Why I avoid low-hanging fruit

October 21, 2021

It is an incredibly common sales and marketing strategy to go after “low-hanging fruit”. On the surface, the idea makes a lot of sense. We’ll go get some easy wins, and then tackle those harder-to-win clients. We can bootstrap our funding! If we examine more closely, we can see how low-hanging fruit is nothing more than a progress trap.

First of all, low-hanging fruit is not as easy to come by as the name implies. Many people employ the same low-hanging fruit strategy, meaning there is more competition for low-hanging fruit. The low-hanging fruit is often picked over and what remains is bitter. Certainly, we can eat bitter fruit, but it is advisable to let that fruit ripen. Going after hanging fruit is a cash-grab that means you must act first and think later. You need to snatch up any low-hanging fruit before someone else does! This is a method of survival but is by no means a way to flourish and prosper.

Secondly, if we are aiming for easy wins and low effort, why not look lower? The ground is littered with fruit. Much of it is half-eaten or rotting, but there is potential here. If we gather up all the fruit from the ground and sort it, we find patterns. There are ways to layer and leverage what we have. Chop the reasonable fruit and bake it into a pie. Pull the seeds from the rotting fruit and scatter them in your front yard. Seeds often fail, but maybe one or two become a plant of our own. Occasionally, we get lucky and find a perfectly good fruit someone knocked down in their haste. Fruit that is so low as to be ignored has lots of potential value. Change your perspective and you might find a goldmine.

While everyone else is busy looking for low-hanging fruit, you are busy baking pies and planting seeds. Before long, you may start to think, why not climb the trees? You have some free time between baking pies and could learn a new skill. Before long, you realize the fruit higher in the tree is more plentiful and larger. The effort of climbing the tree pays off. You make your way home, arms full of fruit. You gather the scraps, bake more pies and plant more seeds. Life is pretty good, aside from all that tree climbing.

Tree climbing is the problem here. Sometimes the trees are tough to climb or full of thorns. Sometimes you get to the top and the fruit wasn’t as good as it looked from the ground. You come to realize, you need to refine and standardize the process. What we need is a ladder and a basket. Now you spend more time walking around the forest, just admiring trees and their fruit. You become an expert, and only break out the ladder when you see a really nice batch of fruit, ripened to perfection. You scamper up the ladder like you have a hundred times before. You place the pick of the litter in your basket and stroll on home.

You pick your fruit, bake your pies, enjoy your free time, and then you start to wonder … do I need the ladder or the basket? You take a good hard look in the mirror and realize, I have wings and I could learn to fly. You forget the ladder and fly from branch to branch and tree to tree. You sample this fruit and that, but only eat the fruit you really love the best. You could have any fruit in the world and you take your time to find those that tickle you pink.

And then one day, you hear someone shout, “Hey you dumb bird! Why aren’t you picking this low-hanging fruit?”.

When you pick low-hanging fruit, you are condemned to eat it forever.

Author’s note

Sometimes people tell me, “You can’t bake rotten fruit into pies”. I beg to differ.

Growing up, we had crab apple trees in our yard. Every fall, my dad would gather up the apples that fell to the ground. He would “cut out the bad parts” and bake them into awful pies. If this sounds unappetizing, allow me to give you some additional context. My dad was famous for a recipe, which produced a dish called “glop”.

The recipe for glop is dead simple.

Put all leftovers into a blender and add water
Purée
Pour slurry into pot and warm
Ladle into a bowl, with a satisfying “glop” noise

When you grow up eating glop, crab apple pie is a delicious treat. In fact, I ate crab apples off the trees – core and all. Hungry kids eat just about anything. Here is the valuable lesson eating crab apples taught me – the delicious ones are at the top of the tree. Those crab apples get a little more sun and are not quite as bitter.

In other words – I learned as a child, to quite literally, avoid low hanging fruit. Do the work. Climb the tree. You will find a tastier foodstuff and you get a little sunshine on our face.