Give the rod, not the fish. Otherwise you get anger, not gratitude.

March 2024, in a notebook, about helping people:

If you keep on giving them the fish — the reward, instead of giving the rod — the tool, they will soon depend on you, and sooner or later you can't provide support for them no longer. And not gratefulness, but angriness you will receive. So if you are providing help, make it sustainable — for each of us have a life to live — not someone to worry about.

I was twenty-two and writing about giving money to people. I read it back this week and realised it is the sharpest description I have of what goes wrong in a client relationship.

The fish version of software

The fish version is easy to sell and easy to build. The client asks for a report; you send them the report. They ask again next month; you send it again. Every request is small, every answer is fast, everyone is happy.

Then it compounds. Six months in, nothing in the business can be answered without going through you. You are the only one who knows where the numbers come from. Your inbox is the interface.

At that point two things are true at once: you are indispensable, and you are a bottleneck. The second one is what people actually feel. Nobody enjoys depending on a person who might be asleep.

And when you eventually can't answer — you're busy, you're on another project, you raise your price — what arrives is not gratitude for the six months of fast answers.

The rod version

The rod version is slower and initially less impressive. Instead of the report, you build the screen that produces the report. Instead of fixing the row, you fix the rule that produced the bad row, and add the test that keeps it fixed.

It is worse for the first month. The client wanted an answer and got a tool. Tools have a learning curve; answers don't.

It is better forever after that. The shop I built an order-and-customer system for this year runs their own daily work now — the staff open a screen, not a chat with me. When the handover was done, what I handed over was the accounts, the passwords, the documentation and the ability to keep going without me on the line.

That is the version I want to be hired for, and I should be honest about why: not because I am generous. Because the fish version has a ceiling and a bad ending, and I can see both from here.

Where the rule bends

The note says make it sustainable, and sustainability cuts both ways.

A rod nobody can lift is not a rod. If the tool needs three days of training and the person using it is a shop assistant on a phone during a busy afternoon, you have shipped a fish with extra steps. The real work is not "build the tool", it is "build the tool this specific person will actually use on a Tuesday".

Sometimes you do just hand over the fish. When something is on fire, the answer is the answer — you fix the data, you send the number, you explain later. The rule is not never. The rule is that the fish is an emergency measure, and the rod is the plan.

The last line

for each of us have a life to live — not someone to worry about.

Twenty-two-year-old me meant it about family and money.

I mean it about systems: the point of building someone a good one is that they get their attention back, and so do I.

From a handwritten notebook kept since 2024 — transcribed word for word. This is post three of five.