Transcript
You've heard it before. Maybe a coach told you, maybe a marketing guru, maybe that well-meaning advisor who thinks they understand your business better than you do. The bait must appeal to the fish, not the fisherman.
It's one of those sayings that sounds profound until you actually think about it. It's supposed to mean that your content, your product or your message needs to resonate with your audience, not with you. That you need to get out of your own way and give people what they want, not what you want.
And on the surface, sure, there's truth there. You can't sell Shakespeare to people who want Stephen King. And you also can't force classical music to someone who bleeds heavy metal.
But here's what nobody wants to admit. This metaphor has become a weapon. A thought-terminating cliché that shuts down legitimate objections and creative differentiation.
It's become the go-to response when someone dares to do things differently. I experienced this recently. Someone on LinkedIn told me I should be distributing my podcast as snippets, like everyone else does.
Cut it up, spread it around, play the algorithm game. I'd already considered this approach, by the way. But I'd also considered doing it differently than the herd.
That's when I got the fish metaphor thrown at me. The bait must appeal to the fish, not the fisherman. Translation.
Shut up and do it like everyone else. Your instinct to differentiate? That's just ego.
Your desire to maintain quality over quantity? That's self-indulgence. Your vision for your own work?
Irrelevant. The fish know better. Except, here's the problem with that logic.
Incomplete Logic
It is catastrophically incomplete. Let me be clear about something. I'm not arguing against understanding your audience.
I'm not suggesting you should create content in a vacuum, oblivious to whether anyone cares. They will be stupid. But the fish metaphor treats you, the creator, as if you are nothing but a distribution mechanism.
As if the only thing that matters is what the fish wants. And everything else, your expertise, your judgement, your differentiation, should be surrendered at the altar of popular opinion. Let's actually examine this fishing metaphor properly, because whoever came up with this saying clearly never spent much time fishing.
Yes, the bait needs to appeal to the fish. But guess what? The angler chooses the fishing spot.
The angler chooses the time of the day. The angler chooses the rod, the line, the technique. The angler decides which fish to target in the first place.
Not everything is a bait.
The angler doesn't show up at any random dock, throw any random bait into any random water at any random time and hope for the best. That's not fishing. That's cosplaying as an angler while starving.
The skilled fisherman makes dozens of strategic decisions that have nothing to do without the fish things it wants. And many of those decisions run counter to what would seem obvious to someone who doesn't understand the deeper game being played. You want to catch fish?
You need to understand fish. But you also need to understand yourself, your resources, your goals, and the competitive landscape. Some anglers fish for sport, some fish for dinner, some fish to sell their catch at market.
Same activity, completely different decision frameworks. So when someone tells you, the bait must appeal to the fish, what they are really telling you is to abandon your strategic thinking and just give people what they say they want. But here's what they are not telling you.
Fish Ignorance
The fish doesn't know what it wants until it sees something compelling. The fish doesn't strategize. The fish reacts.
If you are building something that matters, a business, a brand, a body of work, you can't just react to what the market claims it wants, because the market doesn't know what it wants until someone shows them something they didn't know was possible. Nobody was asking for the iPhone before the iPhone existed. Nobody was demanding streaming video content before Netflix made it ubiquitous.
Nobody was crying out for electric vehicles before Tesla made them desirable. The fish metaphor would have told every one of these companies to stick with what people already wanted. Make a better Blackberry, produce more DVDs, build more efficient gasoline engines.
The fish knows what it tasted before, but the fish doesn't know what's possible. And this brings me to something happening right now in Germany that perfectly illustrates what happens when the same broken thinking infects our institutions. Lower Saxony just removed written division from the elementary school curriculum.
Education Surrender
Let me say that again. Students will no longer learn how to perform long division on paper. Starting in 2026-27 school year, this skill, one of the fundamental building blocks of mathematical literacy will simply disappear from elementary education.
And the ministry's reasoning is too complex for students. The most complex of the written arithmetic procedures, they claim. So instead of teaching it, they are replacing it with half-written methods, breaking larger numbers into smaller, easier chunks that children can handle more comfortably.
At first glance, this might sound progressive. Understanding over rote memorization, right? Teaching kids to think flexibly rather than follow rigid procedures.
But let's call this what it actually is. Intellectual surrender. Germany's PISA scores in mathematics are in free fall.
Nearly one-third of nine graders can't meet minimum mathematical requirements. Lower Saxony ranks thirteenth among German states in mathematical performance. And the response to this crisis?
Lower the standards. Make it easier. Remove the challenge.
It's the exact same logic as the fish metaphor. The curriculum must appeal to the students, not to the education ministry. Students are struggling with complex mathematical procedures, so we'll remove the complex mathematical procedure.
Problem solved, right? Except math isn't an ideology. Math is math.
Division doesn't care about your feelings. Multiplication doesn't adjust to your comfort level. These are foundational tools for logical thinking.
And you can't negotiate with their complexity. The ministry claims they are focusing on understanding rather than formal procedures. As if these are opposing concepts.
As if you can understand division without actually learning to divide. This is the same false choice presented by the fish metaphor. As if you can either understand your audience or maintain your standards.
As if you can either give people what they want or build something excellent. It's a lie. You can do both.
You must do both. But only if you are willing to challenge the premise that the audience's immediate comfort is the only thing that matters. Here's what's actually happening in both cases.
Comfort's Fatal Flaw
In education, we are producing a generation that can't perform basic mathematical operations because someone decided that challenge equals harm, that difficulty equals bad pedagogy. That is, that if students struggle with something, the problem must be the curriculum, not the approach to teaching it. In business and content creation, we are producing an ocean of sameness because everyone's been told that differentiation is arrogance, that doing things your own way is selfish, that the only metric that matters is whether the audience immediately understands and accepts what you are offering.
Both scenarios share the same fatal flaw. They optimize for immediate comfort of a long-term capability. The students who never learn written division won't struggle with it in elementary school.
They will struggle with it in middle school, high school, and beyond. They'll hit a wall than they need to perform calculations that their flexible understanding-based approach can't handle. The business owner who only creates content the market already expects will never struggle to be understood, and also never stand out, never create a category, never build something that couldn't exist without them, conform in the short-term, mediocrity in the long-term.
And both scenarios make the same arrogant assumption, that the experts, the teachers, the creators, the practitioners, should simply defer to what the recipients claim they want. But mathematical teachers know something elementary students don't. That learning division isn't just about division.
It's about developing the cognitive capacity to handle complex multi-step procedures. It's about building the mental discipline to work through something difficult until it becomes second nature. And experienced creators know something their audience doesn't.
That what people say they want and what they actually respond to are often completely different things. The fish doesn't understand the lure, the location, the timing, the technique. The fish just reacts.
Students don't understand the long-term value of struggling through complex mathematical procedures. They just want to get through class. Audiences don't understand your strategic positioning, your differentiation strategy or your long-term vision.
They just know what they've seen before. Your job isn't to be mindless servant to what they think they want. Your job is to make informed decisions that balance immediate resonance with long- term value.
Angler's Strategic Role
To give people what they need, not just what they are comfortable with. To challenge them to rise to your standards rather than racing to the bottom of theirs. In education, that means teaching difficult concepts even when students struggle.
Because struggle is how humans learn. In business, that means creating something distinct, even when the market doesn't immediately understands it. Because distinct is how businesses matter.
The bait must appeal to the fish. Yes, fine. But you still choose which fish you are fishing for.
Where you are fishing and how you are fishing. And sometimes, the best anglers do things that would seem insane to someone who only thinks about the bait. They fish in places others avoid.
They use techniques others don't understand. They target species others consider impossible. And they succeed precisely because they didn't just ask the fish what they wanted.
Excellence Requires Risk
Mathematics isn't going to adjust to accommodate students who find it difficult. The business landscape isn't going to reward creators, who only produce what's already been validated. Excellence requires challenge.
Differentiation requires risk. Value requires the courage to disappoint people who expect you to be like everyone else. Lower Saxony is betting that lowering standards will improve outcomes.
Every paint-by-numbers content creator is betting that copying what works for others will work for them. Both bets are catastrophically wrong. The students who never struggle with difficult math won't suddenly develop mathematical thinking.
They just be less prepared for every challenge that follows. The creators who only produce that the algorithm already rewards won't build distinctive brands. They will just be more interchangeable when the algorithm changes.
So here's my question for you. Are you making decisions based on what you know your audience needs, even when it's not what they think they want? Or are you capitulating to the tyranny of immediate comfort?
Because the difference between those two approaches is the difference between building something that matters and building something that's forgotten the moment someone else offers a shinier version of the same thing. The bait must appeal to the fish. But remember, you are not the worm, you are the angler.
Act like it. I'm André Daus and this has been Iconoclast Insights. See you next week.
