For most of my life I was the smartest person in the room, or at least it felt that way. This is not a good thing, in fact it is the hallmark of the lives of mediocre people in my opinion, as paradoxical as it might sound. We might naively think that someone smart is someone who dominates every room they are in, but the form of intelligence I care about is the ability to see the entire situation at hand, including one's own life, so as to inform one's decisions better. In other words, intelligence is first of all about broad and soft attention, and then and only then can narrow specialized intelligence be useful. 1
In that lens, when you think about your entire life, with the fact that you are inevitably going to die, you need to decide what matters more: living a fulfilling, joyous, free and loving life, where you can develop your self and put it in service of something greater than just you, or obsessively chasing the hits of being right and feeling superior to others? This might sound like a crude dichotomy, and in some sense it is, but the truth is that by default, people fall to what is easiest and most appealing to their ego, in this case the unconscious narcissistic strategy of developing just enough "intelligence" to feel better than others around you.
Long story short, a truly intelligent person deliberately surrounds themselves with people smarter than them. Not so intelligent that he cannot understand anything and just feels like a background prop, but enough to feel challenged and grow.
I don't particularly like Elon Musk, because in general I don't really care about celebrities in the first place, but I still respect the fact that he seems like a fairly intelligent person, and yet he intentionally surrounds himself with people smarter than him in their respective specializations and allows them to do their thing without too much interference. At least that's the vision I get from him, you can obviously only know so much about those people's live from just hearsay.
But from this we can still construct a general archetype of someone who is an effective leader, even if Elon Musk might not embody it himself: someone who surrounds themselves with intelligent and competent people, provides them an environment to work with relative freedom while also giving them a general direction to go towards. In other words, an effective leader is a conductor, he is there to organize the musicians, but the greatness must ultimately come from the players, and the leader must thus know how to step away when needed.
Ineffective leadership then falls into two different camps: the doormats who do not know how to be respected, probably because they do not have any real abilities and expertise themselves, and who do not know how to create enough order for a project to move forwards. And then we have the micro-managers who feel the need to tell other people what to do and constantly assert their dominance, very likely due to a deep-rooted insecurity.
The small pond syndrome for leadership then is the tendency to pick incompetent people so that you may call them out on their mistakes and feel justified in micro-managing them. It's born out of the need to feel better than others and dominate them, which again comes from petty insecurity.
The small pond syndrome applies perhaps even more so to horizontal relationships, for instance coworker to coworker, or friend to friend, than vertical ones. It consists in surrounding oneself with mediocre people so that you may feel better about your life trajectory.
Even very intelligent people can be surprisingly sheepish in their attitude towards life, they evaluate their situation depending on what the people around them experience rather than their own standards. To some extent this is a good thing if you learn to use it to your own advantage: if humans are hardwired to be like their peers, then you might as well find excellent peers to be around.
Needless to say that I do not want to be a medium-sized fish in a small pond. I've seen the type of "life" it leads to. People who love to complain about others, but do very little to navigate towards better waters. Deep down, those people are attached to their small pond because it gives them a sense of superiority over others. Very, very few people would admit to their own narcissism, which is precisely how narcissism maintains itself, as The Last Psychiatrist has found out again and again.
Medium-sized fish are also unlikely to ask the dumb but important questions, a quality which great leaders all have in my experience. They would rather ask irrelevant but technical questions which could steer the conversation back to their area of expertise.
Now that I write it so explicitly, I would say that this tendency right there is a good demarcation between intellectually curious people and others. The former want to explore uncharted territories, stretch their comfort zone, and are fine with sitting with uncertainty for a while. The latter on the other hand, most people in fact, only want to remain within their narrow slice of familiarity, which is why if you present them with something new, they will say something like: "Oh, it's basically just like (thing I already know about) isn't it?" They do not want to interact with novelty, they want to reduce everything down to known forms.
Smart stupidity then consists in asking the dumb but important questions, because you want to understand something and solve a problem. Dumb intelligence consists in asking technical and precise questions which are utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. It is incredible how many intelligent people fall in the latter category, derailing the conversation for a solid 20 minutes just to ask about minutia which is very secondary to the issue at hand.
I would also add that medium-sized fish have a sort of victim mentality which can make them unbearable to work with in group projects. It is often the case that miscommunication happens over very trivial matters, which is precisely why it is so important to have people who will ask the seemingly stupid questions. The reaction from the medium-sized fish usually consists in throwing a fuss that the other people didn't have the same assumptions as them. Even if they might be technically right that those should be obvious by now, there is still this tendency to make the problem even worse and the desire to put the blame on the other side as much as possible.
To give a concrete example, in my workplace there is currently a project to transition a large program and its associated datasets to the cloud—I know, hype technologies and all of that. Because we are still in migration, we have two versions of the same project to maintain, which is fine for code because it automatically synchronizes, but is a bit more manual for the datasets because the technologies for the databases are different, which means that people need to copy data from one to another.
What this means is that if the format of a certain input table changes, the change needs to be applied to both the in-house version, but also the one on the cloud. It so happens that some people on the data team sometimes forget to do the changes on the cloud version, which leads to an obvious problem because the code expects the new format but is met with the old one.
The medium-sized fish response would be to throw a fuss and complain about the ineptitude of the other team. In this case, they are right and it is undeniable that other people can be wildly incompetent at what they are supposed to do. But there is still this fundamental problem that they are not helping the problem in any capacity through their attitude, they are not being the bigger man, or er fish in this case.
If this type of problem keeps happening again and again, the more radical answer would be to leave the company altogether, something which people afflicted with the small pond syndrome would never even consider. They want their sense of superiority and feel like they are the overworked victims in a cruel environment, instead of changing their own life.
At some point you need to ask yourself what's more important: your own life, or being right?
1 See also The Dance of Context and Specificity
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2025-10-10