“If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts and are patient, we shall end in certainties.” — Francis Bacon
In a cold, overlooked corner of the world, a young man named Frederic Tudor gazed at the icy landscape of his city. Where others saw snow and ice as a nuisance, he saw something deeper, something that others, trapped in their everyday lives, couldn’t perceive: a dream gleaming beneath the frozen surface.
It was the year 1806, and Tudor, surrounded by the vast icy expanses of New England, had an idea he found brilliant: “If in the Caribbean, where sun and heat reign, they had what we shovel away by the bucketful, wouldn’t that be a luxury as valuable as gold?” With this intuition, he outfitted a ship and loaded it with blocks of ice, ready to take his idea to the warm islands.
But the ice, mercilessly, melted under the relentless sun before reaching its destination. On his return, only the mockery of those who didn’t understand his vision and a mountain of growing debt awaited him. For most, this failure would have been devastating. But not for Frederic Tudor.
He reflected, studied, and adjusted his plan. “If the ice melts, it must be protected,” he thought, and began covering the blocks with sawdust, straw, and other materials his ingenuity suggested. He built storage facilities at key locations, creating a distribution network connecting the cold lands of his home to the scorching tropical coasts.
By 1810, his tenacity bore fruit. In Havana, where the heat made the air thick and sticky, people received the first ice blocks as a blessing. Tudor became a legend, the man who sold the impossible: cold in the heart of the tropics.
Soon he earned a nickname: the Ice King. From Cuba to India, Tudor took his dream farther than anyone could have imagined. Neither criticism nor occasional bankruptcies stopped him; with each setback, he got back up. In the end, the natural ice industry yielded to the invention of artificial refrigeration, but Tudor had already left his mark on history.
Tudor’s story holds a lesson for the world of sports. Ambitious plans, like his first expeditions, often require adjustments, and sometimes the price of mistakes is an entire season of poor performance. Like Frederic, it’s essential to learn how to accept losses and correct course, to devise, study, and even invent new methods to reach the goal.
At the start of his journey, Tudor fell into a common trap: he believed he had all the answers to launch his business, without understanding the technical and logistical challenges of preserving ice on a long journey to the tropics. This initial confidence, a hallmark of the Dunning-Kruger effect, led him to assume that his idea would work without needing adjustments. However, the failure of his first expedition confronted him with the reality of his own limitations.
But instead of abandoning or insisting on his initial approach, Frederic Tudor adopted an approach similar to long-term sports planning: he revised his strategies and gradually adjusted his approach, blending persistence with humility. By learning and perfecting his conservation and distribution methods, he went from being an inexperienced visionary to an expert in his field, realizing that success is not achieved with blind insistence but with adaptability and refinement.
As the athlete or coach gains experience, they become aware of the nuances and limitations of effective training. This is where Tudor’s humility and adaptability are key: recognizing the importance of meticulous planning, continuous evaluation, and constant adjustments, understanding that sports training is not just a physical act but a profound learning process.
The hardest part is aligning all variables to achieve a result as close as possible to the planned goal. If we succeed on the first try, it would be perfect; if not, it’s necessary to reassess to correct the course for the next cycle. Two concepts can prevent a complete vision: the Dunning-Kruger effect and organismic asymmetry.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes how some people overestimate their abilities and knowledge. It’s a cognitive bias: a misinterpretation of reality. This phenomenon was studied and popularized in 1999 by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in the article “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” According to them, people tend to think they are better than they actually are in certain areas. In other words, we overestimate our skills and abilities. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs because those who lack skill not only draw erroneous conclusions but also lack the metacognitive ability to recognize their error.
In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning examined self-assessments of logical reasoning, grammar, and humor. When they showed participants their test scores and asked them to estimate their position in the ranking, they observed that, while the competent group estimated their ranking fairly accurately, the incompetent overestimated their position significantly. Thus, this effect highlights three key points:
- Incompetent people tend to overestimate their abilities.
- It’s almost impossible to make incompetent people realize the level of their incompetence.
- The effective way to avoid this syndrome is to increase one’s knowledge.
Another concept that can ruin planning is organismic asymmetry, which refers to the tendency to seek explanations of human performance based only on internal mechanisms. A weakness of this tendency is not considering the relationship between the athlete and their environment as the relevant framework for analysis. Focusing excessively on a single factor (especially if it’s internal), like finger strength or endurance, leads to seeing only a part of the picture when planning and organizing training.
In his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein explores how, in a world that values specialization, people with a wide range of experiences and knowledge often outperform specialists. People who experiment in different areas develop critical and creative thinking skills, making them better suited to adapt and solve novel problems.
Epstein argues that, in an increasingly complex and fast-evolving world, the cognitive flexibility of generalists can be a great advantage. This is particularly relevant in “wicked environments,” where problems lack clear solutions and require innovative and adaptive thinking.
Frederic Tudor’s story and his drive to sell ice in the tropics remind us that innovation and success require not only a bold idea but a constant willingness to learn and adapt. His ability to recognize mistakes, adjust his approach, and overcome obstacles is a model of perseverance and humility that also applies to sports training. Just as Tudor refined his method over time, athletes and coaches must remain critical and flexible, avoiding overconfidence and considering all the variables that affect performance. Only in this way, from a broad and adaptive perspective, can ambitious goals be achieved in an environment that, like the ice market or the sports world, is constantly changing.
To finish I would like to share with you some of the original article that both authors affirm and I think it conveys a little everything that happens to me when publishing my articles:
¨Although we feel that we have done a competent job by making a solid case for this analysis, studying it empirically and extracting relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with a disturbing concern that we cannot overcome. That concern is that this article may contain defective logic, methodological errors or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that in the sense that this article is imperfect, it is not a sin that we have knowingly committed. ¨
Juan Martin Miranda
References
Epstein, D. J. (2019). Range: why generalists triumph in a specialized world. New York, Riverhead Books.
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.
Leave a Reply