When I was recently getting my hair cut, the barbershop, which has TVs all over the place, had a fishing show on.  Now I absolutely love to fish.  I grew up on the shore of Lake Erie and I spent almost every day up to my waist casting around the water.  I also used to watch a lot of fishing shows on TV on Saturday afternoons.  Babe Winkelman of Brainerd, Minnesota was my favorite.  I still have a few of his lures in my tacklebox.   

I used to watch intently to try to learn what lures and what techniques the pros were using to catch the big ones on their show. My favourite part was listening to them tell the viewers how they picked the spots they were going to fish, where they were placing the lures, and how they heard about the particular spot they were shooting.   Yes, it was exciting to watch them catch fish but, to me and the audience, it was about so much more than that.

I even remember one episode that I watched where they never caught a single fish.  I couldn’t believe that the “pro” got skunked.  It was relatable since I had certainly been skunked many times in my fishing days.  In fact, when I think about it, I cannot remember another specific episode with as much clarity as that one, even though it was probably 25 years ago that I watched it.  

Fast forward to 2025 (and I am really trying not to sound like the grumpy old man yelling “Hey Kids Get off my Lawn” but….) and things have changed immensely.  For 20 or so minutes (or however long it took to get a haircut) I watched what felt like a non-stop stream of TikToks of people catching fish. 

There was very little dialogue, and almost no learning or teaching. The scene would open, they would set the hook, real the fish in, and drop it in the live well.  10-15 seconds and on to the next fish.  The pros barely said a word, other than “wow”, “that’s a nice one” or some other curt phrase of excitement.  After five or six of these clips, they would go to the weight table and show the total weight of that angler’s catch.

Then it would be on to the next angler and it would start all over again.  

Clearly, this is what the audience wants to see, and clearly, I am no longer the target audience, but it did get me thinking about our obsession with instant gratification, on-demand responses, and the near elimination of our attention span.  Instead of watching to learn something and to explore nature, now fishing shows are just about seeing what “score” the pro gets with their daily catch. 

The problem is that in the real world, very little of value comes without effort, hard work, persistence, and patience (I don’t do well with this one myself).

In this world of instant gratification and on-demand everything, the challenge with our work in Asset Management and Deferred Capital Renewal and Maintenance is that we are dealing with problems that have been years and decades in the making.  There’s no “easy button” solution that is going to solve these problems overnight. It requires long-term vision and effort.  

As industry professionals, we know we need more than TikToks and Reels-type solutions to tackle these issues.  However, many people in our “audience”, those we need to communicate our story to, no longer have the attention span to absorb a complex, nuanced story. 

Unfortunately, I don’t necessarily have a solution on how to tackle the issues right now.  However, knowing what we are facing is the first step to finding a solution, so my journey will continue.