21: Jolt of Joy – Are You a Fish trying to Climb a Tree?

Stop Trying to Climb the Tree

A favorite Einstein quote has been circling lately: everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid. It’s worth sitting with, because it explains so much about why standard organizing and productivity advice so often fails to stick.

Fish and monkeys, not smart and unintelligent

For anyone who struggles to keep a home or a life in consistent order, most available advice comes from people for whom climbing the tree is instinctive: grab the lowest branch, then the next, then the next, straight up in a clear, direct path. That’s a real skill, just not a universal one. Being handed that same advice, climb the tree, when your body simply isn’t built with branch-grabbing hands, doesn’t make you less capable. It just means you were handed a set of instructions built for an entirely different kind of creature.

The freedom of the water instead

What makes being a fish worth embracing is that water doesn’t require one single, correct direction. There’s no straight path up a trunk to measure yourself against. You can swim toward one thing for a while, circle back, head a different direction entirely, and you haven’t fallen behind anyone else moving through that same water in their own way. There’s no wrong way to swim.

Genius, just measured differently

The real takeaway isn’t that tree-climbers are smarter and fish are lesser. It’s that intelligence and capability were never meant to be measured against a single, narrow skill. Whatever your version of swimming looks like, it’s worth trusting that it counts, even when it looks nothing like the tree-climbing advice everyone else seems to be following successfully.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.