Tip of an Iceberg

By: Bikal Dhungel 

Humans have a tendency to over-simplify things. We say lucky to a person who has reached a zenith of his career without even guessing with which cost he achieved this. We dont know this. We only see what he has achieved. The famous Thomas Edison quote express this nicely, ' I did not fail, i just found 999 ways which do not work ' before discovering a working light bulb hence revolutionizing human society. When the indian Economist, Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economist, people thought, ' oh the lucky guy ' but only few knew his contributions to the field of economics for over five decades. We only see the tip of an iceberg, what people have achieved, rarely the whole story.

Second point I want to mention is the story of credit to one person. Taj Mahal was built by Shahjahan in India. In fact, it was built by tens of thousands of laborers who will never appear anywhere. Similarly, the Pyramids of Egypt were built by thousands of other laborers, many of whom lost their lives while building but they again will not appear anywhere for whom the credits goes. In the present day, Bill Gates, who revolutionized the Computer gets credit for all the developments in this sector. But in fact, thousands of engineers who worked for him are equally liable for the credit. Be it Apple, be it any other brand, there are many hands behind the success.

Coming to the academia, I recently finished reading the World Development Report published yearly by the UNDP that reports on various issues related to development. This years report was about the Economic Psychology called ' Mind, Behavior and Society '. What readers see is only the report but behind that report, there are hands of hundreds of researchers, data collectors who worked throughout the year to prepare that piece which we or any institutions can read and refer to for future research.

We often forget that some books written by someone might be their life time work. The big data about income, per capital and other economical issues from the year 0 till today for many countries was collected/guesstimated by Angus Madison. Economical data are only available since few decades. Research that needed data from the past are then based on the estimates on Madison's data. He spent his whole life collecting these data from various sources including novels from the past. The ground-breaking book from Thomas Piketty about the inequality in today's world, 'Capital in the twenty first century ' refer frequently to Jane Austin's novels that reflect the life in Britain two centuries ago.

The lesson from this article is simple: do not over simplify things, look deeper. Do not just see the result, try to find out how much effort was put on it. Last time I saw an interview of Diane Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida, without having a break, without a shark cage. She did this in 52 hours. For me it was an impossible thing to swim continually for 52 hours. It was not her first effort, she tried many times but finally succeeded. What thrilled me even more is, how much she had to practice for that, to swim 52 hours non stop, what a motivation and a gut to achieve she have had. Though, no one see that, people only see that she reached the shores of Florida in 52 hours. However, the largest part of her life was spent practicing for the journey.

Understanding the whole story would help us better understand the success.