Be Like Harrison

Alt. Title: What a Short Story from 1961 Can Teach Us About Overcoming

In the early sixties, Kurt Vonnegut published a short story titled Harrison Bergeron¹. I’ve revisited it innumerable times since first reading it in college, and I’m still in awe at how Vonnegut was able to pack so much into so few pages. The premise of the story is this: it’s the year 2081, and the United States government has achieved total equality. Not equality of opportunity. Equality of outcome. Everyone is the same. By law.

The way the government pulls it off is ingenious…and horrifying. The strong are weighed down with physical ballast. The graceful are forced to move in ways that make them clumsy. The beautiful must wear masks. And the intelligent are fitted with a mental handicap radio that blasts loud, jarring noises into their ears at regular intervals to interrupt any thought that might be forming. The Handicapper General and her agents enforce all of this with clinical efficiency. No one is allowed to be better than anyone else at anything. Everyone is perfectly, miserably equal.

Harrison is fourteen years old, seven feet tall, and extremely gifted. He is also, accordingly, burdened with more handicaps than anyone else in the story. Three hundred pounds of scrap metal. Thick glasses to give him headaches and blur his vision. A rubber ball for a nose. And a constant, clanging audio assault designed to keep his remarkable mind from ever completing a thought.

And yet…

And yet, he escapes. He overcomes. He walks into a television studio mid-broadcast, tears off every handicap, and for a brief, extraordinary moment, dances. He doesn’t just dance. He and the ballerina he freed from similar handicaps leap so high they seem to hang in the air, defying gravity, defying everything the world tried to make of them.

I’ve been thinking about that imagery a lot lately because of what it suggests about the relationship between adversity and performance. The handicaps in the story were designed to limit Harrison. Instead, they propelled him to even greater heights, revealing exactly what he was capable of.

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Back in my (short-lived) days as a law professor, I used to assign my students to read Harrison Bergeron at the beginning of each semester. At the time, I used the story as a metaphor for how the legal system is stacked against the low-income clients that we served in our clinic. Complying with all the regulations governing access to public benefits, housing, and health care is an administrative minefield for everyone involved. It was our mission to help our clients overcome the hurdles posed by confusing forms and deadlines, ultimately securing access and, hopefully, justice. The burden of becoming and staying eligible for vital assistance were akin to Harrison’s thick spectacles and blaring alarms.

What strikes me now, re-reading the story through a coaching lens, is how our invisible handicaps can be just as hard to shake as the visible ones. The clients my students assisted in our clinic could at least see what was working against them. The legal handicaps faced were external and concrete. The ones I see in my coaching practice are often self-imposed and dynamic, making them harder to name and harder to remove. The physical ballast of weight is inertia. The thick glasses are self-limiting thoughts. The clown nose is a lack of self-worth. Despite it all, we can choose to rise up and push back. To overcome.

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Aristotle had a word for what happens when we are tested and rise to meet it: arete. Usually translated as “excellence” or “virtue,” it’s better understood as the full realization of one’s potential through action. Critically, Aristotle didn’t think arete was something you were born with. He thought it was something you earned, practiced, and built.

He was also clear that the conditions mattered. You cannot practice courage without encountering fear. You cannot develop patience without being made to wait. You cannot build resilience without facing something that genuinely threatens to break you. The adversity isn’t incidental to the development. The obstacle isn’t in the way. The obstacle is the way.

In Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Ryan Holiday took that line and built it into the central argument of his book The Obstacle Is the Way: that what blocks us isn’t separate from the path forward, it is the path forward. The Stoics treated this as a matter of discipline and philosophy. Holiday makes the case that it’s also true as a matter of how high performance actually works.

Think back to Vonnegut’s Harrison. Every handicap placed on him was designed to neutralize a strength. But it also named the strength. You don’t put hundreds of pounds of scrap metal on someone who isn’t formidably powerful. You don’t blast noise into someone’s ears every twenty seconds if their mind isn’t worth silencing. The very weight of the resistance was a map of his capabilities. He just had to decide what to do with it.

So here’s a question for you, my dear reader. What are the handicaps in your life right now? Not the fictional ones designed by a dystopian government, but the real ones: the self-limiting thoughts, the setbacks, the constraints you didn’t choose and can’t fully remove. What if those weren’t just obstacles to manage but information about your capacity? What if the weight of the resistance was a map? What if you could decide to do something about it?

Holiday writes that great men and women throughout history didn’t just endure adversity. They used it. They let it clarify what mattered, strip away what didn’t, and focus their energy on what they could actually do. That process, Aristotle would tell you, is exactly how arete is built. Not in the absence of difficulty, but squarely in the midst of it.

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What I find most useful about Harrison’s arc as a metaphor for performance is that it gives us permission to reframe our constraints.

Most of us, when we hit an obstacle, treat it as evidence that we are behind, broken, or unlucky. We compare our current constrained selves to an unconstrained ideal version of ourselves and feel the gap as a verdict. That gap is not a verdict. It’s a training ground. Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who wrote Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, would call that “gap-as-verdict” thinking a fixed mindset: the belief that struggle reveals your limits rather than points toward what you can build next. The reframe she offers, and the one worth carrying into your own obstacles, is that challenges are information, not indictments.

Below are three practices worth building into how you think about the obstacles in front of you right now.

Name the handicap. Before you can do anything useful with an obstacle, you need to be self-aware of it and honest about what it actually is. Not the story you’ve built around it. The thing itself. Is it a resource constraint? A relationship problem? A skill gap? A health setback? Name it plainly. In Vonnegut’s story, the handicaps were visible, physical, and specific. Yours probably aren’t. That makes naming them even more important.

Ask what it’s revealing. This is the Aristotle question. If adversity is the condition under which arete is built, then your current obstacles point to something worth addressing. What capacity are you being called to meet right now that you haven’t fully developed yet? The answer to this question is your next training target, not an indictment.

Take one handicap off. This is Holiday’s Stoic prescription in action. Start by picking just one obstacle, focus your intention on removing it, and start stacking the reps. Obstacles are rarely overcome through grand gestures. Instead, take small, disciplined, forward action addressing the obstacle. You may not be able to remove every constraint. But you can make progress…and progress is the point.

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Harrison didn’t save society by his final act of unshackling himself from his many constraints. He just walked into the room, took off the weights, and danced. That was enough to change everything, at least for a moment.

Vonnegut’s final insight in Harrison Bergeron is hiding in plain sight in the story’s ending. You don’t need to (and likely can’t) change the world, but you can change yourself. Name what is blocking your performance. Determine what progress you can make towards removing the obstacle. And begin.

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Three Book Recommendations:

Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut (A Collection of Short Stories, including Harrison Bergeron)

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumphs, Ryan Holiday

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck

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Three Recommendations for Readers Starting with Kurt Vonnegut:

Player Piano

Breakfast of Champions

Mother Night

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Thank you for reading this edition of Rhetorical Exercise. I hope you found it both useful and entertaining as you strive to perform your best at the things that matter most to you.

Peace and love,

Chris

1. Full short story available here.