You Only Catch the Greedy Fish

My son had a rough morning on the dock at Parc des Roseaux.

He'd been waiting, watching the line, doing everything right. Then finally a tug. He got excited, pulled it in — and came up with nothing but an empty hook. The bait was gone. Clean.

He looked at me like I owed him an explanation.

"Something ate it and took off," I said.

"That's cheating."

"Actually, that fish is probably the smartest one in the lake. It took what it needed, left the rest for others, and went on with its day. That's why you'll never catch it."

He thought about that for a second. Then: "So the ones you do catch — they're always the greedy ones?"

I nodded. "Every single time."

That stuck with me more than I expected.

There's a way of doing business that looks a lot like that greedy fish. You find a client, and you think: how much can I get out of this? You scope up every conversation, you guard every contact, you treat every referral like a transaction. You swallow the bait whole and call it a win.

And yeah, sometimes it works. For a while.

But the clients who actually stay — the ones who send you their friends, who call you first when something comes up, who eventually feel less like clients and more like collaborators — they're not there because you extracted maximum value. They're there because at some point you gave them something you didn't have to. You answered the question outside the scope. You made an intro that cost you nothing but meant a lot to them. You told them the honest answer instead of the billable one.

That's what keeps you in the water.

And the other agencies, the other designers, the other people building the same things in the same city? I've never understood treating them like the enemy. The industry gets better when people in it are generous. There's more than enough work. Share what you know. Send the project you can't take. Collaborate when it makes sense.

The ones who try to catch everything usually end up with the least.

My son caught a perch that afternoon. Right there at Parc des Roseaux, same dock, same lake. Took a while, but he got one.

He held it up with that look — you know the look. Half proud, half "I told you so."

"Greedy?" he asked.

"Oh, absolutely," I said.

He laughed. He got it.