What the Fisherman Story gets wrong
A new look at a classic self-help story
If you’ve read many self-help books or essays, you’ve probably heard the story of the harried CEO and the fisherman. This story is sometimes portrayed in self-help books as demonstrating a fundamental truth about work.1
I think the story misses an essential insight from its protagonist, the CEO. I’ll explain below.
The fisherman story
The story, as I’ve heard it told, begins with a CEO who is incredibly busy. He works all the time, and has no hobbies outside work. He leaves for the office before his kids go to school, and comes back home too late for dinner. He works at least one day on the weekend, but often two days, and is always thinking about work. Outside of the office – where he’s the boss – he doesn’t have a community.
One day, as part of a work project, he visits a small village. He meets a fisherman, who spends only a few hours per day fishing. The CEO is less-than-impressed, as he thinks the fisherman is lazy.
“Why don’t you work more?” the CEO asks the fisherman.
“Because I’ve fished all the fish I need for today,” says the fisherman. “I’ve done all I need to support my family. Now I have time to spend with them.”
“But you have so much unproductive time!” exclaims the CEO. “Why don’t you build this one-man fishery into a real business? If you worked longer hours, and if you had more people working for you, you could 10x your revenue.”
“I don’t want to,” said the fisherman. “I want to earn enough to support my family, and then I want to spend time with them. Don’t you have a family?”
“I don’t get to see them as much as I’d like,” admits the CEO. “I’m working, so I can build a business. I plan to work as hard as I can for the next twenty years, so that I can retire comfortably.”
“What will you do when you retire?” asks the fisherman.
The CEO ponders. “I’ve always wished,” he said, “that I owned a little cottage by the sea, and that I spent my days fishing with my family.”
The misperception of the story
The moral of the story seems to be: How short-sighted the CEO is! He could live the lifestyle he wants NOW. Why is he working himself so hard to create a business? Why is he denying himself time with his family and time to relax?
But if you walk away from the story thinking that you should stop working hard and stop striving, you’re ignoring the challenge that the CEO poses.
The benefits of work
The story fails to highlight the important challenge that the CEO poses to the fisherman.
The fisherman has challenged the CEO to explore the benefits of spending time with his family, which is undoubtedly important. But the CEO has also given the fisherman an important challenge, which is often ignored in re-tellings of the story – the challenge to build something important, to fulfill his potential.
If the CEO can succeed at the job he is trying to do, he will have built a company that serves thousands of customers and employs hundreds of employees. The company may even last long after the CEO retires. If the fisherman succeeds at his job, he will have fished and served people in his town.
But could the fisherman do more? That’s what the CEO is asking him to consider. Could the fisherman help more people? Could he challenge himself to grow professionally? Could he spend less time doing things that he finds ‘fun’ in order to do things that are rewarding in another way?
Someone who never even considers these questions is not going to fulfill his potential.
There are, of course, other problems with the story. For example, the story implies that work is inherently not rewarding, and this unrewarding nature of work has to be the case. The story implies that you should minimize work to maximize happiness. The story fails to address the fact that work can provide a number of benefits other than income. It implies that relaxation is the end goal – which arguably, it is not.
It is not unlikely that the CEO would, in fact, be quite unhappy if he retired at age 40. Given that he is evidently ambitious, he probably wouldn’t actually enjoy spending the majority of his time relaxing. (After he has satisfied some of his ambitious desire to build something, and after he has aged, he may enjoy a life in retirement. But even then, he might be restless.)
This topic of work-life balance, and of how much to work, deserves a more lengthy treatment, and is a subject to be dealt in another post/essay.
Rather than read the story and think about how blind the CEO is, it may be worth posing the challenge to ourselves: “What would it look like to be a little more ambitious?” And then consider, “How would that help me? How would that help others in the world?”
You may or may not decide that you want to be more ambitious. But before you decide yes or no, you may want to at least consider the question seriously.
1The story was originally written as a short story, by German author Heinrich Boll in 1963. It’s been adapted or varied in different iterations by a variety of self-help books, but the basics are the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekdote_zur_Senkung_der_Arbeitsmoral