Big Fish Little Pond

I was recently re-reading Malcolm Gladwell's book "David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants." I wanted to share with you an excerpt that had a profound impact on me.

In it, Gladwell tells the tale of a band of misfits whose art collectively went on to be worth north of a Billion dollars.

"One hundred and fifty years ago, when Paris was at the center of the art world, a group of painters used to gather every evening at Café Guerbois, in the neighborhood of Batignolles. The ringleader of the group was Édouard Manet. He was one of the oldest and most established members of the group, a handsome and gregarious man in his early thirties who dressed in the height of fashion and charmed all those around him with his energy and humor. Manet’s great friend was Edgar Degas. He was among the few who could match wits with Manet; the two shared a fiery spirit and a sharp tongue and would sometimes descend into bitter argument.

Paul Cézanne, tall and gruff, would come and sit moodily in the corner, his trousers held up with string. “I am not offering you my hand,” Cézanne said to Manet once before slumping down by himself. “I haven’t washed for eight days.” Claude Monet, self-absorbed and strong willed, was a grocer’s son who lacked the education of some of the others. His best friend was the “easygoing urchin” Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who, over the course of their friendship, would paint eleven portraits of Monet. The moral compass of the group was Camille Pissarro: fiercely political, loyal, and principled. Even Cézanne—the most ornery and alienated of men—loved Pissarro. Years later, he would identify himself as “Cézanne, pupil of Pissarro.”

Together this group of remarkable painters would go on to invent modern art with the movement known as Impressionism. They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world.

The Salon was the most important art show in the world. Everyone at the Café Guerbois agreed on that. But the acceptance [of their art] by the Salon came with a cost: it required creating the kind of art that they did not find meaningful, and they risked being lost in the clutter of other artists’ work. Was it worth it? Night after night, the Impressionists argued over whether they should keep knocking on the Salon door or strike out on their own and stage a show just for themselves.

Did they want to be a Little Fish in the Big Pond of the Salon or a Big Fish in a Little Pond of their own choosing? In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world.

We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest. There are many examples of this, but few more telling than the way we think about where to attend university.

Gladwell, Malcolm. David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (pp. 63-64). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

According to Gladwell, one of the lesser known benefits of being a Big Fish in a Small Pond, is that you have all the support that comes from community and friendship—and they are places where innovation and individuality are not frowned upon.

Gladwell writes: "The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all. Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne weighed prestige against visibility, selectivity against freedom, and decided the costs of the Big Pond were too great."

An intimate environment that more readily celebrates individuality and a focus on personal development across time, something that is difficult to do at a large bureaucratic university. By working with a small cohort of students at The Pre-Med Academy, we hope to create an environment that can bring out individual talent and cultivate imagination and thought.