Here’s the story of the salmon in English  (Stefan Hammel, Handbook of Therapeutic Storytelling, p. 193f.)

A salmon was travelling along the annual salmon run, further and further upstream. He had leapt up rapids and jumped over enormous boulders – and even used all of his power and skill to ascend waterfalls. “Not long now,” said the salmon to himself at last. “I remember being here before – I passed it on my first evening on the journey down. I’m much larger and stronger now, and I’ll have reached my destination in just a few hours.” The salmon redoubled his efforts, wanting to make faster progress. But as he did so, the current also seemed to become stronger. The path down the river had seemed easy, but the way back seemed pure torture. Sometimes he was too tired to swim, often he lacked the concentration to jump properly, occasionally he had to swim around the rods and creels of the salmon fishers and once he even had to avoid the paw of a hungry bear. Again and again he stopped to regather his strength, but the river kept on flowing to the sea. By the evening the salmon noticed that he had not made any progress – if anything, he had gone backwards. Sad and disappointed, he found a protected spot between two boulders on the bank. He thought to himself, “It must be possible to reach my destination – others before me have managed it. But how?” Then the clever fish had an idea. “I’m not going to try and get there as quickly as possible any more; I just want to make progress. All I will ask of myself is to get a little bit closer to my goal every evening than I was in the morning, and if I do that day after day I’ll eventually reach my destination. As long as I’ve made some progress by every evening, it won’t matter how short a distance I’ve travelled – even if it’s only half an inch.” The salmon plucked up his courage and started again. Some days he barely made any progress at all, but mostly he travelled much further than he expected – and if he didn’t, he remembered his resolution and was content with what he had managed. After a few weeks, he reached his destination; a lake near the source of the river. He looked around, and found that only a few other salmon had reached the lake before him – most were still trying to reach their destination in the shortest possible time.