We’d been talking about it all summer. Labor Day Saturday it finally happened. I took my 7-year-old daughter for her very first fishing outing. We headed to the bait shop after lunch. She was excited. I was a nervous wreck.
Because she is highly empathetic, I was concerned about how she’d react to actual fishing. She loves animals and animals would definitely get hurt if we were successful this day. I downplayed that fact so she wouldn’t lose her nerve before we ever got to the lake. I had a long list of worries.
Then we got there and she completely destroyed my assumptions.
I worried she’d shy away from worm guts. She saw one wriggle on the hook and reached out to touch it.
I worried she wouldn't figure out how to cast. After a few minutes of determined practice, she was casting the line like a born bass pro.
I worried she’d panic when the first slimy fish came out of the lake. No screams, she wanted to pet it.
I worried she’d get bored after ten minutes and demand to go home. She begged me to stay after I was ready to go.
I worried she’d want nothing to do with cleaning and gutting the fish when we got home. Instead, she stood so close that she probably caught a scale in her hair.
On what was a memorable first daddy-daughter experience I spent the day worrying about the wrong things, the things I thought were obvious potential failures. None of them failed. I started looking forward to us eating the fish.
I felt like I won “Dad of the Year.” We conquered fishing and many future outings would follow. Every weekend until winter? Ice fishing? I had successfully managed the operations, the logistics, and the emotional pitfalls of the entire fishing enterprise.
Then we sat down at the dinner table.
My favorite Mike Tyson quote has always been, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” My punch was coming.
My wife cooked the fish with care and served it with a little salt and lemon. My now fishing pro daughter took one bite, frowned. “I don’t prefer it.” Then silence.
I died a little inside. This was a familiar feeling in a different part of my life.
We entrepreneurs spend our days building, breaking, repeating and worrying about the next build. We worry about what’s going to fail and how it’s going to fail. We anticipate the weaknesses in our processes. We draw up possible solutions to those failures. We do this because we’re obsessed with growing, scaling, and controlling our destiny. Many times those solutions we over-engineered end up staying in the box.
We end up failing with the simplest worry of all: will my customer actually like what I’m selling? And the problem is, you won’t know, can’t know until that fish, or drink, or pastry gets into your paying customer’s mouth. Until you enter the ring to face the champ.
I relearned this lesson the hard way on a late summer Saturday. Now I need to find tastier fish to catch if I want to have future Saturdays by the lake with my kid.
What punched you in the mouth?
Disclosure: I write these posts. AI helps me edit them.