Thursday, October 18, 2012

Advice from world-famous fisherman: strike a balance between staying the course and changing up

My 9-year-old son loves the show "River Monsters," in which fisherman Jeremy Wade tries to catch large predators in the world's rivers. We watched an episode this past weekend in which Wade is trying to catch a large stingray in an Argentinian river. While contemplating repeated failure - something in the river has been stealing his bait over and over again - Wade offhandedly shares some wisdom while he waited for another bite on the line:

Always there's this conflict between, do I carry on doing what I'm doing or do I change something? You have to reach a happy medium with that. You sort of have to give something a good go, but be prepared to change if it looks like you're doing something wrong.

This is useful for people involved in creative work, or innovation. Striking "a happy medium" between pivoting too quickly and staying too long with a failing strategy is crucial to long-term success.

Albert Wenger is discussing how to balance conflicting items like this in his "Scylla and Charybdis" series on his blog Continuations.



The section I refer to begins around the 12-minute mark of the video.

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