By Benjamin George Coles.
In a 2010 English-language blog post, the Brazilian novelist Paulo Coelho told the following very short story, giving it the title ‘The Fisherman and the Businessman’ and commenting only: ‘classic Brazilian story, probably also present in other cultures. Someone found the English version, but I could not identify the translator’.
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite a few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?” The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.” “Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished. “This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said. The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?” The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and [when] evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.” The fisherman continues, “And after that?” The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares on the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.” The fisherman asks, “And after that?” The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with [your] kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!” The fisherman was puzzled. “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
The behavioural scientist Paul Dolan, citing Coelho’s blog, reproduces this story in his 2014 book Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life. It was reading this book some years ago that I first encountered the story. You’ve probably encountered it too – though, I would guess, in a different context and with one or two of its details slightly different.
The second time I encountered the story, about a year and a half ago now, it was in a YouTube video of a monologue in French by the actor Dominique Rongvaux, and the location and the fisherman were identified as Mexican, while the businessman was identified as American. Indeed the video was titled ‘L’Américain et le Mexicain’, and Rongvaux – perhaps expressing where his sympathies lay – was wearing a sombrero. A quick bit of research revealed that this video was a clip from Rongvaux’s one-man show Éloge de l’oisiveté (tr: In praise of idleness), recorded in 2011. In an exploratory mood, I watched the full show, helpfully also available on YouTube. In it, Rongvaux does not say anything about the origins of the fisherman and the businessman story, but he does, repeatedly, and often without announcing he’s doing so, quote at length from a 1932 essay by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, with the show’s title also the title of that essay. So I read the essay. And I’d say it finds Russell at his charming and provocative best, as he calls for a universal 4-hour working day and champions a life generally much like the one the fisherman in the story describes living – although I get the sense that he’d be happier to see a bit more civilisation-advancing thinking going on in the freed-up time, and he does suggest that education is normally necessary to know how to make best use of one’s leisure. Anyway, despite the thematic closeness, he does not, in the essay, tell or refer to the fisherman and the businessman story.
By this point, I’d of course also tried a simple web search for it, and found endless versions – a lot of them in wellness or travel or language-learning blogs. Small details continued to differ from one version to another. The characters and setting were, in one case, all Italian, in another all French, and in another had no specified nationality. In cases where they were Brazilian, Coelho was sometimes cited as the author, though his own comments, just mentioned, seem to rule out his authorship. In most cases, there was no citation at all. It seemed a modern folk tale, basically.
I’ve now done a bit more research and discovered that former Harvard Business School professor Mark Albion claims to have written the story – his title for it is ‘The Good Life: A Parable’, and his earliest circulated versions of it do not mention any nationalities, but he did later make his coastal village and fisherman Mexican and his businessman American. In his 2008 book More Than Money: Questions Every MBA Needs to Answer, Albion even explains how he came up with the story in the 90s after returning from a week’s vacation spent mostly in the company of a carefree scuba-diving instructor on a barely populated island (which I’ve found him elsewhere identifying as Salt Cay, in the Turks and Caicos Islands). In a footnote, however, he acknowledges: ‘I’ve since seen this parable in many forms to which my monthly e-newsletter readers have directed my attention, so it is clear that others have written similar stories. The earliest I have found is “Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral” (“Anecdote to Reduce the Work Ethic”), written in 1963 by the German Nobel Prize laureate Heinrich Böll, nearly identical but used differently. A similar tale apparently also appears in a Buddhist story and in Russian folklore.’
The Böll version, easily found when you know to look for it, takes place in a harbour on the western coast of Europe, and features, instead of a businessman as such, merely a well-dressed, camera-clicking tourist, who, with some effort perhaps, switches to the local language to converse with the modestly attired fisherman, having accidently awoken this fellow from his quayside slumbers. Of course someone presumably has to switch language, and deal with any difficulties arising from that switch, in the Mexican-American versions too – and I guess that, while historically that would have more likely been the businessman, these days it would just as likely be the fisherman. Anyway, Böll’s slightly more detailed rendering (three pages, rather than three paragraphs) strikes me as, in proportion, less comic and less stark – though, yeah, still comic and still stark. It is, however, noticeably the same essential story, so much so that I wonder whether Albion for instance read it in his childhood and then forgot about it.
Reading up on the Böll version – as it turns out, a classic of German literature, widely featured on the syllabi of both L1 and L2 courses – I found the recurring observation that it was probably inspired by the story of a conversation between the famously fierce Greek army general and sometime king Pyrrhus and his famously wise and oratorically gifted advisor Cineas in the ‘Life of Pyrrhus’ section of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, most likely written early in the 2nd century AD. Here the structure and gist are again very familiar, but, instead of fishing, the conversation is of military conquest, with Cineas quizzing his master on how, if he succeeds in his plan of conquering the Romans, he will make use of this victory, and Pyrrhus answering that he will of course then conquer all of Italy, and Cineas then asking how he’ll use that victory, and Pyrrhus answering that he’ll then go for Carthage and Libya, and the conversation continuing in this vein until Pyrrhus grants that, upon securing complete domination over all adversaries, ‘We shall be much at ease, and we’ll drink bumpers, my good man, every day, and we’ll gladden one another’s hearts with confidential talks’, only for Cineas then to ask why they don’t just do that in the first place.
So, in summary, Coelho was certainly right to think that that ‘classic Brazilian story’ was ‘also present in other cultures’. I think of Adela Peeva’s documentary Whose Is This Song?, exploring the history of one popular Balkan folk song and the emotional claims of authorship and ownership of it made by laypeople and musicologists alike in just about every country in the region. I would be fascinated to know more about the genealogy of the story of the fisherman and the businessman, and I’m sure there is far, far more of that genealogy to be uncovered, especially if we expand it to include those Buddhist and Russian incarnations that Albion alludes to (but does not provide citations for), and other classic folk tales with noticeably similar characters and themes, like the one La Fontaine tells as ‘The Cobbler and the Financier’ and the one the Brothers Grimm tell as ‘The Fisherman and His Wife’.
Of even greater interest to me though are the responses to the story that I’ve encountered. Dolan, who I can credit with first introducing me to it, describes it as ‘highlighting the paradoxes of our relentless drive for achievement’ and further comments: ‘Much of what the fisherman is meant to aspire to he has now. The consequences of this tale could, in fact, turn out to be worse than circular, as the fisherman loses friends on the way up and out. He could also develop doubts about his identity. This is one reason why many of the scholarship kids from poor backgrounds are not as happy as their equally high-achieving peers from wealthier backgrounds.’
Similarly, it appears that Rongvaux sides very much with the fisherman. I mentioned the sombrero, but, far more importantly, there’s his delivery – he seems to play the businessman for laughs, giving him a monomaniacal, deluded, condescending tone. Plus, lest we forget, there’s the title, the Russellian inspiration and the general ethos of the show he features the story in.
Even Albion, the business guru, says that the story is ‘about values often taken for granted as the material world and its partner “greed” pull you away from yourself, magnified in most business school settings’. He uses the story to help illustrate his concept of ‘the MBA trap’, which ‘occurs when you measure success just by money’. The businessman functions in the story as a kind of mouthpiece for this trap. Albion explains: ‘With a meaningful life as your goal instead of money, your definitions of safe and risky change: you now recognize that a “safe” job choice is one that you believe is on your destiny path, and a “risky” choice is one that is not.’ He concludes: ‘Why not stay with the good life, like the Mexican fisherman? Why not focus on achieving a life of working and living in a place you belong, doing work that matters with people you care about?’
Albion’s claim that the Böll version of the story is ‘used differently’ must, it seems to me, be based mainly on Böll’s title, with Albion feeling his own version is not about the work ethic as such. Incidentally, I’m not sure which translation of the story Albion means to cite, or whether the translation he gives of the title was his own or that of a translation tool. It is, I think, slightly more literal than the title of what’s probably the standard English translation of the story, which is by Leila Vennewitz: ‘Anecdote Concerning the Lowering of Productivity’. I suppose Albion would equally feel that his version is not about productivity as such.
The Böll version, in any case, is totally explicit in its negative judgement on the tourist’s entrepreneurial proposal, arguably from the title on, and especially in the concluding lines uttered by its omniscient narrator. As the Vennewitz translation has it: ‘the thus enlightened tourist walked pensively away, for at one time he too was working so as someday not to have to work any more, and no trace of pity for the shabbily dressed fisherman remained in him, only a hint of envy.’
The Plutarchian urtext, meanwhile, is not quite so explicitly damning of the war-mongering Pyrrhus, but it leaves him sounding like a victim of what some psychologists have called Combat Addiction: ‘By this reasoning of Cineas Pyrrhus was more troubled than he was converted; he saw plainly what great happiness he was leaving behind him, but was unable to renounce his hopes of what he eagerly desired.’
As for the endless blog posts I found reproducing the fisherman and the businessman story, they too, almost invariably, expressed the same essential response to the story, based on the same essential interpretation: this businessman is a fool, and his foolishness is of a kind that many of us are prone to, and that much of our economy / way of life is based on, to our detriment.
I’m more than a little sympathetic to such sentiments. It’s just that a completely different interpretation of this story seems to me as credible, if not more so. I said that blog posts featuring the story almost invariably express the same essential response to it. In several hours of reading through such blog posts, I found one exception. That was by Nathan Barry, the founder and CEO of ConvertKit, ‘an email marketing company for creators’. Barry says in his blog post that he has a goal for ConvertKit of $100 million in annual revenue – up from its current $26 million. Delightful, right? This is very much the businessman responding to the parable of the fisherman and the businessman. He’s American too!
Barry does not comment on whether the businessman in the story is a fool. Instead, while acknowledging that the story can help some people reflect on what they really want in life, he critiques an idea that he detects in it: ‘here’s the problem: If you shortcut to the destination you won’t undergo real transformation.’
He says that he decided on his $100 million goal ‘because I know it’s audacious enough that I need to undergo a transformation in order to achieve it. The 23 year old who started ConvertKit 8 years ago isn’t capable of building a product, team, and company to reach millions of people. He isn’t capable of recruiting, inspiring, and leading a team to navigate the countless obstacles that will need to be overcome. Today at 30 years old I’m still not there. But I set the goal because it calls me to overcome real challenges that I believe will shape me to be a better man. More specifically I believe that if I pursue the goal in alignment with my values, I’ll be a better father, teammate, leader, husband, and friend. The goal doesn’t have to be about money or business, that’s just what I chose.’
Barry does not explain why he thought the $100 million goal – of all the possible goals out there – would be particularly suited to making him a better father, teammate, leader, husband and friend. I would be sincerely interested to hear that explanation.
Barry also does not address the related question of whether he’d expect the fisherman in the story to be a particularly bad father, teammate, etc., or at least a significantly worse one than the businessman. As the fisherman seems to describe a state of harmony and contentment in his relations with family and community, would Barry then have to call the story out as unrealistic? Or the fisherman as deluded? Or equally, if Barry wouldn’t have that kind of expectation, how does he imagine the fisherman could have avoided such weaknesses?
I am doubtful about much of what Barry says, but I take his point when he asks, ‘what if the journey is what matters?’ and when he adds ‘journeys and hardships shape us.’ It also occurs to me that, for instance, ease and restfulness at the end of – and earnt by means of – a great and effortful project, or even just a period of hard work, feel quite different from ease and restfulness enjoyed without any such foundation. Maybe we’d do the fisherman a disservice if we imagined that there’s a dearth of effortful and challenging activity in his life, but that’s at least not clear.
What anyway strikes me as odd about standard interpretations of the story is how they understand what is going on in the mind of the businessman when he, describing to the fisherman what might await him in the glorious concluding phase of a life of successful enterprise, repeats, almost word for word, what the fisherman has just said he is currently doing with his life. Are we thinking this businessman is senile? Are we thinking he suffers from severe short-term memory loss? Mightn’t we expect the businessman to, if answering the question sincerely, mention one of the many classic enjoyable or satisfying things to do that requires a bit of money – travelling, say, as he’s presumably doing now, or gourmet dining, or having a school or a theatre built where there is need of one? It seems to me that the more realistic interpretation is that the businessman is fully aware that he’s repeating what the fisherman said, and that he’s doing so with a smile. That is to say, he’s joking. But there is a serious point behind the joke. Which is: why do you always ask ‘and after that? And after that?’ Surely you know that some things are valuable in themselves. The adventure of enterprise is a thrilling and rewarding thing in itself! Much as these things you currently dedicate your life to are things of value in themselves.
In asking ‘Isn’t that what I’m doing already?’, the fisherman is then totally failing to grasp both the joke and the serious point behind it. It doesn’t occur to him for a second that the adventure of enterprise could be enjoyable or rewarding in itself.
According to this interpretation, the story is of an interaction not between a natively wise fisherman and a foolish businessman, but just between two people who are, in important ways, quite different – with the fisherman, if anything, the less aware of the two.
Now, it may be that the fisherman’s way of life is the generally healthier one for most people. To my mind, the case that it’s generally healthier for all people is at least a more doubtful one. Another view we might take is that the fisherman and the businessman here represent opposite ends of a spectrum, and most of us are somewhere in between – and maybe the existence of some such diversity is a good thing too. As already indicated, I’m sympathetic to the idea that many of us these days could do with living more like the fisherman. I’m even persuaded that basic environmental and civilisational sustainability are at stake in this. On the other hand, I’m far from convinced that having some people about who are closer to the businessman end of the spectrum is not desirable. I mean, even just in the terms of the story: if one guy fishes more than feeding his family requires him to, that will surely mean others in the community, perhaps less keen and able fishers, can fish less, as they can instead acquire fish by purchasing from or bartering with him, and this in turn might well mean that they have time free and an additional incentive to develop and practise other skills – skills that might then benefit the fisherman and indeed the whole community; and if the fisherman does go on to develop a large, successful fishing business, that might, for instance, play an important role in addressing problems of hunger and malnutrition besetting in-land communities in years of bad harvests.
For these kinds of reasons, I find it very satisfying that all of the versions of the story I’ve seen can accommodate this less partisan interpretation.
Granted, the Böll version and the Plutarch version might, at first glance, seem not to. The comments of their omniscient narrators, quoted above, might seem to get in the way. In the Plutarch, there’s even the matter of the Pyrrhus line about the ultimate goal of his enterprise not being preceded by any similar line from Cineas, to say nothing of the matter of that enterprise being, in most people’s reckoning, a far more problematic one than fishing.
Take the Böll case first. So the tourist is ‘enlightened’ at the end and feels no pity anymore but just ‘a hint of envy’ towards the fisherman. This enlightenment, however, does not necessarily concern how best to live one’s life, and the envy is not necessarily based on the feeling that the fisherman is living a better one. ‘At one time [the tourist] too was working so as someday not to have to work any more’ – this, presumably, was before he got properly into his work, started valuing it at least partly for its own sake. I would think the tourist envies the fisherman a little – and only, it is said, a little – for his apparently simpler life, or at least his simpler relationship with work, his more easily achieved work goals. The tourist would like that simplicity, perhaps, if he didn’t have to sacrifice anything much for it. And I would think that the tourist is enlightened at the end in that he understands that the fisherman is not like him in this way – not everyone is.
In the Plutarch case, we can at least ask whether Cineas is here demonstrating his oratorial skills and also-documented Epicurean tastes as much as his wisdom, not least as there is, very possibly, an obvious answer that Pyrrhus could give to him at the end, but doesn’t (perhaps because, bamboozled by Cineas’s argumentative manoeuvre, he doesn’t think to) – namely that the good life Cineas suggests he might enjoy already would not be tolerably secure, for him or for others he cares for or is duty-bound to, as long as their adversaries are at large. Whether or not it would be reasonable for Pyrrhus to give that answer is, crucially, just a matter of historical contingency. And it might not be so obvious, but such contingency is also a huge factor for the fishermen who take his place in subsequent versions of the story. I mean, suppose simply that the fisherman or one of his children develops a severe health problem, curable only with expensive treatment – and suppose this is indeed 90s Mexico or Brazil, or anywhere where there is not a strong universal healthcare system. Suddenly his decision not to take the opportunity to amass some wealth has to be seen in a slightly different light. It has left him and his family more exposed to the winds of fortune. Paradisical the fisherman’s life may be, but it’s a delicate paradise, and an entrepreneurial journey even a little like the one the businessman proposes might have made it more secure.
Reading up on the Pyrrhus and Cineas story, I found that I have an ally here in Simone de Beauvoir, whose first published nonfiction book, released in 1944 but not translated into English until 2004, is titled Pyrrhus and Cineas and takes its starting point from that story. Or a version of it, anyway. Far from concluding that Pyrrhus is a fool or an addict, de Beauvoir sides passionately with him. She objects to Cineas’s queries thus: ‘Such are often the thoughts of the adolescent when the voice of reflection awakens in him. As a child, he was like Pyrrhus: he ran, he played without asking himself questions, and the objects that he created seemed to him endowed with an absolute existence. They carried within themselves their reason for being.’ This is the healthy and right way to live, she implies; Cineas-style thinking arises from ‘a fit of ill humour or puerile exaltation’.
Conspicuously though, de Beauvoir paraphrases Pyrrhus’s list of things he will do when he’s warred and conquered enough thus: ‘I will rest’. This emptying of the envisioned state enables her to demand, ‘why […] condemn human projects by comparing them with the tranquillity of nothingness?’ This is not the devious move it perhaps seems. Simone de Beauvoir is not attacking Plutarch. She’s composed her own simplified version of the story to suit her purpose, which is really to ask and then answer the question of how we can be content with the arbitrary or semi-arbitrary limitations of our endeavours and concerns. (‘All human projects […] seem absurd because they exist only by setting limits for themselves, and one can always overstep these limits, asking oneself derisively, “Why as far as this? Why not further? What’s the use?”’) .
But Pyrrhus, in the Plutarch version, speaks of drinking and deep conversations, and we can surely surmise that he means a lot more than that – he means something like what his fishermen heirs describe doing with their days. And of course in friendships and marriages, in bringing up children, in gathering and feasting on food and drink, and in making music and dancing into the night, there are plenty of decent projects. Nor do I think that de Beauvoir would dispute this. By the end of her book, she seems to be saying that the ‘rest’, the ‘nothingness’ her Cineas advocates skipping to can only ever be a figment of reflection and cannot be experienced in actuality. (‘Wherever there is a point of view, there is not nothingness.’ ‘Every thought, every feeling is project.’ ‘We never escape from that human condition, and we have no way to envision it from the outside in order to judge it.’)
It might seem then that de Beauvoir is not such an ally after all. But really she is an ally in her appreciation of the diversity and essentially self-justifying nature of authentic life projects. It seems to me funny – because out of character – that she, in order to make her metaphysical argument, mischaracterises the life of the fisherman as nothingness, much as the businessman perhaps does; meanwhile her target is something like the fisherman’s mischaracterisation of the businessman’s life as pointlessness. I’d hazard a guess that, presented with all these descendants of her book’s namesake story, she would not take sides.
I wonder how, in the end, to understand the possibility I see of interpreting the story as not taking sides, despite so many of its tellers and re-tellers seemingly focusing on an opposite interpretation. On the one hand, I’m inclined to think that what we have here is a demonstration of the resilience of truth – tell a story that minimally adds up, and in that equation there will be all sorts of deeper truths, whether or not you, in telling and/or interpreting it, discern and join those particular dots. The main truth I’m in this case referring to is that of the extent of human diversity, to be clear. On the other hand, I wonder if what we have here mightn’t actually be more of a demonstration of just the interpretive flexibility of texts, the way that we can often all find in them what we want to.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benjamin George Coles can be found in The Philosopher, Film International and Bright Lights Film Journal, while his short stories have appeared in The London Magazine, Philosophy Now and Hobart, among other places. He won the 2022 Crème Fraîche screenwriting competition at the Luxembourg City Film Festival, with his winning entry turned into the 2023 short film A Place to Be. He’s a member of the artist collective Antropical and sometimes writes their blog.
