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Have you heard the saying, give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for the rest of his life. Well a wise man once told me that if you teach a man to fish, he’ll steal your fish.
Helping others is a great thing to do and I have even preached in the past that you should help people. But one thing you shouldn’t do is teach people everything you know because no matter how good of a friend they are, it will cause your knowledge to be less scarce. Plus there is nothing stopping them from selling your knowledge to others, which could have been money going into your pocket.
Hopefully this blog post doesn’t discourage you from helping others, but for a moment just think about the saying:
Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll steal your fish.
The saying is very true and I personally learned it the hard way. You should never teach anyone everything you know. You can teach people some things, but keep your trade secrets to yourself. If you don’t, expect that individual to steal your fish.
Pretty interesting advice, I think there are certain times when you can trust someone with everything you know, but you’re probably right in that most of the time you should only teach them how to bait and cast and let them figure the rest out on their own.
I would say that you have to be careful even with family.
You have to protect the information that you have that you are profiting from. Pertaining to what I said about seminars. If you have valuable information then people need to pay for it. However, since the “teacher” will be progressing the information that he may give will be already surpassed and taken advantage of by the teacher. HOWEVER, no teacher is going to give the “secret sauce” information. It’s the same as having people over to your home. You’ll have them over but they don’t have access to the whole house all of the time at any time.
As long as you give bits and pieces you are usually fine. The good thing about doing that is it helps build credibility and can help you make more money as well.
A little off topic, but that’s basically how lots of bloggers have turned their blogging in to book writing success. Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse specifically both have books that were basically spawned by having such large communities that they built by slowly building credibility over the years.
There is nothing wrong with that too. I bet you some of those guys don’t talk about everything they know.
That’s true, I’m sure that as a Professional Blogger, Darren probably doesn’t give away all his tips. I would imagine Steve probably writes everything he knows about general personal development, and he’s trying to turn that into specific one on one coaching as a business.
I think that the one on one coaching is a lot closer to “giving a fish” than teaching them to fish though, since now you’ve got them always coming back for coaching!
The thing with teaching these days is most people don’t use what you teach them.
It depends. If you’re not after the fish yourself — and instead have a pretty good business selling fishing rods — it might not be so bad having him “steal your fish.”
In that case you wouldn’t be in the business of “catching fish” so you can teach someone how to fish. But if you teach someone how to build rods, it can decrease your revenue.
And if people started coming to you wanted to learn how to build rods you can either send them away because you don’t want to share your secrets…. or you can start selling them fishing line. I hate to get all “Who Moved My Cheese” on you, but sometimes being successful is about allowing old knowledge to become commoditized and grabbing better opportunities upstream. There’s something to be said about not jealously hoarding information … it allows progress to happen, knowledge to evolve. On the other hand, sometimes people do just need to learn to STFU and stop giving all their “cheese” away for free.
Nicely put. With old information, by all means give it away and teach others. With cutting edge information, you shouldn’t teach others everything you know.
But I do get what you are saying. To some extent if you teach others it will help build up your brand.
I think what you are saying is be a teacher or a mentor to someone. You had to got through the hard work of putting all the bits of information that you got together. We teach people the basics and “some” new ideas (tools) and then they are responsible to make themselves successful.
Besides, give people enough information so that they will want to come back to your paid seminars to get a little bit more.
It isn’t even about getting people to come back to paid seminars. If you can make money off of your knowledge, even better, but you should just try and be careful what you teach. At the end of the day, it can affect your income.
I agree with you, I don’t think I would tell someone everything but I would still help them. Sometimes people are looking for direction, like the steps or process of fishing, just to get a start in the right direction. That little bit of knowledge may be huge to them without giving them the fish or having them steal it. Ultimately people need to have their own ideas and goals.
If you teach someone how to fish and they turn around and outfish you, that’s not stealing, that’s capitalism. Maybe he took your technique and improved on it. Perhaps your fishing skills are antiquated.
But there are only so many fish in the sea. The fishes he caught could have been ones you caught.
I my memory serves from a seminar I took quite a few years back, the story goes something along the lines of teaching something wrong on purpose.. The martial arts were taught wrong for thousands of years when they were passed from Japan to China.. From what I remember from a martial arts seminar I had probably 20 years ago, a Tuite master spoke of how the Japanese actually taught and passed on martial arts to the Chinese, but purposely taught them wrong. Not completely wrong, the art was functional against typical foes… but they taught them stances that they could easily attack that actually opened the meridians (pressure points) inside their legs, making them more vulnerable to attack. The thought being if they should ever have to face the Chinese in battle, they would be able to defeat them more easily.
Do I have verified proof of that statement, no… I’m paraphrasing from a seminar I attended 15-20 years ago.. but it does make sense if you think about it, and it’s something you should think about as well. When someone teaches you something, keep that little thought in the back of your mind, take what they’re teaching and keep what is useful, discard what is not, and put your own spin on it.
An of course don’t teach everything you know… As the old saying goes, “Dad, of course I can beat you, you taught me everything I know! ….Yes son, you’re right, but I didn’t teach you everything I know… ”
Great example. You can be better than your teacher if you put your own twist on what they taught you. There is always potential to improve upon things.
I stole your fish
and you know it.
LOL, you did.
I say screw the damn fish thieves.
Of course I am coming off a weekend where my laptop and cell phone were stolen, so…as of this moment I am kind of in the fend-for-yourself and put-number-one-first camp.
Give me a week though and I will be back teaching people I care about how to fish- that’s the real issue- WHO are you teaching to fish?
Currently I am not teaching anyone. Luckily I have always been a bad teacher, so even if I try teaching others, it usually doesn’t go well.
I’d love to be the idealist and stand up to you and argue… but sadly its true. You really need to be careful what you tell people. I run quite a successful men’s online magazine, and have made friends with many in my niche… but i learned the hard way that helping them out… means a smaller slice of the pie.
I’m all for sharing tips… advice… lesson’s learned… but if you have something genuinely special… something that makes your product uniquely your own… then hold it close to your heart!
I am the same way. I don’t mind sharing small stuff, but I try to keep the good stuff to myself.
By the way, nice blog. I love the GOP Vice Presidental Candidate Sarah Palin is a MILF… post.
I’m going to go ahead and disagree with you (Office Space anyone?)…
I think sharing knowledge is directly responsible for the overall progression of our collective intelligence and well-being.
I think we should keep an ‘abundance mentality’ with ideas and share them around.
I fear the world we’d be living in if everyone thought their ideas were the best but didn’t reveal them. There goes electricity and airplanes!
…but then again, you’re probably just relating this to the oft-shady world of internet marketing, right?
If that’s the case, I fully agree.
Sharing knowledge isn’t the problem and if I felt that sharing knowledge was bad I wouldn’t blog.
When I mean don’t teach others to fish, I mean don’t teach them everything you know. For example if I was a successful management consultant, I wouldn’t teach others what I consult on and how I get clients. I may teach someone one or the other, but teaching them everything can be deadly.
Couldn’t agree more, these days almost everyone wants to make an extra quick buck and to most it doesn’t matter whose to they step on in the process. So it is best not to let everyone know, everything you know about a particular industry, even if they don’t belong to it.
Those are the people you really have to watch out for. The ones who want that quick buck will try and weasel their way into what you are doing and learn from you. Even if you don’t teach them anything, they may still learn from your actions.
This is very true and you’d be a jackass to think someone will teach you everything you know. Sure i’ll teach a man how to bait the hook, but i’m not going to teach him my way of hooking the fish. Get it?
I get it, but people do think you will teach them everything. I get emails on a regular basis asking if I will teach them how to make money.
Oops! I made an error. You should be they.
Ah, take it easy on the B word. I am a big fan .. but your constant use of the B word in your posts is a turn off.
Just bitchin’.
Sorry Lily, I was thinking the same thing today. Not just this post, but I felt I have been using bad language in my last few posts.
Hey, you’re forgiven. I just hold you at a higher standard than the mere mortals.
I’m kinda surprised so many people agreed with this actually. In my experience…there really aren’t any “secrets” out there to success, what you should do is pretty clear, it’s just a matter of doing it. Ironically, sometimes no matter how much you give someone advice they don’t take it, haha. The harder question is how do you get people to actually use your secrets!
I dunno, maybe I’m naive…I tend to think the world is abundant, if I help someone else make a ton of money, it will end up helping me in some way down the road. I don’t really mind if it makes them $1,000 and I only get $10 of value out of it cuz I can still get $10 from a whole lotta people.
But what happens if it makes them $100,000 and $0 for you? Sounds like rare occurrences, but sadly it has happened to me.
I think a lot of this comes down to hanging out with too many fisherman. Why not have a full deck with a captain, crew and 1st mate.
Diversify your company more…pun intended
There is nothing wrong with having a crew, but if your crew knows everything you know what is stopping them from starting their own company?
Loyalty, friendship, moral beliefs? Or maybe they aren’t the entrepreneurial type?
@Neil
I think that still comes down to picking the right crew. After being burned here and there, I like to pick people who are passionate about what they do, but are not interested in any spotlight…or even have a phobia of it.
In fact I work the best with people who are looking for someone to take the spotlight because it’s just not what they do. There are a ton of gifted people with “no balls” for the lack of a better expression. Sorry if I offended anyone.
@Joshua
Yes, but they are not that common anymore
Valid point. The best business partners I had and current have don’t care about the spotlight. All they care about is the company they are building.
I totally agree on this.
Like Guru’s never give their followers 100% what they know…
This makes them a “Guru”… otherwise every one can be…
Isn’t that part of the point eventually though, where the student eventually surpasses the master?
It is, but you don’t want to pass you too quick. If they do, you may be a broke master.
How do you deal with this with your business partners though?
Wouldnt they expect you to share all your knowledge etc. to make the
business a roaring success?
With business partners you only share knowledge that needs to be shared. The trick with business partners is not to have ones with similar skill sets, this way you guys can do different tasks.
Yeah i agree too, i would like to choose a business partner who has excellence in other field rather than from the same field and business can only built up on trust with each other, in country like india, there are two types of business partners “one - technical partner” and “second - financial partner” and they run the business successfully across the globe.
There has to be more types of business partners. You should also look for a partner who is a visionary.
Hi Neil, you may be right.
Can u please list out few other partner types.
Not sure of any other partner types. All I know of is the business guy, tech guy, and the visionary.
Right Said Brother - I learned this from my experience too. I Taught a person everything i knew - now he is doing my job ( and am searching for a new job - Somebody help me
Sorry to hear that. Best of luck trying to find a job.
Shanker,
lol, you outsourced yourself!
LOL. That is actually a good business idea. If you get paid 100k for a job that doesn’t require you to be in an office, you can outsource it to India for 10k and keep the rest.
Maybe I’m just being idealistic, but I have to say I have my doubts. While I do see where you are coming from, I would tend to agree with Melanie from earlier in the comments. In today’s world especially, what with information and knowledge being so readily available, keeping “trade secrets” gets harder, and arguably less valuable. It’s more important to be able to adapt and move. Or maybe I’m just being too naive.
To some extent I agree and to some extent I disagree. With some knowledge it is only useful for a certain amount of time. In that case by all means share it and build a name by sharing the knowledge.
With trade secrets and things that can last for a long time, you want to keep it to yourself as long as possible. You will be surprised on how many secrets are not public or on the web yet.
LOL, for some reason that picture reminds me of Chapple’s Show….but your are right, you have to be careful what you teach people because it can come back to bite you in the ass. Once I when to a trade show, and talked about on a topic I was going to blog about and I noticed that someone I met at the show also blogged about what we were talking about, something I taught him!
Dude, it also reminds me of the Chapple show. I just thought I was a bit crazy… at least I know it wasn’t just me.
Trade shows are a bad place for people like us to be talking… You have to be real careful about how much info you give away with speaking engagements.
We all just get so into it and actually like talking about this stuff, thats the problem
What I like to do at trade shows is give the audience enough to where they love what I am saying, but little enough to where they can’t act on the information I gave them.
Ah…the games we play
Well said Neil.
That picture kills me every time. I have actually done this myself as well. It was on a more concentrated niche my company focuses on so it wasn’t a huge deal but taught a freelancing employee many great tips and after the contract was up they went and started their own company using many of the tips I showed them to use money and to make them a competitor.
That sucks!
All you can do is learn from your mistakes and hope it doesn’t happen again.
I think it comes down to your audience and what you are trying to accomplish by divulging your knowledge.
You said you don’t consider yourself to be a good teacher. I’m not trying to knock on you here, but that might have something to do with your POV on this subject.
There’s a special relationship between an teacher and a student/mentor and protege. My part time gig is teaching drumlines, and I can tell you that I would never hold back from my students to protect my own self interests. As a teacher/mentor, your goal is for your student/protege to improve, exceed and excel (even beyond your capabilities). Having someone devoted to someone else’s improvement and success has been a stable of civilization dating back as far as we can know.
When you make a commitment to an individual or group of people, you aren’t fulfilling your duties by “holding back.” The feeling that comes from helping someone else succeed through your guidance and their devotion is one of the most fulfilling things you can experience.
But of course, you wouldn’t tell a direct competitor what makes you better than them. You still have to protect your own survival.
Again, it comes down to your audience and your intentions.
I’m gonna go eat some fish…
Thanks for shedding some light on the subject. I can now see when you may want to teach someone everything you know. One day I would like to be a professor and as you said yourself, I probably wouldn’t hold back.
oops, my post (conches) on the next thread was meant to be here.
That picture is hilarious. I find that a lot of times when I try to teach people anything, most of the info goes in one ear and out the other. But I guess it only takes one person to use your secrets elsewhere to take money away from you.
And if that one person teaches someone else, you can expect to lose even more.
Well said. As some one whose career is in philanthropy I have come to the conclusion that the only engine that has enough horsepower to actually solve the world’s most intractable problems is the market. (I specifically say the market as opposed to Capitalism. Markets are science and Capitalism is religion.) The problem with the physics of making a better world is that we have two competing markets. The one that says I have to compete to be the best and win the resources and the other says I have to collaborate to achieve the goals of a better world.
And there in, I believe, lies the answer. We need to collaborate to create a better world.
The Teach-A-Man-To-Fish paradigm is a mess. First, it concentrates on the Man when many studies show that, specifically in the developing world, women are far better entrepreneurs. Second, people know how to fish and the assumption that you are “helping” by telling some one everything you know is more ego stroking than anything. There are lot’s of people who fish much better than I do. (To take yet another tangent, knowledge or IP, IS a fish. In an information economy teaching some one to fish means requires a vibrant education system. Something that we should work to develop here in the US, eh? In an information economy, IP IS a commodity. Knowing how to fish is the ability to innovate, to apply insight to opportunity and then operationalize.)
Don’t help. Solve. Take the problem seriously. Apply your sharpest knife. Find the very best partner(s). Solve the problem. Generic “helping” is useless on a global scale. The boy scout model is pleasant and makes us each, individually feel better because we took a few seconds to help. But, with out an ability to strategically aggregate our collective efforts to “help” we are just making ourselves feel good. Find someone who is every bit as good at fishing as you are and point your collective skills at a specific problem and then take the problem seriously enough to internalize the hubris to solve it.
WOW, thanks for the input!
I totally agree with you about women entrepreneurs. They are great and have different perspective on many things. I just wish there was more of them.
What if you always hire people that are better than you are. Then, you can always still their fish. Business owners should always hire talented people who are or have the potential to be better than themselves. That’s the way to grow!
If the person you hire knows less than you, make them grow in their area of expertise but keep yours secretly.
I am with you on that one. For that reason I always try to hire people who are smarter than me.
Neil, I couldn’t of said it any better myself. I have been down that bridge several times and I still give to as many as possible … but never “everything”! That is a great thought to live by!
Darin
I live by it to the fullest extent. Even if the person was my brother or sister, I still wouldn’t teach them everything I know. Sounds cold, but it is the truth.
[...] is good, if you are receiving most of the benefit. It’s never equal and someone always has more to gain or is making more money than the other. Can there really be an truly equal cooperative competition [...]
Think about this: “Give a man a fish and it’ll feed him for a day, show him how and he’ll buy the equipment from you.”
Not a bad idea if you are trying to get out of fishing.
[...] your business. In the words of Neil Patel, you could be giving other freelancers an opportunity to steal your fish. While it’s nice to teach others how to fish, you need to catch a few of your own [...]
“But one thing you shouldn’t do is teach people everything you know because no matter how good of a friend they are, it will cause your knowledge to be less scarce.”
Only if your knowledge does not increase, and consists entirely of things which can be transferred completely.
Almost all of my favorite musicians and artists were also teachers, but the success of their students didn’t impugn their success at all. For example, Bach was a teacher throughout his life, but he was always far more famous and successful than any of his students or children.
If anything, it sounds as if this makes a convenient excuse for both not improving, and not teaching.
The things you are refering are related to a specific art thats MUSIC , This saying dose not fit for ARTISTIC knowledge. It is more realted to general Knowledge which dose not require ARTISTIC capabilities.
With some knowledge it can be transferred. But with basic knowledge as Shanker pointed out, it is a different story.
Well, in real world this might be a truth. However, I don’t practice them. I’m happily give away/ tell away what I know as long as it’s not invading me personally. I don’t agree with “teach a man to fish and he will steal your fish.” In real world there are plenty of things to learn, to experience and to explore.In addition,not all the people want to accept what you have taught them.
I get what you are saying and it seems that many of us have different view points, which is fine. I have a scarce viewpoint on many things, which is why I feel people will steal my fish.
I guess I need to learn to change.
I signed up for your RSS feed a few days ago (recommended by a friend) and I’ve been laughing about that photo ever since I saw it. The look on that boy’s face is priceless.
And it’s a good point that you make too … it’s great to help people but it hurts to feel that you’ve been used, particularly by a friend.
Thanks, I am glad you are liking the blog.
I love the picture too, just can’t stop laughing. However I don’t quite agree your point. He might “steal” your fish at first, yet he may give you back a boat load of fish later on.
Yea some people will pay it back and others may not. You just have to be careful on who you teach if you believe in karma.
Funny picture