1920s, London. Radclyffe Hall was pacing around her study. She wore close-cropped hair, a tweed skirt, and a man’s silk smoking jacket and tie. Her partner, Uma Troubridge, sat in a nearby chair, reading the writing of Radclyffe – or “John,” as she preferred to be called. But just as Uma’s voice wavered a bit, John grabbed the papers from her hand, and threw them in the fire. In the 1920s, throwing writing in the fire meant it was gone forever. These weren’t print-outs of digital files, safely backed up to the cloud. But Radclyffe still often threw her writing into the fire, if she didn’t like the sound of what Uma was reading. Radclyffe Hall, like many great creators, understood the Iceberg Principle Any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg What I call the Iceberg Principle is this: What you see of any masterpiece is just the tip of the iceberg. There is far more knowledge and work beneath the surface, giving the piece confidence and grace. The Iceberg Principle is inspired by Ernest Hemingway, who said, “The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” He explained further: I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water once and harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg. In other words, when Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea, he didn’t need to include every story and every detail about the life of a fisherman. He had already lived it. His experiences fishing were the underwater part of the iceberg. The stories and details he did include were only the tip of the iceberg. They were more powerful because they were held in place by everything beneath the surface. What isn’t revealed gives power to what is revealed If I say, “I’m David. I grew up in Nebraska. I now live in Colombia,” I’ve only said three statements, but each of those statements is held in place by a massive amount of knowledge and experience. When I say, “I grew up in Nebraska,” eighteen years of open skies and snow drifts and cornfields flash in my mind. When I say, “I’m David,” more than forty years of being called David are behind that. I’ve never had a different name. When you read a book by Daniel Kahneman, and he tells you something about human behavior, there’s a lot of authority behind everything he says. Each statement he makes is backed up by mountains of data, and decades of running experiments and seeing it with his own eyes. While he maintains the humble uncertainty of a real scientist, there’s confidence and grace behind each statement. Just think of how much work, experience, and knowledge went behind Einstein writing the simple equation: e = mc². This is something Radclyffe Hall seemed to understand. It didn’t matter if she threw her writing into the fire and started over. When she heard Uma’s voice waver, that signaled to her that her stories or her characters weren’t flowing on the page confidently. The same way snow and ice layers onto an iceberg, making it bigger over time, pushing more of it underwater over time, it took many iterations for Hall to write classics such as The Well of Loneliness – the first great novel of lesbian literature. Each time she threw writing into the fire, the paper burned, but the iceberg didn’t melt – it only gained mass. Keep the Iceberg Principle in mind Why should you keep the Iceberg Principle in mind? The Iceberg Principle helps you manage expectations about your work. It also takes some of the mystery out of great masterpieces you see. The product is not the process That last part, first: When we see a masterpiece, we can’t help but marvel at how it must have been made. What we see is deceiving, because we tend to mistake the product for the process. This is because the way we consume