The Big-Fish–Little-Pond Effect

Do we really grow to the size of our surroundings?

Adapted by Tank—my ChatGPT servant—from Henri Matisse’s “Goldfish” (1912). The original is on display at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

TL;DR 1: Watch Tim Burton’s Big Fish or read the novel it was adapted from by Alabamian writer Daniel Wallace.

TL;DR 2: If interested in how the novel came to be or the craft of writing, read Wallace’s interviews with Cosmoetica and storySouth.

TL;DR 3: Explore the Big-fish–little-pond effect (BFLPE), introduced in 1984 by educational psychologists Herbert Marsh and John Parker, that Malcolm Gladwell explored in his 2013 book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

TL;DR 4: The common pet-store goldfish can grow to 10 pounds and live twice as long as your pet poodle. Goldfish also have great memories (sorry, Ted Lasso). More goldfish myths debunked by science.

---

One of my favorite films as a boy was Big Fish, with Ewan McGregor, about a frustrated son coming to terms with his father’s fantastic stories before discovering, at the 11^th hour, that they weren’t all myths.

The story is layered and alluring to wonder junkies who are not so bothered by a father abandoning his son to hang with giants. When I first saw it, I was 14 and entranced by the idea of there being bigger water out there for me to explore, with new and better pods of fish to join¹.

The place where I grew up is surrounded by water: the Newark Bay to the east, Kill Van Kull to the South, and Upper New York Bay to the west. As boys and girls, we did not dream of hopping trains but barges. As Bayonne’s most famous resident, George Martin, the creator of Game of Thrones, did decades earlier, we looked out toward the port from First Street Park and imagined taking ships to places filled with heroes and dragons, where there were no bullies and pretty girls would kiss us.

Friends from Appalachia to Indonesia have told me they, too, have felt unsettled where God put them. Of needing to leave home to find their place and people.²

Two years ago, I read the novel Tim Burton based his movie on. It’s a light read—less than 200 pages—and made me wonder whether the writer, Daniel Wallace, also sought to escape home as a boy. Wallace is the artist son of a wealthy CEO in Birmingham, Alabama. A college dropout, he was back in his parents’ basement when his old man hooked him up with a job at a partner firm in Japan, hoping the time away would clear his head and make him worthy of inheriting the company.

Wallace swam out to the Pacific. He loved Japan but hated business, so after he was summoned back stateside, he told his dad he was quitting to write books. Fourteen years later, at the age of 39, Wallace published Big Fish. He earned his college degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he is now a distinguished professor, a decade later.

In 2008, when his fame was still new, Wallace was interviewed by the editor of Cosmoetica. He told him how he’d always felt like an average Southern dude. He loves Alabama and North Carolina. And that, rather than some higher calling, writing was simply something he liked doing. The reason it took more than a decade for him to get a novel published was that he got so caught up in making things up, that he never thought about what stories readers might actually enjoy. He said:

“I would never encourage a student of mine to pursue a career in writing, no matter how talented she/he was. That’s a choice only the writer can make, because they’re the only one who truly cares. No one will miss the stories they never write—no one but them.³”

Wallace took the idea for Big Fish from two concepts: one, the Big-fish–little-pond effect (BFLPE) model explored by psychologists trying to understand if capable students perform better in less- or more-challenging environments. The second is the common stereotype of fishermen who exaggerate their catch, making them bigger and bigger with every telling. (I swear, I’ve never done this.)

In his book, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell discussed the BFLPE model using three examples: the French impressionists who, instead of trying to get their work accepted into the high-brow Salon, put on their own exhibition and forced the art world to take notice; university economics departments that hire faculty from elite academic programs, even though they tend to produce less high-quality research than those from middling schools; and, finally, Caroline Sacks.

The third may be the most relevant to you and me.

Sacks was the valedictorian of her Maryland high school and chose to study chemistry at Ivy League Brown instead of taking a full ride at her state school. She was a bluefin tuna seeking out other giants, thinking their intensity and exclusivity would help her tap into new levels of greatness. Instead, she was crushed by the competitive nature of the school and ultimately switched to an easier major outside of the sciences.

“The smarter your peers,” Gladwell wrote, “the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science.”

It turns out that, scientifically speaking, some fish—perhaps Caroline, or you, or me—are just as likely to thrive in small tanks as big ones. While pet-store goldfish might kill and eat each other if too constrained, they can also grow as big as a Subway foot-long if looked after properly.

Some of us may have felt, at some time or another, that we needed to leave our families and cities to flourish as students, artists, or professionals. Others may have chosen to stay in the same place forever because there are things that matter more than tapping into perceived potential. In the end, it seems, the difference is subjective, and the results are unpredictable, no matter what you go with.

In a way, it’s like the “The Road Not Taken,” the famously misinterpreted poem by Robert Frost: the road perceived to be less traveled by, like the greener grass, and the bigger pond, is all in one’s imagination.

Before you leave, support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $4.17/month ($50/year). You can also buy me a coffee, order a copy of either my first story collection or my epic Ping-Pong novella, or listen to my stories on YouTube and Spotify.

1. I was particularly focused on girl fish, but also artists and philosophers, actors and historians, the kind of people you didn’t come across every day in Bayonne.

2. And, of course, many of those who leave discover that the feeling doesn’t disappear with a new address. Or that they’ve made a big mistake. Brent Cobb, probably a Top 10 songwriter of our generation, wrote “Come Home Soon” about getting back to South Georgia after trying to make it in Nashville. And though I haven’t seen the film yet, the trailer for Aftersun includes the line “There’s this feeling once you leave where you’re from that you don’t totally belong there again,” which hits hard.

3. This last line, specifically, reminds me of something Zach Bryan said in an interview with The New York Times in 2022 about why he is so prolific. I can’t stop writing,” he said. “I have this weird fear of like, if I don’t put this music out, someone 20 years from now isn’t going to be able to hear it. If some kid needs this in 40 years and he’s 16, he’s sitting in his room, what if I didn’t put out ‘Quiet, Heavy Dreams’? What if that’s his favorite song of all time?”