Off-Topic: Fish, or Dine Out?

Off-Topic is my chance on Saturdays to stray away from the world of books and publishing for a few minutes to look in a different direction.

I was listening to Michael Dunlop interview internet marketer Yanik Silver on his Income Diary Blog. At one point Silver said

…everyone has heard this saying: “you hand a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life.” Well, that’s kinda bullshit. People want the fish handed to them … you walk into a restaurant, you don’t want to go out back and go fishing for your dinner.

This caught me up short, and I experienced one of those moments of cognitive dissonance when you’ve got two ideas pulling on you in opposite directions at the same time.

I remembered clearly, standing in the back room of a church up on Skyline Boulevard in Oakland, getting ready for a meeting that would be held under the high beamed ceiling of the main chapel. This was the “staging area” and the group I was with had rented the church for meetings for several years.

On the wall among other Christian-themed paraphernalia was this same quote that Silver mentioned, lettered in an uncial script, and I would often look at it. Sometimes, when I was leading meetings, I would talk about the empowering vision behind this message, and how grasping this idea was a key to true leadership.

We dreamed then of creating a different kind of society, within, but not a part of, the culture around us. We would learn to fish, each in our own way. We would bring each other up, and improve everyone that way. There just seemed so much wisdom and truth in this one saying.

“Give a man a fish” was hierarchical, the attitude of a paternalistic society. “Teach a man to fish” was democratic, the emblem of a society of equals trading knowledge for the betterment of all. And how proudly I imagined the un-named man would stand, when he held the fish he had caught himself!

On the other hand, I couldn’t deny Yanik Silver’s message. Every blogging and information marketing guru taught the same thing: teach to the newcomers, explain everything in detail, give it to them on a silver platter, do the work for them and they will love you.

I didn’t understand this at first. Like you, I was buried in my own expertise. It had been so long since I was a beginner in my field, I really didn’t remember what it was like, and how much I would have appreciated a hand held out and an explantion for the simplest things.

I know this is still true. Part of the work I do is as a consultant. Clients want to hire me to sit and answer questions. That’s it, just answer questions. They arrive at the appointed hour, with the results of their research in hand, but with no way to connect the different pieces of information together. They have a list, usually a neat one. We go down the list and we don’t stop until we get to the bottom.

I know that half of what we talk about won’t make sense the next day. That’s just the way we learn. But if a couple of key ideas fall into place, the hour will have been well spent.

Teaching to beginners makes sense. You intersect with people when they are at the height of searching for answers, for understanding, for the big picture. They are trying to see where they fit into a field, or how to take the hard drive out of the XBox, or the best way to light their portrait shots, or any one of millions of possible questions.

And this is something the internet does remarkably well. I actually watched a video on Youtube of a fellow removing the hard drive from an XBox. In the video he said that he didn’t think anyone would need to see this, because it was so simple as to be self-evident to anyone but a complete moron.

I hung on every word. I had to get the hard drive out of my son’s XBox and I was stumped. I was that moron. He had made the video anyway, he said, just to be thorough. And sure enough, it was about as easy as opening a drawer and extracting a spoon. In other words, a witty four year old could have done it fairly easily.

But there’s a truth in this. Everyone has expertise—but no one has expertise in everything. The most brilliant blogger might not know how to inflate his tires. Genius mathmaticians stare hopelessly at backed-up toilets, as if they were possessed. You might be a brain surgeon, but can you repair your shoes? No, I didn’t think so.

So out into the world we go, looking for Yanick Silver’s “fish products.” We don’t want to learn everything there is to learn about everything that happens in our life. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. I don’t want the technician to explain to me how the discs on the hard drive are interleaved or magnetized or whatever it is they are. I want to push the lump of metal across the counter and have him fix it.

I don’t want to learn the “7 Top Tips for Locating Clogs,” I want Mr. Rooter to come in here and unclog the sewer drain.

Look, even in publishing, which companies are producing all the books for self-publishers? The ones who do it all, who take your Word doc and promise you a quick trip to the shelf at your local Barnes & Noble. That’s what people want, the total package. A nice piece of fish, well cooked, served up on a pretty plate. Oh yeah, we’ll pay for that.

In the end I had to admit there’s probably room for both the “Give” and the “Teach” approach. When I’m studying to become a better blogger, say, I want to be taught, I want to gain control of the springs that drive the machinery of commerce. But if it’s putting up an opt-in box and dealing with the CSS code and the autoresponder’s specifications, I say let’s call the Tech Guy—just give me the damned fish.