Once upon a time, an artist made a very serious bet with a king. The stakes: if the artist could draw a perfect fish in the span of one year, she would be given enough gold to fill three swimming pools. If she could not, she would be killed.
A year and a day after the bet was made, the king came to the artist’s studio. She sat in the center of a bare room lined with cupboards, with a blank page before her.
“Where is my fish?” the king said. “Have you forgotten our bet? Do you forfeit that easily?”
The artist smiled, and picked up her bush. She made three simple lines in as many seconds. And there, on the paper, was the purest essence of Fish the king had ever seen.
The artist was duly rewarded with her life and her gold.
As the last of the gold was being brought in, the King turned to the artist. “I’d like to know one thing,” he said. “If you could draw a perfect fish in three seconds, why did you need a whole year?”
The artist laughed, and opened one cupboard after another in her studio. Thousands of drawings of fish fell out, each one different, each one beautiful, some of them densely labored-over, some of them dashed off, but none of them as perfectly a Fish as the one she’d given the king.
“I needed a whole year to learn what to leave out,” she said.
I really wish I could remember enough details to find a better rendition of this story on the net, but sometimes you’ve just gotta tell a story yourself, I guess.