit more. And in fact, recently, we ended up getting married. So thank you. And keep up the good work. 

Thanks to Barry and to everyone who shared their experiences. And remember, we’d love for you to let us know if you’d rather be a big fish in a little pond or a little fish in a big pond, and why. Have you had to make that choice in the past? If so, how do you feel about your decision now? Send a voice memo to NSQ@Freakonomics.com, and you might hear your voice on the show!

Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions: When it comes to personal space, how big is your bubble?

DUCKWORTH: Rule of thumb. If you can touch me, you’re too close.

That’s next week on No Stupid Questions.

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 No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. Lyric Bowditch is our production associate. This episode was mixed by Eleanor Osborne. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter @NSQ_Show and on Facebook @NSQShow. If you have a question for a future episode, please email it to NSQ@Freakonomics.com. To learn more, or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com/NSQ. Thanks for listening!

DUCKWORTH: You have to make decisions about what game you’re going to play. Like, am I going to try to be the jock here in this school? Or am I going to try to be the popular girl? Or maybe I’m going to try to be, I don’t know, king of the nerds?