Fish Can't See Water - Invisibility is The Enemy of Excellence.
Jul 02, 2026
Written By Bart Berkey | Founder of Most People Don't
When something is always there and always working exactly the way it should, we stop registering it entirely.
Here is how it relates to me personally...
I've had an MRI once or twice in my entire life and each time I was anxious in the waiting room, nervous when they loaded me in, and genuinely unsettled by the sound of that machine running inches from my face. I thought about it for days before I went to the appointment, and it was one of the most uncomfortable experiences I can remember.
But for the technician running that schedule, I was procedure number 247 that month, and my worst day was just another appointment on their Tuesday afternoon.
Nobody told that technician to stop caring and nobody made a decision to treat patients like numbers.
It just happened to the technician, gradually and quietly, the way it always happens when something becomes routine enough that you stop seeing it clearly.
We don't see what we're completely surrounded by.
Fish can't see water.
Humans don't notice air.
And the MRI technician stopped noticing the fear on a patient's face...sometime around their 200th procedure.
Not because they stopped caring, but because familiarity is invisible, and invisibility is the enemy of excellence.
A fish can't see water because it has never been without it, and we are really no different.
The colleague who quietly makes everything run
The employee who never complains and always delivers
The customer who never calls because they're satisfied and you've stopped checking in.
The people who are so consistently present and so consistently reliable that you've stopped registering them entirely, until the day they aren't there anymore and you suddenly feel it.
Think about the person mid-asthma attack reaching for an inhaler because in that moment air becomes the only thing in the world that matters. But an hour later when things settle back to normal it disappears again, completely invisible and completely assumed.
But here is what I keep coming back to.
The goal was never to take the fish out of the water, the goal is to help it see the water again, because when that happens everything changes.
Not the water itself but the relationship to it.
The technician who pauses for just a moment before walking into that room and remembers what it actually feels like to be the patient strapped into that machine shows up in a completely different way.
Same room
Same procedure
Same Tuesday
But a completely different human experience for the person who needed it most.
The people around you right now may be experiencing something for the very first time, regardless of the fact that you may have stopped noticing years ago.
Here's how we start seeing the water again:
1. Feel the current. Pause before entering the meeting room or facing a client.
2. Read the room. Is the prospect or client happy, hesitant, or hurried. Is your colleague content or disgruntled.
3. Swim on the other side. Feel the water the way your guests or clients feel it.
That is where HUMANALITY lives, not in the policy or the process, but in the moment you choose to see the water again.
The only question that matters is whether you still noticing too.
Just like the Fish in the ocean that can't see the water. The air becomes the water we move through without ever thinking about it.
Who or what in your life is air right now?
Most People Don't stop to ask that question today.
But you're not most people.
If your team knows what to do, but isn’t consistently doing it, let’s fix that.
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