- Would you rather be a small fish in a big pond, or a big
fish in a small pond?
Your answers will reveal something important about your
perspective. If you think first of the cost of a project or rank
profit higher than progress, then your perspective is short-
term. A person who would rather be famous than rich is the
more ambitious because—unless you’re in show biz—fame
requires more talent and originality than the making of a
fortune. If you would discuss a promotion with your family
before accepting it, you’re more humane than ambitious. And
if you’d rather be a big fish in a small pond, you may lack drive
(or you may simply agree with Julius Caesar, who is reputed to
have said, “I would rather be first in a small Iberian village
than second in Rome”).
Perspective is no more and no less than how you see things,
your particular frame of reference. Without it, you’re flying
blind. But it’s also your point of view, and as Marvin Minsky, a pi-
oneer in artificial intelligence, said, point of view is worth 80 I.Q.
points. Marty Kaplan told me, “I think one of the reasons for the
fame or notoriety of this studio [Disney] is that the people who
run it have a very strong point of view, which I guess I would add
to leadership.... To the outside world we couch a rejection in
subjective terms. ‘Gosh, we just didn’t like it.’ But inside the
company, a decision is not viewed as a kind of soft, mushy, rela-
tivistic thing. We have a viewpoint, and a project either works
with our viewpoint or doesn’t work with our viewpoint.”
If you know what you think and what you want, you have a
very real advantage. In this era of experts, when we have nu-
tritionists to fine-tune our diets, turn family dogs over to pro-
fessional trainers and even pet psychologists, and bring in
Deploying Yourself: Strike Hard, Try Everything