A man I used to know, "Joe", was extremely smart and quick. He was also famously impatient. So long as one tried to communicate a specific point within a framework he already understood, Joe was very efficient at quickly getting to the bottom line. But if anyone tried to communicate something unfamiliar, it all twisted into enormous inefficiency with Joe asking enough questions to turn a well-constructed fifteen minute presentation into a two hour Q/A session that only he could follow.

For this reason, it always struck me as odd that Joe's favorite pastime was fishing. I could never reconcile the two concepts. Joe. Fishing. Joe. Fishing. No, I just couldn't put the two together. One day, Joe invited me and one of my managers to go out fishing with him. We agreed. So, on a bright beautiful blue day, we prepared the Cabin Cruiser and headed out from the shore. I hung out the back of the boat enjoying the sun, the sky, and the spray. Joe, meanwhile, hung out in a nearly closed cabin completely surrounded by every modern electronic gadget conceivably relevant to fishing.

Suddenly, Joe yelled, "There they are!" Blips had appeared on the sonar. Joe pulled open the throttle and we sped into a school of fish at better than forty knots. Joe reversed engines, pulling the boat to a sudden stop. Joe began barking out orders. "Throw over the anchor! Throw out the chum! Put out the lines!" In a flurry of activity we accomplished all this. Well, thought I, now we'll wait for the fish to come back. Nope. After two minutes, Joe said, after consulting his electronics, "They're gone! Pull up the anchor. Pull in the lines." In another minute, Joe was cruising out to sea. Another blip. Full speed ahead, we dashed into another school of fish. Another rush to get the fish. Again they were gone. This went on all day, with us zig-zagging around at forty knots chasing images on sonar and radar screens. The only actual fish we saw that day were the ones on our plates at dinner afterwards, courtesy of Legal Seafood.

This story is about two specific people really (with different "lessons"). It illustrates how utterly (and self-defeatingly) impatient a particular person was on this specific occasion. By extension, it shows how self-defeating any trait can be when applied to an inappropriate situation. The story also illustrates how the teller's (my) concept of a general activity; viz., fishing, was quite different from the reality of fishing as instantiated in a specific instance (fishing a la Joe). The second "lesson", then, is a variation on the same theme -- rigidity. In the first instance, rigidity of behavior; in the second instance, (my own) rigidity of concept. If one went to sell specifically to Joe, it would be important to know that you had to make your point quickly and be prepared for a barrage of unrelated questions.