The Fish Didn’t Get The Memo

I have never met a fly fisherman who talks about certainty. Hope, perhaps. Optimism, definitely. But certainty? Never.

You can spend hours reading the water, choosing the fly, watching the conditions and convincing yourself you've worked it all out, only to discover that the fish have other ideas. That's part of the attraction. After all as my brother always says “it’s not called catching - is it!”

The river doesn't care how much experience you have, how successful you've been elsewhere or how confident you felt when you left the house that morning. You still have to pay attention and you have to adapt and just accept that some things remain stubbornly outside your control.

It strikes me that business can be remarkably similar.

We often speak as though success is simply the result of planning hard enough, working hard enough or being clever enough. Whilst all those things matter, there is usually a healthy amount of uncertainty involved as well. Markets change, customers behave unexpectedly, competitors appear from nowhere and good ideas take longer than expected to gain traction. Sometimes things work better than you imagined and sometimes they don't.

The longer I spend around business owners, the less convinced I become that confidence comes from knowing exactly what will happen next. Most of the people I admire are comfortable admitting that they don't. What they do have is a willingness to keep learning, keep adjusting and keep showing up even when the outcome isn't guaranteed. Standing beside a river with a fly rod teaches a similar lesson. You can influence plenty of things. You just can't influence everything. Oddly enough, accepting that can be quite liberating. Once you stop demanding certainty from situations that can never provide it, you tend to make better decisions and enjoy the process a little more.

The fish, unfortunately, still haven't received the memo.