I saw this post about how so many Icelanders — one in ten! — are now publishing books, and was immediately reminded of a conversation I had with one of the many Icelanders I met when I was there last November for the Iceland Airwaves 2012 music festival.
I traveled to Iceland for the music festival as part of a group tour. Being a group tour, we had some official tourist events that included us being on a bus together with a tour guide we became friendly with during our stay. One of my fellow tourists commented on the amazing (to us) fact that about half the bands playing the festival were from Iceland while the rest hailed from around the world. These were all excellent bands because Airwaves is a serious, established festival that up-and-coming bands work really hard to get into. Playing Airwaves can and has catapulted artists over that last hurdle between “really good unknown band” to “hot indie band getting lots of play on the college and indie radio circuit and about to hit the big time.”
How did so many Icelanders –hundreds out of a country with little more than 350,000 residents — all end up so successful as music?
There is, I believe a link between this and the phenomenon of Iceland as an international banking hub. Much has been written on the topic since tiny Iceland — and a fair number of British citizens — suffered terribly when world markets crashed in 2008. A huge number of icelanders became bankers because, in the words of an Icelander I chatted with last November who used to be one of those bankers, no one told them they couldn’t do it.
In many countries, we have many societal norms that stop us from doing things and often stop us from pursuing dreams. In Iceland, people are encouraged to follow their dreams and pursue what they want. So, they nurture talent in a way that many cultures do not. Most of us have parents telling us that we must study something that will bring us a good career, which is often something very different from the things we dream of doing.
None of this is to say that these are not good writers, or that the musicians were not good musicians. In fact, it is even fair to say those bankers were probably good bankers. They were very successful given the rules of world finance as they existed in the years preceding the 2008 crash.
The difference is that in Iceland, these people are not met by the naysayers that surround the rest of us in the developed world.
Think about what we could all accomplish if we stopped listening to those who tell us we can’t do things and instead just get up there and do them, as Icelanders do when it comes to music and writing?
