The Catch You Didn't Plan For
There is a podcast moment I keep coming back to. Chris Koerner is talking with Steven Bartlett. The conversation has been winding for an hour about what works and what doesn’t in starting a business, and at some point Bartlett asks the question that has been hovering underneath the whole exchange: do you think wanting the sexy thing — the next Facebook, the next AI app, the next viral idea — is part of the trap for the average person?
Koerner answers with a story instead of a theory.
Have you ever been deep sea fishing? Here’s a real story. I was out there. I throw out the chum. I try one bait. I try another. Eventually, you have a bunch of sharks in the boat. You have a grouper. You have a snapper. We’re eating shark tonight. We’re eating grouper. We’re eating snapper. You have this amazing life that’s dynamic and full of color and all these other awesome things are coming into play because you stayed out there and you didn’t just do one thing — you tried all these other things.
Even if I don’t catch anything, it’s fun. I think other people should try that too.
I want to spend the first essay of this series with that story, because almost everything else we are going to talk about across the next five essays sits inside it.
The story sounds like it is about methodology — try many baits, stay out longer than the unsuccessful do, accept that the catch will be plural. That part is true, and we will get to it in Essay 4. But the deeper move in the story is somewhere else. The deeper move is its quiet diagnosis of why so many people never catch anything: they go out for one specific fish, the one they decided they wanted before they even left the dock.
The fisherman who has decided in advance that he wants a marlin will probably never get a marlin. He will spend his time looking at the water for marlin signs, casting baits marlin like, in stretches of water marlin are supposed to live in. The grouper that comes up beside the boat will go ignored. The snapper will be released. The catch he was open to was the catch he had already decided he wanted, and the ocean does not work that way.
The fisherman who throws out the chum and tries one bait and then another — the one Koerner describes — comes home with sharks and grouper and snapper. He eats well that night. He has a story to tell. He is also, quietly, becoming the kind of fisherman who knows what these waters actually hold, because he has been letting the waters teach him instead of demanding they confirm what he already believed.
This is the story underneath the story. Predetermining the catch is what keeps most dreamers on the dock indefinitely.
Why sexy doesn’t work
The trap that Koerner names — wanting sexy stuff, the next Facebook, the next ChatGPT, the next AI app — is more useful than it first sounds. The argument isn’t aesthetic. It isn’t don’t pursue what’s beautiful. The argument is structural and it runs through three steps.
First. What is currently sexy is sexy because it is currently visible. The thing that is sexy this year is the thing many people are talking about, the thing the magazines have on the cover, the thing your friends keep mentioning. Visibility is not random. It tends to be the thing that has just produced a few extraordinary outcomes, and the few extraordinary outcomes are what make it visible. The visibility creates an attraction effect, and the attraction effect creates competition, and the competition turns the water into a crowd of well-equipped boats fishing the same well-mapped stretch.
Second. What is currently unsexy is unsexy mostly because no one has yet narrated it as sexy. The narrative absence is itself the unfair advantage. The waters are emptier. The fish are easier to land. The eventual story emerges from the catch itself, not from someone’s prediction.
Third — and this is where the principle becomes useful instead of merely true — the sexy/unsexy axis is not a fixed property of categories. It is a property of how you frame what you do. The same niche, written one way, is sexy and crowded. Written another way, it is invisible to the crowd and visible to the people who actually need it. The reframe is not cosmetic. It is the entire game.
If your work is, say, self-knowledge for women in their fifties navigating a career pivot in the AI era — there is a sexy framing of that. AI for personal growth. The future of self-help. Coaching for the AI age. Each of those translations puts the same work into the most competitive water available, where it instantly becomes one shimmering small fish in a sea of much larger, much louder ones.
The unsexy framing is exactly the same work, told for the people who actually need it, in language they actually use, in waters where almost no one else is fishing because almost no one else has done the practitioner-decades it would take to fish there honestly.
You don’t have to choose unsexy work. You probably can’t, because you don’t choose your work; you discover it. But you do get to choose how you frame the work you discover. And the unsexy framing of your actual work is almost always closer to the truth of what it is, and almost always opens onto waters where you can actually catch something.
Phantom shoals
Let me give the structural shape of this a name. Koerner offers his own — mirage opportunities — and that works. I want to call them something that stays inside the fisherman’s vocabulary, because that is the vocabulary we are going to use for the rest of the series. I am going to call them phantom shoals.
A shoal, in fishermen’s vernacular, has two meanings that overlap. It can mean a stretch of shallow water where currents and food gather and fish therefore concentrate. It can also mean the gathering of fish itself — a shoal of mackerel. Both meanings collapse into the same practical thing: a shoal is the named stretch of water where the fish are. Fishermen know their shoals. They return to the same ones across years. They give them names. The whole geography of a fishing career is the slow learning of which shoals hold what, in what season, at what hour.
A phantom shoal, then, is a stretch of water that keeps looking like it should hold fish — because the surface signs are right, because the diagnosis is widely shared, because every spring brings a new fleet of well-meaning fishermen trying it again — but has never actually held fish, for reasons invisible from the surface.
Koerner gives three examples, and I want to walk through each one because the structure they share is the structure of nearly every dead end I have personally watched friends and clients walk into.
The groups app shoal. Loneliness is at all-time highs. WhatsApp has limits. Facebook groups don’t work for younger generations. Surely there is space for a dedicated app for run clubs, recital groups, friend circles. Many people have tried. None of them succeeded. Not because the diagnosis of loneliness was wrong — loneliness is real — but because the leap from people are lonely to people will download an app for groups skipped the actual data about what lonely people do. (Mostly: they don’t download apps. They text three specific friends. They go to the place the people they already know are going.) The diagnosis was correct. The conversion to an opportunity was not.
The what’s-going-on-at-campus app shoal. Every entrepreneurial undergraduate decides, around her sophomore year, that the campus needs a noticeboard app. None of them succeed. Not because campuses are organised, but because students don’t decide what to do on a Friday night by checking a noticeboard. They decide based on which dorm-room friends are going somewhere, and which person they have a crush on is going somewhere, and what their group is going to do. The supposed problem is not the actual problem. Worse: the customer base churns thirty-three percent every year, which means even if the product worked, you would lose a third of your audience before you finished onboarding them.
The tools-for-podcasters shoal. A friend of a friend builds a useful product for podcasters. He realises, eventually, that he is selling to a market whose defining feature is quitting. Ninety-five percent of new podcasters quit within six months. The five percent who remain split into the few who can afford an expensive tool and the many who cannot. The market is not just small; it is constituted by abandonment. The bait is well-tied. The water is empty.
What these three share is a precise structure. A visible diagnosis (loneliness; campus disorganisation; podcaster needs) that is correctly perceived but incorrectly converted into an opportunity. The conversion error is in assuming that what people say they need maps onto what they do in response to a product designed around that need. It usually doesn’t. People are lonely and don’t want an app for it. Campus is disorganised and students decide socially anyway. Podcasters need tools and mostly quit before any tool can compound for them.
Phantom shoals draw fishermen in because they are obvious and uncrowded — no one is doing this; the gap is right there. The thing is, the gap is right there because no one has been able to fill it. The emptiness is not a vacancy. It is the visible trace of structural unworkability. The fishermen who already failed in those waters did not write about it. So the next entrant does not learn. The shoal keeps its reputation for promise indefinitely, because the only people who could disprove the reputation are the ones who already gave up and moved on.
The calling shoal
The opposite of a phantom shoal is the water Koerner names — with characteristic plainness — your unfair advantage.
I will only start businesses today where I have an unfair advantage. Everyone has an unfair advantage in something. Even a 13-year-old has an unfair advantage — they might know Roblox better than anyone. So unfair advantage is not only for the rich or the wealthy or the elite or the most experienced or the PhDs.
The water where this advantage lives needs a name too. Authentic niche would be the obvious candidate, and it’s also the wrong one. The word authentic has been drained over the past decade. Half a generation has watched it become a marketing word. Serious people have argued, fairly, that authenticity isn’t a stable thing — what we have instead is what calls us, what we keep returning to, what we cannot put down even when we try. The argument is right enough that the word can’t quite carry weight any more.
So here is a different word, in the same fisherman’s vocabulary as phantom shoal. I am calling it the calling shoal.
A calling shoal is the specific stretch of water where the inner pull and the unfair advantage meet. It is named for what it does, not for any essentialist claim about your true self. There is no need to argue about whether your authentic self lives there. The water is the water that calls you and rewards you and that you can fish better than almost anyone for reasons that have nothing to do with effort. That is enough.
A calling shoal has four features that distinguish it from a phantom shoal absolutely.
It is known to you in non-articulate form. You don’t know that you know what you know. Your unfair advantage is invisible to outsiders not because it is rare but because it is so woven into your unremarkable life that you have stopped noticing it. The thirteen-year-old who knows Roblox better than anyone is not remarking on her expertise. She is just playing the game.
It keeps calling you back. A calling shoal is the water you keep finding yourself in even when your conscious plan was to fish elsewhere. It is the topic you cannot stop reading about. The conversation you cannot stop having. The small problem you keep noticing in the world that no one else seems to find worth noticing. Across years, the call is steady regardless of whether you obey it.
It isn’t visibly crowded — but for the inverse reason from a phantom shoal. A phantom shoal looks uncrowded because it is structurally empty. A calling shoal looks uncrowded because the specific cross-section it occupies has not been named yet. There may be many fishermen in adjacent waters. None of them are in the exact bay you have been swimming in your whole life.
It converts existing behaviour, not new behaviour. The fish in your calling shoal are already doing what you would need them to do. The boat doesn’t need to teach them anything. Phantom-shoal businesses always require the customer to start a new behaviour — download this group app, check this noticeboard, subscribe to this tool for the podcast you have not yet quit. Calling-shoal businesses meet customers in behaviours they have already been doing for years.
There is an example I keep close because it is mine. The phantom shoal version of my work would be AI productivity tips for women in tech — sexy, currently shimmering, fully crowded, structurally going to be eaten by the next model release within months. The calling shoal is self-knowledge in the AI era for women in mid-life pivots, with the body as instrument, written by someone who has done the contemplative work for twenty-five years already and the data work for fifteen. No one else fishes those exact waters because no one else has done that exact decades-long stack. The unfair advantage is hiding in the unremarkable accumulation. The calling has been steady for so long it had stopped registering as a call and registered as the way I happen to spend most of my private hours, week after week, year after year, regardless of whether anyone is paying me to.
The translation between the two is precise. What is unsexy from the dock is unfair-advantageous from the boat. And what is unfair-advantageous from the boat is, almost always, what was already calling you from the dock. The unsexy reverse, the unfair advantage, and the long quiet call are the same principle stated from three angles.
The forager
The fishing allegory is one cultural form of an older instruction. There is a contemplative cousin that sits closer to the lineage I actually inherit — Bulgarian, peasant-rooted, walked through forests rather than across oceans. The boat is not the only vessel for this teaching, and I want to give the other version its own space, because some of you will recognise yourselves in it more than in the fisherman.
Here is the allegory in the form my grandmothers would have known.
A woman walks into the forest at first light. She carries empty baskets — several of them, of different shapes, because she does not know what the forest will offer today. She does not walk toward a pre-decided harvest. She does not say: today I will gather only chestnuts, or only mushrooms, or only wild garlic. She walks slowly. She watches her own feet. She listens for water. She turns over a leaf. Sometimes a fox crosses her path, and she stops to honour it. Sometimes she comes home with mushrooms; sometimes with one root she didn’t expect; sometimes with nothing in the baskets but a small change in her body that will turn, six months later, into a sentence she had not been able to write.
The woman who has decided in advance that today is a chestnut day will return empty when the chestnuts have not come up. The woman who walks open returns with whatever the forest decided to give. Across a year her baskets are wider, stranger, more sustaining than the chestnut-hunter’s. Across a life her body knows the forest as a partner, not as a vending machine that has betrayed her.
This is not laziness. It is a discipline of a different shape. The chestnut-hunter looks more rigorous from outside; she has a target, a route, a measurable outcome. The forager looks aimless. But the forager is the one whose pantry stays full across the seasons, whose hands know more plants by the third year, whose body has slowly learned what the forest actually grows. The chestnut-hunter, in a poor chestnut year, eats nothing.
This is the same teaching as the fisherman’s. The forms are different. The body’s grammar is different. The grammar that fits a contemplative practitioner of decades, walking into the forest of her own writing each morning at five, is not throw out the chum. It is carry empty baskets and walk slowly. But the structural lesson is the same.
Stay out longer. Try many baits. Refuse the predetermined catch. Accept that the dynamic, color-saturated, sustaining life is the one the field decides to grant you, not the one you scripted.
The forager’s calling shoal is the forest she grew up walking through. She knows where the wild garlic comes up after rain. She knows which slope holds the late-summer raspberries. She doesn’t know this because she studied it. She knows it because she was a child in this forest. The unfair advantage is the years of unnoticed walking. The same configuration. The same teaching. Spoken in the grammar of someone who has spent her life on land instead of at sea.
If you are a fisherman by temperament, take the boat. If you are a forager, take the basket. The instruction is the same.
What both allegories teach, and where we go next
You came to this series with a question. Some version of could I actually do this? The first thing both allegories give you is the only honest answer to the question’s first half: only if the water you cast in is your own.
The phantom shoal will not yield to effort. The next Facebook is not in the cards for you, no matter how hard you work, because the next Facebook is fished by ten thousand boats with deeper pockets. The crowded sexy water has never been the place where the obscure beginner emerges with the catch. The crowded sexy water is the place where the obscure beginner emerges, eventually, with nothing.
The calling shoal will yield, slowly, to sustained presence. Not because you are special, but because no one else is fishing your specific water for the specific reasons your specific years made it yours. The unfair advantage was never an advantage you earned in the conventional sense. It was an accumulation of unrecognised practice that became, by the time you finally noticed it, an asset no shortcut could install.
The next essay in this series will be about your shape — what kind of fisherman or forager you are, across two independent axes that the popular discourse has not yet drawn. Knowing your shape is what makes the diagnostic in Essay 3 actually accurate. Knowing your shape is what makes the methodology in Essay 4 actually fit.
For now: just notice, if you can, what waters keep calling you. Not what you have decided you should want to fish. What keeps calling, year after year, regardless of whether you obeyed. That noticing is the first cast.
Where these ideas come from
The fishing allegory belongs to no one and everyone — a folk form of older wisdom about gathering, hunting, casting nets. The specific version told here is Chris Koerner’s, in conversation with Steven Bartlett (Bartlett, 2026). The expansion into a contemplative cousin (the forager in her own forest) is mine, written on 2026-05-10.
The names phantom shoal and the calling shoal are coined here, on 2026-05-10. They are the fishermen’s-vocabulary version of Koerner’s mirage opportunities and unfair advantages. The choice to keep both names inside one allegory rather than mixing two was deliberate — it lets you hold the contrast in one imagination instead of having to translate between two.
The argument that the sexy/unsexy axis is a property of how you frame your work, not a property of your category is mine, drawing on Cal Newport’s longer body of work on craft and calling (Newport, 2012).
The argument that what is unsexy from the dock is unfair-advantageous from the boat, and what is unfair-advantageous from the boat is what was already calling you from the dock is mine, written on 2026-05-10 as the convergence of three threads — Koerner’s unsexy reverse, Koerner’s unfair advantage, and the older contemplative tradition’s recognition that the call is usually quieter than we expect it to be.
Bibliography
Bartlett, S. (Host). (2026). The Diary of a CEO [Audio podcast]. Conversation with Chris Koerner of The Koerner Office (tkopod.com).
Newport, C. (2012). So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. Grand Central Publishing. ISBN 978-1455509126.