One Pot in Seven

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, or rather down at the harbour below it, before light, when the pots come up.

Two fishers set their pots at sea,
Same bait, same ground, same rocks, same lee.
One lifts a dozen, finds them bare,
And sets no more, in fair despair.
One lifts a hundred, most are empty.
Whose boat came home with catch a-plenty?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two fishermen working the same ground below the town I've never named, and their pots, in the old chorus, were equally well made and equally well baited.

The first set a dozen pots and lifted them on the Tuesday. Nine were empty, two held crabs he could not sell, and one held a lobster.

He took that badly, and here is the thing: not unreasonably. Twelve pots, one lobster. He had built the pots himself and baited them and risen at four, and the sea had given him one creature for the whole of it. He set eight the following week, and five the week after, and by the spring he had concluded that the ground was fished out and that his father's day had been a different world.

What he had actually done was collect a small sample and mistake it for a verdict.

The second man had kept a book since he was a boy, which is the whole of the difference between them, and his book said that on that ground, in that season, roughly one pot in seven held something worth selling.

Which meant a great many things. It meant that lifting a dozen and finding one was not bad luck, it was very nearly exactly what should happen, and told him nothing whatever about the ground. It meant that a run of nine empty pots was ordinary rather than ominous, and he no longer stood in the boat feeling that the sea had formed an opinion of him. And it meant he knew what to do to catch more, which was not to bait more cleverly but to set more pots.

So he set a hundred, and lifted a hundred, and most of them were empty, and he came home with fourteen and a good morning's work behind him.

And note the second effect, which mattered more over a lifetime than the first. He was never discouraged by an empty pot, so he never stopped setting them in the weeks when the takings were thin, which is precisely when his rival stopped. The man who understood the ratio kept working through the bad fortnights, and the man who did not read every bad fortnight as a message about his future.

He also improved, mind. He learned which rocks paid better and shifted his ground accordingly, and the book told him that too. But he learned it from a hundred liftings rather than from twelve, which is the only reason he could tell a real pattern from a bad Tuesday.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Nobody knows their own ratio, so every refusal is read as a verdict rather than as arithmetic. A trade that has never counted how many enquiries become customers, or how many letters produce a reply, has no way of telling an ordinary run of noes from a genuine failure. And in the absence of a number, the mind supplies a meaning, which is invariably the least helpful one available: that the market has changed, that people are not buying, that you have lost your touch.

Count, and the meaning goes away. If one enquiry in five becomes a job, then four refusals in a row is a Tuesday, not a message. If it takes forty letters to fill a month, then the thirty-ninth is not evidence of anything. That is worth more than any encouragement, because it is checkable, and a man who knows his ratio can be turned down all morning without it costing him anything but the morning.

Then the practical half. Once you know the ratio, the way to more work is usually more attempts rather than better ones, at least until the numbers say otherwise. Most trades reach for cleverness first: a new letter, a different offer, a sharper price, all applied to twelve pots. Set a hundred and you will learn more, catch more, and finally have enough liftings to tell whether the cleverness was worth anything.

Two warnings, and the first is important. A ratio only means something when the pots are properly baited: this is not an argument for pestering more people with poor work, which is the leaking coach again at greater volume. And do not judge a ratio on twelve, since twelve of anything tells you almost nothing, and half the confident conclusions in trade are drawn from samples that small.

Three questions, and the first wants a book rather than a memory:

1. What is your ratio? Enquiries to jobs, letters to replies, conversations to customers. If you cannot say, you have been running on feeling, and feeling in a thin fortnight will tell you to stop setting pots.
2. How many attempts does your month actually require? Work backwards from the number of customers you need. If you need four and one in five says yes, you need twenty conversations, and anything less than twenty is not bad luck, it is arithmetic you declined to do.
3. What did you stop doing after a run of noes? Name it. Then look at whether the run was longer than your ratio would predict, or merely felt longer, which it nearly always does.

The Answer to the Riddle

Whose boat came home full?

The man who expected most of his pots to be empty. Both were fishing the same ground with the same bait, and one of them read twelve liftings as a report on the sea and the other read a hundred as a morning's work. The lobsters were never the difference. The difference was that one man knew what an empty pot meant, which is nothing at all, and so he was still setting them in the week his rival gave up.

The verse:

An empty pot is not a sign,
Nor is a run of nine, nor ten.
Count what one pot in seven brings,
Then go and set a hundred, then.

Until next time. Go and count your ratio from the last three months, then work out how many attempts your next month actually needs.

P.S. The reason so few trades keep the book is that counting makes the bad news specific, and a vague sense of how things are going is more comfortable to live inside than a figure. It is also useless. The figure is what lets you sleep after a morning of refusals, which the vague sense has never once managed for anybody.

Also in the archive: The Chandler's Two Jars, Twenty Strangers and Ninety-One Letters.