Fishing is an art of patience and timing

Daan Uijterwaal
4 min readFeb 9, 2018

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Photo by: ©Eveline Dekkers

Fishing is an art maybe not fishing itself but the amount of patience you need in order to succeed. Fishing is a slow and tedious process you need to always be watching your rod. You could do it the lazy way and put a bell on it so you could do different things in the meantime. But normally fishing is waiting. That is exactly why most people don’t really like it, including me. It is amazing when the sun is shining and you can enjoy that warm glow on your skin. But when it is cold or the sun isn’t shining I am out. I just don’t like that, there is no fun in it for me.
That doesn’t mean there is nothing I could learn from it. Because no answer is an answer to right? The same goes for learning, you might not like it but you could learn something from it. There are actually multiple things to learn from fishing one of which is patience. This is the one that is easy to spot but really hard to understand. Why would you ever just sit there without doing anything? That is what I can’t get, I have so much to do and so many things to finish. At least I think so. If I go out and sit there for about 3 hours waiting for fish to bite on my bait, I feel useless. I want to do something I want to improve myself actively and being patient while sitting and doing nothing is not what I would do to improve myself. Although patience is something I should learn and that is hard to me.
I want to be patient so badly but this kind of patience is useless in my eyes. Patience while doing something is useful to me. For example, I would love to build an Instagram audience but in order to create an audience, I need to patient. This kind of patience is not sitting there and not doing anything, no this is hard work. You need to create good content, be actively involved with people on Instagram and show me on as many accounts as possible. Building an audience is not as easy as most people think and you need an insane amount of patience and passion with what you do. You won’t grow a thousand followers overnight. Well, at least not if you just start out. Most of the time you need a hype that is all over the internet to grow quickly.
There is this quote that helps me with this kind of patience. “patience is not the ability to wait but how you act while you’re waiting”. I am patient in the long run but I am impatient as fuck on the short run. I want to put all my energy to grow the most on a daily basis but I do accept the fact that I don’t grow as much sometimes. Then I will keep up the hard work and just wait till my account has grown even more.
That is the first thing you could learn from fishing, being patient but that patience needs to be translated into different kinds of patience because sitting and waiting won’t help you grow or learn.
Then the second thing I have learned from fishing is timing. If a fish is starting to show interest in your fishing rod you see it bouncing up and down. Normally I would instantly pull but at that point, you need to wait for the perfect timing. That means waiting till you see the moment to strike. This is something that is really important when showing yourself. If you are striking every single moment of the day you get exhausted and people start to think that this insane amount of energy comes naturally. That way people think this is normal and you won’t stand out anymore. You need to do your thing until there is that moment where you could shine. At that moment you strike. You grab this opportunity to show yourself and let people know that you are a force to recon with.

There is two things I have learned, one is patience and the other is timing. Two essential things to be a ‘succesfull’ person whilest working with other people.

My instagram: ©Storiesbydaan

Portfolio by: ©Eveline Dekkers

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Daan Uijterwaal

A journey to end each day and say Today I Lived. I made the most of it!