00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host Mark Kenyan. In this episode number two eight two in today we are chatting with author Brad Staalberg about his studies into peak performance, the power and potential downsides of passion, and how all of this can make you a better hunter. All right, welcome to another episode of the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by Onyx and today, I want to start by telling you a story. When I was three or four years old, I remember that first time I headed into the woods with my dad for a deer hunt. We didn't see anything at all, but I do remember it was something that I almost right away fell love with. And as the years rolled by and I continue to go up to deer Camp, I just became more and more infatuated with the experience. I remember these truck rides headed up north, sitting in the backseat listening to my grandpa and my uncle's and dad debate current events. I remember getting to deer Camp and at night, after we turned off the lanterns here in the crackle of the fireplace in the cabin, and then the next morning, those long walks through the swamp out to our blind, looking around, and then finally you get to your blind, you're sitting down in that quiet stillness of snow falling over the forest landscape, and then that rush of excitement when you see that first deer. That experience just captivated me, and my love for that continued to grow over the years. You know, it was eight or nine years old. I remember getting on the bus after school and just being like, Oh my gosh, tomorrow's November. We're going hunting. I cannot wait. And then I remember being in high school and reading deer hunting magazines in the back of class while people are talking about math. This love of the experience just grew and grew and grew, and eventually a new layer developed for me within my relationship with hunting, and which now is forming this this new intense drive to learn more about hunting and to get tangibly better at it. And now, for a whole lot of years, and still to this day, I've spent an inordinate amount of my life working towards those goals. You know, hunting has shifted from just something fun to do, just an exciting experience, is shifted from that to now a pursuit that I'm always working towards has grown into almost almost a mission of sorts. It's it's the thing that my life revolves around in a lot of ways. And I think it's it's a pretty natural thing for a lot of people when they find an activity they're passionate about, especially something like hunting that's that's so deep and so involved and so rewarding. It's powerful to have something like this that you can constantly be challenged by and constantly work towards. I think there's a drive inside of a lot of us to to work towards some challenge or some goal like that's an innate human thing, um, and it's it's I think it's awesome to have something that in your life, this kind of this kind of purpose, this kind of anchor. I guess it's like an anchoring pursuit that drives me. It's a big part of why I love hunting so much. So you certainly don't need to have this kind of relationship with hunting. There's nothing wrong with just going out there on occasion having some fun. I know, there's a lot to enjoy about hunting when experience just as a casual pastime, and I'm glad there's people out there who engage in it in just that way. But for some of us, it's it's more than that, and it's this pursuit of excellence that really fascinates me. And that's that's why I've been doing this podcast for so many years now, That's why I've been studying the best hunters in the world over the last decade, and that's why recently here on the podcast, I've been kind of unofficially kicking off this series of sorts in which I've been trying to explore lessons learned from high performers outside of the hunting world to see what can be applied into our world in pursuit of hunting. So you probably heard an episode two eight as Dan and I discussed what I've recently been learning about the power of habits. And in episode one we discussed training and mental toughness and a whole lot more with the Olympic gold medal winning free skier and bow hunter David Wise. And now today I want to continue that discussion with Brad Stahlberg, a calumnist for Outside magazine and the author of several books related to this topic, the first of which is titled Peak Performance, Elevate your Game, Avoid burnout, and thrive with a New Science of Success. And this book and the first Person the first portion of my chat with Brad today is all about what he's learned in his studies of the best of the best across the world and the science being done to understand these high performers, whether that be athletes or artists or businessmen and so so we look at all that and how all these kinds of concepts and skills can be translated to our pursuit of hunting. So this goes back to that mission, that that passion, that drive that I have and I know that many of you have, which is how can I become the very best version of myself and as a hunter. So that's part one of our conversation. But the flip side of this coin the other side of having this deep drive and this passion for hunting or passion for anything, really, the flip side to that is the potential negative effects that are obsession and are all consuming drive can lead to. You know, passion can be a very powerful thing for good. But it can also be a powerful negative force too, resulting in burnout, results in ruined marriages, or lost friendships, or depression, all sorts of other bad kinds of outcomes. And that's where Brad's second book comes into play, titled The Passion Paradox, A Guide to going all in, finding success and discovering the benefits of an unbalanced life. So in this book and in the second portion of our chat, we dive into this power of passion and how it can be harnessed for good, and how if it's uncontrolled, how it can lead to some disastrous things in your life. And if you're at all like me and have the same kind of passion dry for hunting as I do, I I just know you're gonna be able to relate to this stuff. I mean, how many times in the podcast have we talked about this? How many times have you thought about this? Probably you know, has my passion gone too far? How do I balance my love of hunting with family or with work or other obligations. So that's the kind of stuff we talked about today. How do you tell when your passion is disastrous? How do you achieve balance? Should you try to achieve balance. How can you channel your passion in a controlled, positive way, but how can you also have enough self awareness to know when to pull out of it when you're going too far. That's where we're gonna end our conversation today, and I think these are some of the most important ideas maybe that we've ever discussed on the Wire Dune podcast. Um So, I'm just I'm just so excited for you to listen to this one. It's very different than our usual episodes, that's for sure. But as you'll hear about soon, you know, there's value in putting yourself in new situations or pushing yourself to try new things, to to stress yourself because these challenges, these new ideas, these new experiences they are would lead to growth. And I think conversations like this are there exactly at least for me, what I believe can help myself and all of us grow as hunters and as people. And that is a pretty exciting thing. And now let's get to our conversation with Brad. All right with me now on the line is Brad Stallberg. Welcome to the show. Brad, Hey, Mark, thanks so much for having me. Really looking forward to uh to this conversation with me too. It's it's a little bit um different than our usual chats we have on this podcast. But I've been kicking off this series over the last couple of weeks where we're trying to exam m in and learn about different practices and ideas that are helping peak performers across all sorts of different fields and finding how they can be applied to what what I do and what my community does, which is hunt and participate in all these different outdoor activities. And when I ran across your most recent book and then another that you wrote a little while back, I just had this great big flashing lights that are like, hey, you gotta get ahold of Brad. You've gotta figure out some way to have him on the show to share what he's learned. Um. So I'm really excited and happy that I was able to do that. So thanks for being so responsive via email. Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's um, let's roll. I'm looking forward to learning from you, which I'm sure i'll do throughout this conversation. So so, in addition to you're writing for Outside magazine and stuff like that, I know you're into the outdoors, but it seems like you have this passion for studying high performers, studying how people get stuff done, how they can reach their their potential. And you wrote two books, the first being or co wrote, I shouldn't say, Peak Performance, the most recent being The Passion Paradox. My first question is is why did you write these books? Why these topics? And then why you Why were you the person to dive into these so um, yeah, those are good questions, and I'll answer them in order. Uh. So, so why these books? So? The first book, which is called Peak Performance, uh came to be because I had experienced a fair bit of burnout early on in my career. I left graduate school and went to a pretty illustrious international consulting firm where very quickly I was doing um, pretty serious work in the boardroom with sea level people at age four, and I absolutely love the work, but I couldn't turn it off. Uh So, for about six to nine months, I performed really well. I was quite happy, and then about a year year and a half into that gig, I just started feeling extremely burnt out. Uh. Physically, I didn't feel well. Psychologically, I was kind of apathetic to the work. Uh, and I didn't know what I was experiencing at the time, but in hindsight, I learned that, you know, those are telltale signs of burnout UM which doesn't always happen just from working too many hours, but it's often when you're going about your work the wrong way. And another misconception about burnout that I learned later on is burnout doesn't mean you dislike what you're doing. It often happens when you love what you're doing so much that you lose the ability to turn it off. So after that experience, UM, I started to get pretty pretty interested in what went wrong, and I also became fascinated by, well, how do people sustain that level of performance and that level of drive without burning out? UM? So I did a fair amount of just self exploration and self study. I also went back to graduate school and studied public health, and I was particularly interested in in well being. And I started to notice this really interesting trend, which is that so many of the principles that apply to athletes also apply in the corporate world. And what applies in the corporate world also applies to creatives an artist, let's say. And there was so much work done on this topic of performance, but it was all very siloed. So there might be a book about performance in sport, or performance in business, or performance in hunting or performance in triathlon, but none of these different fields were talking to each other. And when I stepped back and I took a broad view across fields, I noticed all these patterns. And it's a very scientific thinker. If you see patterns, you can become more likely that the excuse me, you can become more sure that something is true. So I started to see these patterns pointing to the truth of what it takes to be a peak performer, showing up in all fields. Granted they were talked about a little bit differently, but they're saying more or less the same things. And I became fascinated by this notion of, well, what if there are a few underlying principles of performance that cut across all fields and all domains, and if you can identify those, we can be pretty confident that they're actually true and that they'll hold up in that the work and then the second book, and finished the first book, my first book with a major publishing house, had sent it into the editor uh and heard back from the editor that he was running behind, and I had set aside about two weeks to go through edits um instead of kind of celebrating the fact that the manuscript was accepted and I was going to have this book and and the editor said that all looked well. I did that for about a half an hour, and then I got really antsy, and I started thinking, well, what am I going to do next? And then I stepped back and I said, well, wait a minute, why can't I just be content? Like where does this drive come from? And is this drive a good thing? And is the bad thing? And is it both? And and I realized that I have a pretty obsessive personality. Um can also be called passionate. Passionate has a much more positive connotation. But I'm kind of wired to just keep on pushing, and when I want to go for something, I want to go all in. And at times that can work out really well for me, but at other times it can lead to all sorts of problems. So I became fascinated by the idea of passion. And much like the first book, I'd assume that someone had explored passion. But what I learned is that outside of the kind of cliche, trite self help books, you know, Find your Passion, Follow your Passion um, which I'm sure we'll get into most of that's just bullshit, but um, no one had really done a good deep dive on passion UM. So much like the first book, I kind of did it to help myself because these are issues that I work through and I still work through UM. And I tried to figure it out on the page. And it turns out that thousands and thousands of readers are going through the same stuff now to to come to the conclusions that you guys did eventually in these books. You and your co author Steve Magnus, did you guys just sit at a coffee shop and and BS and and say, hey, I think it's a B and C are the are the keys to peak performance? And I think that this thing, this thing and this thing are what are going to lead us to understand passion or you know, help me understand, help folks understand. How you research this how you I know you dove into a lot of the science and the findings and that was really fascinating. Yeah. So it's it's it's funny that the thing I'm probably most proud of with both these books is a lot of the books that are in this performance genre are what I like to call bro science, in in bro science is not real science. Bro science is these are ten hacks that are going to make you superman or superwoman, or you know, drink this magical tea and suddenly you're going to be a better hunter. All that stuff is crap. It sells, but it's not true. It's not based on any real evidence. So my co author and I were you know, we both have very scientific minds and we want to write a very different kind of book. So we spent for each book over a year looking at all the various areas of research, so that included psychology, physiology, biology, anthropology, We looked at the life sciences, we looked at creative sciences, and again our goal was to try to identify patterns that came up everywhere. And then in addition to looking at the science, we interviewed hundreds of performers in the in in the same diverse fields. So we talked to world class artists, world class outdoorsmen, world class adventure athletes, world class business people, entrepreneurs, and much like we did with the research, we weren't so much interested in the anecdotes that each individual told as so much and trying to identify these common themes and patterns, and in both books where we wind up are on these few core patterns, these few core insights that again came up in all different areas of research and also in all different areas of practice, which leads me to think that they are most likely true. And that makes a lot of sense. And it's it's interesting even within the microcosm of of our little community, the however many fifteen million hunters or whatever it is out there. As I've gone through my years of studying high performance within our community, you see, you know, there's there's ump team, different million ways to you know, to skin the cat right, to to actually fill a hunting license and have success in the field. But there are always these core truths that that seemed to be consistent across those best of the best. You know, there's gonna be those those different little tweaks here and there, but at the base level, it's well, they're always doing this kind of thing, or they have these practices, or they have these routines, or they have this certain kind of mindset um. And I think as I study this both within the hunting world and outside of it. There's a lot of overlap there um and one of the things, and and there's in in in and you know, it's interesting because, like I was saying earlier, like I'm not a hunter, So your audience might be like, well, what's this brad guy gonna tell me about a sport that he doesn't participate in? And what I would say is nothing, Like, I'm not an expert in hunting. I'm an expert on these principles. And I think it is so powerful to actually get outside of your small little microcosm and see what other people are doing, because that's where true breakthrough happens, is when you can realize that, hey, there's this thing that works everywhere, well, yeah, it's gonna work in hunting because performances, performance ash and is passion, whether you're in a boardroom, whether you're hunting, whether you're on the start line of a marathon. Like, beneath all the noise and all the sales people trying to sell you hacks, there are these timeless principles that if you stick to, you will make you better at whatever you do. Uh, And That's what I'm really interested and me too, and I feel like we're a little bit like just um self critiquing our little community a little bit. We we are a little bit insular. Sometimes I think we're not. We're sometimes in an echo chamber, I guess, And probably each different little community out there of this type of athlete and this kind of business person, this kind of artist, like everyone kind of lives within their own worlds, especially today with how social media is and all of our very customized media. You know, you can kind of fine tune what you want to hear in the perspectives you want to hear, but it's really easy to just hear from people just like you. And all the new ideas you ever get are just from people just like you and people doing just the exact same thing as you. And that maybe feels good in the short term because there's a lot of amen, but I think it's not a recipe for growth, um which is why I'm particularly interested in hearing from you, because I think you do bring these different perspectives for us, and and I guess on that topic of growth, one of the first principles in your book peak performance, that you guys identified as one of these core consistent truths across high performers. Was this, uh, this concept you guys called the growth equation? Can you describe what what that is? How that applies to peak performance? Because I think taking one step back before I let your own with that one of the top goals of most people within our world of hunting, like everyone's trying to and anything, I guess, but trying to figure out how to grow, how to get better. This is like any kind of hunting, whether you're hunting elk in the mountains or deer in the Midwest. Um, it can be very physically demanding, it's very mentally demanding, and more and more you get into it, the greater the challenge can become. You can find a lot of ways to just dive wholeheartedly into this thing, and a lot of people kind of find of lives and maybe originally they just wanted to find a way to put some meat on the table and eventually find oh wow, it's this whole consuming lifestyle that you can really dive really, really really deep into, and so people end up just just I mean I've used the word before, it consumed with it. How do I grow? How do I get better in this? How do I learn more? How can I improve my chances? So there's there's a whole lot of interest in these how to or how to improve. So I think though this growth equation kind of a really good starting point for people to think about that process. Yeah, for sure, this is this is one of the favorite principle post that I've uncovered. Um, So you're right. We call it the growth equation, and the growth equation is stress plus rest equals growth. And this is universal to all pursuits. So I'll start by explaining it in terms of how you make a muscle bigger, because I think that that's the easiest way to understand the concept, and then we'll spill over into how this would apply to hunting, or at least how I think it. So, if you're in the weight room and you want to grow your biceps muscle, the muscle in your upper arm, you pick up way too heavy of weight and you try to curl it, and two things are gonna happen. You're gonna injure yourself. You're gonna throw out your back, or you're gonna not even be able to pick it up, and you're gonna say, screw this, I can't do this. I'm done If you go to the weight room and you pick up a one pound weight, you could sit there and curl it all day and nothing's gonna happen. So the first part about making a muscle bigger is you have to find the right dose of stress the right weight. Now, even if you find that right weight, if you sit there and curl all day, every day without resting in between, eventually your muscle is physically gonna fatigue. It's gonna physically burn out. So what you have to do is you have to stress the muscle at the right dose, the right weight, and then allow it to rest and recover. And it's actually during the rest and recovery period that the muscle gets stronger, not during the work, but during the recovery. And then when the muscle gets stronger, you can stress it a little bit more again at the right dose, allow it to rest and recover, and then you get growth. So very easy to understand in a weight room and very easy to modulate the stress level. Right you go from a twenty pound weight to a twenty five pound weight to a thirty pound weight. It's a little bit harder out in the real world, but that same principle applies. So when you take on a challenge, you want to get just outside of your comfort zone. If you take on too big of a challenge, too big of a stressor you're going to be overwhelmed with anxiety. That's not going to lead to growth. But if you stay complacent and comfortable and just go through the same emotions that you've always done, you're also not going to grow. So you've got to figure out what's the equivalent of picking up that weight that really pushes you almost to the point of failure, but not so hard that you're going to get injured, and not so hard that you're never going to be able to do it. And then after you take on those challenges, you've got to allow for rest, recovery, and reflection, because if you're just constantly pushing ahead, physically, you're gonna fatigue, and psychologically you're not going to give yourself the space to actually learn from the experiences that you've had. So a trap that a lot of type A driven pushers fall into, and I don't care if you're a hunter or runner or a corporate executive, is you just want to go, go, go, go go. So we're really good at the stress part of the equation, but we often neglect the rest part. And what happens is, again, physically, we can work ourselves into fatigue and perform suboptimally, and just as important, mentally, we skimp out on the reflection. So we're not actually learning as much as we could because we're so focused on immediately going to the next thing. Um So, not only does this apply to performance pursuits, but it also applies to relationships. Um whether it's a friendship or romantic relationship. The way a relationship deepens is you face a challenge together. You have to step back after that challenge, reflect, rest, recover, and then you grow out of it stronger. But if you take on way too many challenges in a relationship or too great of challenges too soon, the relationship falls apart. And if you never have that time to rest and reflect same thing, the relationship falls apart. But if you're constantly challenging yourself together allowing that space to recover and reflect been the relationship strengthens. Um So again, this is this is quite a universal equation. Uh, you've got to stress the system, challenge it in a way that's the appropriate dose, not too much but not too little and then make sure that you build in a little time to rest and recover to grow, and then you can take on a greater challenge. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. And it's something that that I've always tried to try to do in certain ways within within most things I do. But I feel like in the hunting world, one way that I've always tried to do this one way to kind of apply stress to what I do is by forcing myself into new situations. So it's really easy, um to just hunt in the same place all the time, or just to use the same basic strategy of what you're gonna do, how you're gonna do it, when you're gonna do it. Like, there's definitely a trend out there where people kind of find the one thing that works for them and they just do that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But maybe you had that one great experience doing we'll just say strategy A, and if it works at one time, then you kind of live off the glory of that memory for ten years, twenty years, and then people kind of, you know, the common definition and saying to do the same thing over and over and regardless of results. Sometimes people fall into that rut. I've always tried to force myself out of that by going to this new state, going to this new piece of public land, trying this completely off the wall idea, just because it might not work the first time, but I guarantee him going to learn something from it and grow from it. So I think that's probably a good example of the stress part of your equation, right, just putting yourself in a brand new situation and seeing what can come of it, right, Yeah, that's a big part of it, um for sure. I think the other thing that is a helpful framework to think about this is if you look at yourself today as a hunter, and then you look at where do you want to be five years from now, what's the goal, what's the endpoint? And then you just step back and you ask yourself, well, what's the next logical step to get there? That's a pretty accurate way of figuring out what's the next challenge, what's the next stressor you want to take on. This is something we talked about last week with a guy named David Wise. He's a gold medal winning free skier, and he talked about how he has some really specific ways of setting goals to kind of achieve something like you just described. Um, throughout your research for either one of these books, did you kind of uncover anything around that goal setting process? Um, that might be helpful for people? I guess yeah, totally the biggest thing. And this is definitely a topic that came up in the Passion book, and these books are interrelated. But but with Passion, uh, I'm I'm assuming if you're thinking about hunting and stress plus rest equals growth and you want to get better, you're probably pretty passionate about this pursuit. And what can happen in a passionate pursue is you can become so focused on achieving the end goal that you make yourself crazy. And there are often things that you can't control that might affect that end goal. So in hunting, it could be things like whether it could be who else is out there that day, um, whole number of factors. So, well, it's good to set goals, it's really important to focus on the process that's going to give you the best chance to achieve that goal and judge yourself on the process because you you don't have full control of outcomes, but you have control of the process. So again, you know, I don't know hunting well, but I know traathlon. So if I'm gonna traathlon race, I might want to run, uh do a sub five bike, get the hundred twelve mile bike right done under five hours. If I measure myself just on that goal and it thunderstorms that day, I'm probably gonna go slower, or if it's really windy, same thing, and then I'm gonna be piste off and achieve the goal. If I set up a process, I'm gonna take care of my nutrition, I'm going to ride at the right power. I'm going to make sure that I that I stay in the aerodynamic position. Then I can really like control all those things and as a result, judge myself based on those things. Um And if you're in it for the long haul to make long term progress, I'm a big, big believer in focusing more on the process than the outcome, because again, outcomes are so often influenced by things outside of our control, and they can create emotional roller coasters of ups and downs, whereas the process is always in your control. UM. So set those goals, but then figure out what are the processed steps that you can control, and then nail those steps. And judge yourself on those steps. So the goal might be to you know, rain in an elk that is x pounds bigger than previous but there are a lot of factors that are going to control whether or not you can do that. So what you need to do is figure out, well, then what are the processed steps it's going to give you the best chance, and then you go out and you repeat that process over and over again. So so this makes like I totally understand this, and I always tell myself this each fall I'm out there, and I'm always trying to remember to enjoy the journey, to enjoy the process, to not get too hung up on the end outcome because all those things you just said are one true, so many things outside of your control that can lead to those high highs and very very low lows. But it's always one of those concepts, at least for me, is so much easier said than done totally, So how do you is there any way to actually make a practice of that? I mean, like when you describe, like think about the different steps in the process, would it be helpful to actually write them down? Yeah? Yeah them write them down? And uh, you know, immerse yourself in a community. Um, whether those are those are partners that you go out hunting with or just you know, you're the hunting community. However, you would define that as an individual listener and hold each other accountable on those process measures. Uh. And if someone starts to get like really upset about missing an outcome, then remind yourself that, hey, like I nailed the process and you should feel good about that. Now. If you keep on nailing the process and you're still not achieving your outcome, then that probably tells you that you ought to change the process. But I I keep on coming back to what are the things that you can control? Rite those things down, nail those over and over and over again, and give it at least I don't know, eight or ten times of nailing that before you start changing things. Because such a common trap is people have an outcome goal, they go after it, they don't get it because of some external factor, and then they change their process, and then you get into this loop where you're constantly changing your process and you're never really refining it to the point that it's actually gonna work. Yeah, I get that. I imagine Another way to think of it is like think of yourself as a crafts person. I love that analogy, right, Like a crafts person they come into the shop every day, they pound the stone, they show up, they do the work. It's not always easy, doesn't always lead to the result that they want, but they hone their craft over months and years. Um, there's not a lot of wild roller coaster ride in the mindset of a craftsperson. Yeah, yeah, I like that, And I think you know, when it comes to writing those things down, it's it's almost like all those processed steps are all the little um like another way to look at as someone. I can't remember where I was reading this, but just you've got your big high level objectives. And then even even in my previous life, my old job, we used to have these things called okay ours, And I was talking about this couple weeks ago. We had we had to set these objectives which are like your big high picture, your high level goals, and then you had to have these key results, which in many cases were specific micro goals and metrics that you could look at and say, Okay, my big picture goal was to increase sales by or whatever it might be, and then I was going to achieve that by doing a B and C, which was going to have so many more calls with my with my client's gonna have so many more Um, I don't know what it would have been back in that day, but all these different specific, quantifiable steps, and I feel like within our world, the hunting world, you know, maybe your goal is to get your first elk this year, to get your first buck. Um, it's really easy to have that goal. But then what are the three or four steps along the way that you can keep track of that you can quantify and that would lead you to that goal. So maybe it would be step one would be I'm going to scout ten new properties this year. Maybe step two is going to be I'm going to practice with my bow weekly to make sure I'm as accurate as I possibly can be. Step number three is gonna be I'm gonna plan on spending a minimum of four weekends this year out in the field trying to accomplish that goal. Um, I'm thinking those kinds of things are ways to quantify that, yes, I'm doing the things along the way that would lead to that goal. Is that totally and if you and if you're confident in that process, then you can trust it like you trust your training, you trust the process. Over time, it's like the outcome takes care of itself. So it's this really um ironic uh and kind of like paradoxical thing is that the more that you're focused on an end goal of a less likely you are to achieve it. The more that you're focused on the process, the more likely the angle just takes care of it. And it's almost it's almost probably because you're freeing yourself of a certain amount of pressure. That is that a totally yep, because you're not You're not going out there with this with this weight on your shoulder that Oh, if I don't get you know, if I don't get the kill, what are I co Like what are my friends going to think of me? Or am I a failure? Or I've spent all this time away from my family and I still can't get it. Like that's that's a lot of weight on your shoulders again, especially because like the weather might be shitty that day. I don't know, maybe, I mean again, I don't know much about hunting, but like where I hike, there are a lot of deer, but they're also mountain lions, and mountain lions are out that day, there aren't gonna be out. So like, there's all these things that you can't control, but what you can't control is that process. And there have been so many times in my life where I've fallen shore on an outcome, but I've nailed the process and I've really and it's hard. Again, it's easier to say than to do, but I've held myself to the process. I've had friends helped hold me to the process. Um, and then you just pick it back up and you start executing on your process again. So so on the topic of the process a little bit and going back to the growth equation and how this all kind of comes together. The second part, Like we've talked a little how to apply stress to your to your usual stuff, So try some new things, maybe go new places, add new challenges. But the second part of the equation is the rest or reflection time. And I'm wondering if you can help us understand a little bit of what that might look like. Um, you know, there's there's literal ways that we could insert rest into our training regiment. Maybe we are physically trying to train for a back country hunt where we're gonna be hiking in fifteen miles into the mountains, and Canna have to hike out fifteen more miles and we're gonna gain ten thousand feet of elevation, We're gonna be packing out two hundred pounds of meat. That kind of thing, like training for that kind of physical activity. It's really easy to understand how I'm gonna stress myself, and then adding maybe it's rest days or rest weeks or things like that. But I think the trickier one is where we are trying to when we're talking more like the conceptual level or like the mental side of things, where I'm trying to learn from hunting experiences. And then one of the big things that happens last times when we're out there hunting is stuff goes wrong. Just like you said, there's a lot of things out of your control. Also, you make a lot of mistakes out there. So I find myself so many times something goes wrong, I blow an opportunity, or all this work went into this outcome, then the last second, something goes wrong, and then always say something and we all say that, well, you know, I'm gonna learn from that. But many times I feel like we say we're gonna learn from that, and then we just then go on with our daily lives, just go on. And I don't know if we ever actually do learn from that in any or at least I don't have a practice for really reflecting on it. So this is my long rambling way of trying to say, did you find anything as far as a practice or an idea of how we can better mentally reflect or mentally rest after a challenge a stress, and how do we grow in that kind of way? Does that make sense? Yeah? I think that you. I think that you have to you have to realize what you just said and be aware of the propensity to just immediately move on to the next thing and expect you to feel that way and then know that it's coming and still choose to not just move on and set aside some time. Uh. And then this can be really simple, this can be These are the things that went well that I want to repeat, These are the things that didn't go well that I want to change. And here's what I like to I use the word habit energy, which is just like that, the energy of habit. And here's all the habit energies that are going to get in the way of me making those changes, and just being aware of the resistance that you're going to face helps you face it so much better because then when it comes, you can say, oh, high habit energy, like, I know you're trying to, you know, make me do things the old way, but even though you're here, I'm gonna go do the new things. And this often comes up with fear. Fears a really strong habit energy. And it's not just visceral fear of one's life, but it could be fear of messing up, uh, fear of fear of you know, getting out of your comfort zone, doing something the wrong way. So oftentimes what will happen is people people will be reflecting in the they'll realize that the real reason that they did something wrong is because they had fear, and they could have acted differently in the midst of fear, but they didn't. So then the practice is next time when fear happens, not to resist it, but just to realize it acknowledged that, oh, fear is here, and I'm still going to go ahead and do this thing that my rational brain knows gives me the better chance of accomplishing what I want to. So it's it's really about being able to step outside of yourself a little bit and identify what's going on inside your head this little I think you've referred to as self distancing a little bit. Will that be kind of what we're talking about here? Yeah, exactly. It's to get outside of get outside of the ongoing chatter in your head some of those fears, be able to see them from a little bit more of a broader perspective, uh, and in and create some space between that ongoing narrative and then your ability to make a wise decision amidst it. And I think reflection is really helpful it doing. Speaking of decision making and dealing with stress and things like that, there's a lot of really high pressure situations in in a hunt, a lot of different things that might be going on where there's a lot resting on the next decision you make. It might be a physical thing, it might be just making a shot which is as high pressure and intense of the situation as there is out there, or simply a fork in the road where I need to do A or B and I need to make that decision right now, and if I make the wrong decision, ten months worth of worker's shot. Um I I remember reading a bit about some of the things you guys have learned about the importance of mindset and and and attitude and things like that, and how that can help with some of these things. Is there anything you can speak to on that front. So I think I think a big I think a big thing is that, well, there's two In high pressure situations, a lot of people call that emotion being nervous or anxious, and then they freak out about the fact that they're nervous or anxious, which just makes it worse. The research shows, as well as interviews with great performers, that better than that is to actually let yourself feel that physiological or cousl instead of labeling anxiety or nervousness, label excitement and tell yourself the story that oh ship like it's go time. Like my heart rate is up, my body temperatures up, I've got butterflies in my stomach. That's not a problem. That is that is thousands of years of evolution preparing my body to be a on it For this situation, I'm gonna go crush, which is so different than I need to take thirty mindful breaths. I need to try to calm down How am I nervous in this situation? Why do I always get anxious? Um? Because our body, like our mind body system, is a lot smarter than our brain. Right. We try to force these mindsets on ourselves, but the body knows really well. In the minute we call something anxiety, it takes on a negative connotation and it's gonna mess with us. But if we don't give it that label, and we just say, WHOA, I'm aroused, you can actually channel that. Uh. Free solo climbers do a really good job of this, all the free solo climbers that I've gotten to speak to, and including guys like Alex Hanald so I'm talking to like the best to have ever live. He told me that he feels tons of fear. He doesn't not feel fear. The difference is when he feels fear, he doesn't freak out about it and try to make it go away or calm down. He he, he names it and he says, this is my body getting ready to go. Because when we're in a state of arousal or fear, our perceptions are actually more heightened than ever. I mean, I can tell you there have been two times in my life when I've never been more alive, and when when when my perceptions have been the highest, And that's when I found myself ten and twenty ft from a mountain, lion and a bear, respectively. And it was scary, for sure, but my vision was crystal clear. Time slowed down, uh, and I didn't I didn't say, oh, I'm freaking out. I was just in the moment. Boom, You have no choice. I think the problem is when you're on a hunt, maybe you have a little bit more time, even if it's just a few seconds, and then your mind starts thinking and starts saying, oh, you're feeling nervous. This is a problem. So it's really about trying to get your mind out of the way and just going, yeah, that's that's one of the greatest you know, speaking of of of climbers, right, you talk about the crux of a route, I feel like the crux of many hunts is that final minutes. Sometimes it can be minutes, or it might be seconds when you have to have to make that shot and yeah, that exact scenario you just described, where Okay, this thing is happening, and then you start your heartbeat starts increasing, and you start sweating, you get nervous, maybe start shaking. Um. In in the hunting world, people will refer to this as buck fever, and it's this kind of dreaded thing that happens to almost everybody where you kind of have a physical and sometimes mental breakdown as you prepare for this, this final culmination of everything that's been happening in the previous months. And um and yeah, I feel like the conventional wisdom and recommendation is too deeper. Take deep breath, to steady, calm down, act like it's normal. Um And And if you've practiced doing that, like if you've gone on silent meditation retreat and you've trained yourself to do that, then that's a great strategy. But the thing is most people haven't trained themselves to do that. And if you haven't trained yourself to do that, what ends up happening is you try to force yourself to calm down, and you don't calm down because it's really freaking hard to calm down in those situations. And now not only are you nervous, but you're nervous that you can't calm down. So like you've just taken a situation and made it worse versus instead, with the research shows really clearly is just changing your mindset and learning to label those physical sensations is arousal versus anxiety and say I'm aroused. This is thousands of years of evolution that has programmed the human body to feel this way in high pressure situations. I'm going to channel it and use it. And just that level of self talk can totally totally change your perception of what's kind of crazy. How powerful self talk is just like being able to recognize what's happening in your head and kind of talk yourself through these things. I feel like when you say these things just a normal conversation, it kind of sounds like you're a crazy person. But there's so much power there, isn't there? Oh? Yeah, for sure. Um, I'm I'm a big fan of um of just having a few mantras to go do, because again, it can be hard, like in the midst of that situation, you don't want to like have to come up with a dialogue that's going to be helpful. Uh So, just a few pointers. So for me, something that I use in in in high intensity situations across all aspects of my life is I just say, this is what's happening right now. Like those couple of words just bring me into the present moment, gets me out of the fear, out of the I'm feeling anxious, I'm tight. It's just this is what's happening right now. UM. Don't don't lay any kind of concept onto it. Just this is what's happening. And and and I'm not saying that that should be the mantra that listeners use, but coming up with a thing or two, if it's just gonna bring you back into the present moment and remind you that like you've trained and you're there for it, and you can trust your training, that can be so helpful. And one of the one of the ways I think this applies really really nicely to what we're doing a lot of times is archery. And you mentioned the mantra that you use. That concept is actually something that some people in the archery field talk about, how you can have this this phrase or series of phrases that can help just center you, get you into your routine, um avoids some of the fears and negative self talk that might be there. UM and and on that topic of archery, then it brings me to another concept that you talked about in the book, which was around practice. So for hunters, whether you're trying to practice with a with a firearm or a bow, it takes it takes a lot of time, a lot of uh, routine building. Have the building I guess to become proficient with something like that. Um, but lots of times you see people just practicing with their bow and they just kind of go through the motions. You guys write about a concept called deliberate practice. I've heard about this from from various folks and it seems really powerful. Can you talk about what that is and why that's important? Mm hmm. So practice you've probably heard this, But practice doesn't make perfect perfect practice makes perfect, and deliberate practice is a notion that when you go out to practice, you should have clear goals and objectives before the session, you should have steps to execute on that, and you should break down what you're trying to do into small parts and then focus on each of those individuals small parts. Uh. Deliberate practice is not always fun. Uh. There's some really interesting research in the book around how when world class athletes and world class musicians when they describe practice, they describe it is really challenging and kind of something to get through, and when scientists hook up physiological monitors on them, they're actually showing a stress response throughout practice. Whereas matures, they tend to really enjoy practice and they say that they have fun when they're practicing. So really good practice shouldn't necessarily be fun. It should be a vigorous challenge, both mentally and in some fields physically. Um So, I think it's okay to go out there and have fun, Yes, you want to do that, but for your key practice sessions, they shouldn't feel fun. They should feel like it's a fully demanding challenge of of both mind and body. Uh. And that's a big shift for a lot of people, and it's hard to do that day in and day out. The best athletes they tend to only do three hard workouts a week and the rest of their stuff is easier and more fun. Um But I think it's really important to identify these two or three practice sessions where you might not have fun, it's going to be really really demanding, but you bring a hundred percent presents to the session. You break down what you're trying to do into very small parts, and you really work on fine tuning specific parts. I mean, I relate this to like a golfer again, like I you know, I want to cav at this, like I'm not a hunter, so I don't know. But I think that can also be valuable that I don't know because I have like this broad perspective is I've gotten to coach and spend time with golfers. And there's a big difference between going out to the driving range and hitting fifty balls with each club versus going out there and saying, I'm really gonna work on my for iron and I'm particularly gonna work on my follow through and for an hour just focusing on that and I'll tell you what, like that is not fun. That's how you get better. Yeah, I think that's a perfect, a perfect analogy for the same thing. And be with with practicing your archery, it's uh, that's don't and yeah, and don't try to do that every day of the week because you'll it's like back to stress plus rest. Like that's too much stress. You'll burn out, you'll start hating hating the sport. So it's like, identify two to three key practice sessions in and it can just be two by two hours a week, and if you haven't been practicing in that way, just inserting four hours or or two sessions of that kind of deliberate practice goes such a long way to make you better. So another another tie into that, I guess, right, if we're talking about trying to bring some deliberate practice into our lives, if we're talking about trying to find ways to insert stress and rest into our lives to to combet at our pursuits like hunting in this case, UM, lots of times it's hard to build that into your routine and or can be if if right, we're all busy, there's always too much on a lot of our plates, or run around like chickens with their heads cut off. It feels like all the time, UM, Which brings me to a little bit of what you guys talked about within another section of that book, which is around priming, building habits and routines and different things like that that can can help you grow too. UM. Can you speak a little bit about what you guys mean by priming and why having these types of processes in your life are important. This is something I've kind of been talking about the last two weeks in particularly. We talked with David Wise about this the week before. I share some of my own habits and routines I'm trying to get better at building into my life. Um, how does that fit into this peak performer research you guys have done. So I you know, I don't need to go into the weeds on this because I think it's pretty well accepted that routines are really helpful. I'll say two things. The first is that there are a lot of people out there and what I mentioned earlier the bro science community that try to sell their routine is the be all and end all, the only routine, and they're generally selling you some kind of product with that, right, So you drink this coffee or you drink this tea and and then you're gonna do better, and you have to do this in the morning and this at night. The research shows that none of that's true. While routine itself is really important, there's no single routine, so there's a lot of self experimentation. So it's right routine for the right person at the right time of their life, and i'd even say for the right activity. So your routine for hunting could look very different than your routine for whatever you're doing in your nine to five job. Of course it's going to so no, right, like, routine is important, But anyone that tells you that they've got the magical routine, it might be magical for them, but it doesn't mean it's magical for you. You've got to figure that out. Why this kind of routine is so important, though, is um I think the easiest way to describe it is this. If if you show a baby a chair and use technology to look inside a baby's brain, nothing special happens. If you show an adult a chair and use technology to look inside an adult's brain, The part of their brain called the motor cortex that is associated with the sitting motion starts to fire just by showing them a chair. So you might be thinking, well, what the hell does this have to do with routine? And I'd say it has everything to do with routine, because once you get into a routine, before you're even consciously able to think about what you're doing, your brain is primed to do that thing. So the reason the baby's brain doesn't fire when they see a chair is because they haven't lived a whole life associating chairs with sitting but once you associate chairs with sitting, your brain is going to be primed to sit in the minute that you see that chair. And that's basically what routine does for you. You ease into your routine in your brain is operating. Your subconscious brain is operating faster than your conscious mind. So it's a step of head leading you in the direction that you want. And having those routines helps you helps hard decisions become a little bit easier. Right, There's this concept that that I've read a lot about, and I know you guys discussed too, called decision fatigue. So like the all the different little micro decisions you have to make during a day that maybe yeah, they add up. And so in the hunting world, I've always thought this a huge, huge, huge thing because a lot, especially within on the mental side of things, you're you're forced to make a lot of decisions. Let's say, before you go out for the day, you need to decide, Okay, what what section or property I'm gonna go to, how am I going to access this piece of woods, which is the proper tree stand I'm gonna go to? How what time should be in there? What what where do I think that they are going to be. Where do I think that they are going, How do I think the direction of the wind is going to influence that? What do I think about the time of year versus the weather factors versus the own phase? All these I mean, there's a million different variables you have to think about before heading in for a day. And I've always thought if there's any kind of habit or process I can have in place to eliminate as many of the easy decisions or have to get go, the more I can do that, the more mental energy I can put towards those couple tough decisions. So I try to make sure I've got a plan for are you know, I'm gonna have these four pieces of clothing out and ready to go first thing in the morning. I don't need to think about what I'm gonna grab to wear. I'm gonna have my lunch and dinner that I'm gonna pack in with me and have that already made the night before, so in the morning I can just grab that bag and I don't need to worry about choosing what I'm gonna bring. Um, just little things like that, I think kind of fall into this idea of maybe not you're not priming yourself, but you're at least addressing the decision fatigue side of things. Right, Yeah, and that's that's the time I was. You know, you beat me to it. Man, we're on the same page. That's like the second part of routines, the second big benefits. So the first is the priming notion, like getting your subconscious geared up to to do the thing before you're even there. And then the second part is the more that you can automate things, the more you free up the capacity to be fully present and have the energy both physical, emotional and mental for those tough decisions that you can't automate. Uh. Some of my favorite studies are and this isn't just in the research, This isn't a lot of high performers. Uh. If you eat the same food every day and you wear the same clothes, you make better decisions on everything else. Uh. With athletes, if if they have to figure out what they want to wear before a hard workout and what they're going to use as their fuel, they squat less weight than if they've already decided that at a time. So seemingly unrelated things, because both your ability to make decisions and your willpower gets so much better when you only have to worry about the hard thing. So, if I'm going in to to front squad a max effort, I don't want to be thinking about anything. I want to know who's spotting me ahead of time. I want to know what barbell I'm gonna be on, what kind of clamp I'm going to use, I want to I don't want to be thinking about what kind of protein shake I'm gonna have after. I want all that to be automated, so all my energy, all my willpower, can go towards the task at hand. So if you're on in a hunt, figure out what are the most important things that you really need your willpower and your decision making for, and automate everything else. I think that's that's such a powerful idea that that probably speaking from. If if I were to just depend on like my base um mental qualities, like if I if I just kind of went with what the easiest thing to be, would for me would be to be kind of unorganized chaos and procrastination UM and I would constantly figuring out all these things at the last minute. What am I gonna bring and what do I need to grab what am I gonna wear? And I mean it'd be a mess. I have to force myself into preparing ahead of time and trying to develop some of these systems UM because I just know it's it's so easy to fall into the messy procrastinator route that I just need to put these things in place. So there's a lot of ways that can apply UM slight pivot on that, because as I'm thinking about the mental side of hunting and trying to plan for things and trying to develop practices around you know, actually practicing or preparing for hunts and shooting, archery and whatnot. UM. Another key thing that I've always pointed to that's kind of intangible UM, but I've always thought has been something that gave UM. I'd like to think that I try to embody this, but definitely other UM high performers within the hunting world that I've studied and talked to, a key consistent trade across them is always just this mental toughness or you might call it grit, just the ability like it's gonna get done. Like the first thing might not work, but we'll try option bet, and then we'll try option see, and you're push through the challenges and like failure isn't an option in many ways for a lot of these people. And you kind of a little bit passing towards the end of the book, I think I remember seeing a little bit about um this idea of grit and Angela Duckworth's book, which I've read and found really interesting. Whether it be in the research for this book or through maybe some of your other conversations for your outside columns and things like that, can you just speak to anything you've learned about grit how we might be able to develop that, because it seems like sometimes like such an intangible, maybe even inherited traite like us. Some people are just gritty and tough and some people aren't. But I gotta believe that's not the case. We can probably foster that, right, So it's totally not the case. So there's no there's no grit gene, or at least if there is a great gene like DNA, no, no one's yet identified that. Uh. I think the biggest thing here that a lot of other people in this field don't seem to be talking about a lot. And it's the drum that I'm trying to beat because I actually think it's the most important is to surround yourself wisely with other people that are going to push you. Particularly in America in the west's a very individualistic culture. We like to think that we have to be gritty, and we have to have the willpower, and we have to show up. All that stuff is so much easier if you're in a community of other people pushing you to do it. Um. So, I think the most important thing for grit is to surround yourself with people that are gonna push you and hold you accountable, and that on your really good days are going to bring you back down to earth, and on your really bad days are going to push you to show up. Uh, Because, like grit is really just about showing up. Showing up is a very inspirational motivational phrase. But but it stops there. But if you've got three to five people that you care about and care about you making sure you show up, then suddenly showing up becomes an action that you're gonna take. And I heard I heard you once talking about this maybe it was a rich, rich role um about the fact that when you're thinking about who you surround yourself with, it's not necessarily that the people around you all have to be like the very best performers, um, like you, You're They're not gonna be maybe the very best at in this case, all the greatest hunters in the world. But if they are at least all positive like people that will push you and have the right positive mindset around around what you're trying to pursue, that's the most powerful aspect. Does that is that right to interpret that? Right? Totally? It's because you can be you can surround yourself with great performers, but if they're negative and not trying to get better and sulking, it doesn't matter how good their skills are. So I'm glad you clarified this is not about skill. It's much more about attitude and mindset. So they might be great, greatly skilled, but they might be novices. And it actually might be that what you need is the energy and enthusiasm of a novice if if you're kind of stuck in a rot to kind of reignite you and relight the passion, relight the fire. Um. But I just think that like there's such a there's such a cultural ethos around individualism and going at it on your own, and I think the power of a tribe and the power of community, um across all of evolution for our species has just been super important. And I think that's that's if you ask me, the key determinati of grit is community. So this this perfectly then, And that's obviously your two books are very connected because these topics are really kind of one and the same. They meld and mold right into each other. When you talk about people that are wanting to surround themselves with other people that will push them to their to be their best lots of times, it's because, right they're really passionate about whatever it is that they're pursuing. And UM, I've had this recent question that I've kind of talked about the last couple of weeks that I've thought about myself as i've you know, um explored my personal goals to get better um at certain things and and weighed that against my my personal tendency to get really excited about all sorts of different things. So what I mean specifically is that like the number one thing that I do is I hunt dear. That's like my number one passion, That's what I spend the most time on. That's what my audience is interested in the very most Um, that's the like eight percent of the hunters in America or deer hunters. Um. So that's what my number one passion. And someone told me, and I've brought this up over and over again, but someone told me once that you couldn't be really great at deer hunting if you let yourself have other passions. And I've kind of wondered about that, Like, am I am I missing it out on potential because I'm getting distracted by fly fishing or backpacking or whatever it might be. Uh, you had I can't remember who it was, but someone in the book you guys quoted, I believe, said that in order to be a maximalist, you need to be a minimalist. I'm wondering what you think about that, given that that was within the Peak Performance book, And I think that this person was speaking to the fact that you do need to try to find ways to trim the facts you can focus on your your number one goal. But at the same time, within the passion paradox, it sounds like sometimes that can be a danger too. Can you just speak to that what your thoughts are now on that? Oh, now we're getting philosophical So I love this topic. I mean, this is why I wrote the second book, UM, which I actually think is the more And I told you this offline, and no, I think it's probably the more important book of the two UM, particularly for your audience, just because it's a passionate group of people who can fall in love with this sport and that love can be the best thing in your life and the most energizing source, and then it can turn destructive and you can be like, well, how the hell did this happen? Uh? And that's not just hunting. That is every single pursuit that people get passionate about UM. And the crux of it is this being passionate is I would argue, like, what makes life worth living. There is nothing like feeling totally energized, revved up on something tunnel vision. It's the only thing that you can think about. You are just committed to it. It excites you, it makes you tick. Uh. There's a reason that passion and love are intimately connected words because the passion is very very similar neurochemically to love. So when you're falling in love, the only thing on your mind is the object of your attraction that can be true if you're falling in love with hunting, like it's not just love for another person. And when I was doing the research for this book, I asked people while when in life where they're the happiest. No one described times of their life when they were perfectly balanced. People said, it was when I was training for my first marathon. It's it's when I was you know, out on out on a safari, uh, climbing Mount Everest, starting a business, training to make it to the Olympics. Like, these are times of life when you're completely unbalanced, that are the happiest times of your life. Now, the issue is if you live that way in perpetuity, what can end up happening is your identity gets so fused to that one thing that you forget about everything else for months, and then for years, and then for decades, and suddenly you look back and you're like, holy sh it, like what did I just do? Or you get injured and you can no longer hunt, and then you're like, well, if I can't hunt, then who am I? Or your marriage falls apart, Like these are real, real consequences. So the book is called The Passion Paradox because this is a paradox, and I think it's so important, and it's shocked me no one's talking about this, that being super passionate, obsessive, driven about something is both the greatest blessing and also the greatest curse, and it can be both those things at the same time. So if you're passionate, to me, it's not about being balanced or passionate, those two things that you can't be both. It's about walking this fine line of being super passionate about your pursuit, being able to go all in, but maintaining just enough self awareness to objectively evaluate what you're giving up as a result, and to try to make sure that that's in alignment with your values. And that's really really hard to do. And that's often the difference between a phenomenal, happy, high performing life and burnout, depression, anxiety. Yeah, there's lots of unpackaged there. Um. And you're right, this is this is probably the most important topic within within our little micro world here of hunting, but it's it's almost never talked about. It's talked about in generalities. I guess lots of times will discuss um like a very common quandary that will have chats with folks about is how do you balance hunting with family life and other obligations and the challenges of doing that, and you know, sometimes how do you help your significant other understand why this matters so much to you? Or how do you put enough time in other parts of your life so you can spend so much time doing this other thing. Um. The point being that that hunting is definitely just like you said, as many other pursuits are. It's something that people can fall deeply, deeply, deeply kind of in love with. There's so much you can get into, it can consume your life, you can so much, I mean, three hundred sixty five days a year. I'm thinking about something related to this pursuit. But to your point, um, which which can be pretty awesome like that, Yeah, like exactly like yeah, and that and that's what makes it hard to step away. Yeah, yeah, sorry, go on, Oh no, I mean you're exactly right. I mean, it's really easy to point out the positives of passion, you know, like, there's so I mean, it's it's a great feeling, you get excited it. It probably propels you to to higher heights because you're about something and I'm kind of lucky, and a lot of people listening to this podcast are lucky because we have a passion. Right. There's probably a lot of people out there that you know here folks say, oh, well, passion is a great thing. Find your passion, and they're thinking, well, I don't know what I really like to do. I like, I go to work and I just kind of get through it, and then I go home and I watch Game of Thrones, and you know, I try to get a paycheck and try to you know, provide for my family, but they don't have that driving force or this other thing that gets them out of bed and gets them excited. I feel pretty lucky to have found my passion something that really does energize me, and that my my year kind of pivots around the seasons of this passion um But as you mentioned, it has this kind of dark side to it, and within our world, you kind of spoke to a couple of these things, like I know people whose marriages have fallen apart because they get so obsessed with this. I know people who have lost or ruined great friendships because of this. I know people not personally, but I've certainly read about and heard about lots of people have become so obsessed where the end outcomes related to hunting that they've bent the rules or broke the rules and done illegal things just because they want to stroke their ego and say, oh, I got this buck or I did this thing. Um, there's a whole lot of that happening, especially in today's kind of instagram age. I bad, it's hunting. I know in other sports it is like even even in weight training, like you've got guys doping and using steroids so they can take a video of themselves back squatting eight hundred pounds. Yes, it is exactly that. I mean, it's a huge, huge, huge thing going on. So so there is this whole side of that that we're not really examining. A whole lot. Um. I guess let's start there. What have you learned about the negative power of passion? I know, one of the things you labels obsessive passion. Yeah, that's a good place to start. So and and and this is, um, this is so important for people to understand. And it's something that I didn't realize until I started writing this book and learning about this topic in a meaningful way. So there are two kinds of passions. One is what's called harmonious passion. The other is obsessive passion. Harmonious passion is when you are passionate about the activity itself. So in the case of hunting, this is when you are passionate about hunting because you love hunting. Obsessive passion is when you are passionate about the activity because of the external validation you get from it. So this is when you are passionate about hunting because you like telling your friends that you're a hunter, and you like the comments on Instagram when you post you know, when you post your outcomes. People with harmonious passion they have they have great life satisfaction, happiness, and lasting performance. People with obsessive passion driven more by that external stuff that is associated with depression, anxiety, burnout, and cheating. Some of the greatest cheaters in history score off the charts on obsessive passion. So Lance Armstrong crazy obsessive passion. Elizabeth Holmes, the woman behind Pharaonus that by tech company that was a huge fraud, crazy obsessive passion, Barry Bonds, and Alex Rodriguez crazy obsessive passion. So they got so so wed to their results, and they became so so passionate about being the man or the woman about stroking their ego of results. You literally do anything, even if it's cheating or fraud, to get those results. And if you don't get those results, then your identity suffers, your self worth suffers, and that's a very very very quick route to depression and anxiety and burnout. Now, no one starts out wanting to be obsessively passionate, but no one teaches you about this stuff. So it just kind of happens, like very common trajectory. As you start out harmoniously passionate. You love hunting, you fall in love with the sport, and then suddenly you start to get good results, and then you start to post those good results on Instagram or share those good results with the community, and the next thing, you know, because humans crave social status. This is just how our species is hardwired. You become more attached to those external results than to the love of the thing itself, and that that can be a precarious spot to be in. Now, I think it's also important to say no one exists solely in one end of the spectrum or the other. Right, Like this is on a continuum. So where where I come out and what the book the research in the book taught me. So long as the majority of your passion is harmonious, most of the time you're in you're in good shape. The problem is when you start to get into these obsessive routs that then you can start to latch onto carrying so much and craving the outcome and the external validation. That's when you get kind of on this on this negative trajectory. I face this in writing all the time. I like to use myself an example because, like I said earlier, like I don't have all this stuff figured out. I'm working on figuring it out. That's why I write about it. When I publish a book or have an essay go viral, there is such an inclination for me to sit there and refresh my sales rank, or to sit there and look at Twitter because because for writing, Twitter is kind of the medium I assume for hunting its Instagram. I could be wrong, but to sit there and like refresh and watch the comments come in because I'm a human. The issue is when that force becomes so powerful of it, then you start getting upset when the comments don't come in, or you start being willing to do some shady things to have an external success. And it's so important to just be aware of when that's happening so you can nip it in the bud and stop those roots from growing too deep. Yeah, something I found really interesting was what you guys dove into related to the science of passion, like kind of like the neuro chemistry of of of how passion becomes almost addictive. Um can you can you expand it a little bit on that just I think people would be find pretty interesting to understand how and why we get so so, I don't know, consumed by the stuff. Yeah. So there's a neurochemical called dopamine, and dopamine is the neurochemical um involved of striving. So dopamine isn't about feeling good once you've achieved something. It's about the excitement and feeling excited and good about the chase. And our species evolved for dopamine to be a very strong neurochemical. And that's because way back when, when when we were evolving, if you had to kill, you wouldn't want to be content, because if you were content and then there was famine, you would die. So the part of our species that that got selected and turned into modern day humans were those that were really like that that needed dopamine, right, because it's the dopamine that fueled them to never be content to keep on going. Now, dopamine never be content to keep on going. As you can imagine, that's the same neurochemical. I it's implicated an addiction because such a part of addiction is chasing that next high. Can't be content, Gotta get my fix. There's fascinating research that shows that what addicts are actually addicted to isn't so much the feel good of the high, but it's the chase. It's getting their score, getting their fix. And I think anyone that's a passionate person can can probably empathize with that, because for me, the passion isn't the feeling of having your book being a best seller. Passion is like writing the book and promoting it. It's like the whole process. It's the chase. If anything, when my book was named the best seller was kind of a letdown because it's kind of like, now, what, um, So what ends up happening is much like an addiction. The stakes keep on getting higher and you kind of keep on having to chase, chase, Chase, chase, Chase. Now, the minute that this chase gets pointed in an unproductive direction, it can totally go haywire. Uh So that's what I was saying again. This, this is this is why the book is called the Passion Paradox. One of the many paradoxes of passion is on the one hand, this chase is associated with well being, peak performance, life satisfaction, so long as it's kind of kept in chuck. On the other hand, it's associated with depression, anxiety, burnout, and passion and addiction are really two sides of the same coin. Um, you know, I like to nerd out. I could talk about this forever, but perhaps the simplest way to think about this is that the definition of passion is the relentless pursuit of something with productive consequences. The definition of addiction is the relentless pursuit of something despite negative consequences. So the only difference is what you're getting at the end. And that's why what starts as a productive passion can become a destructive addiction if you're not careful. Yeah, it's interesting because obsession passion and obsession within the hunting world are are kind of glorified. Especially it's it's kind of funny. There's a there's a really large hunting brand that their slogan, I don't know if it still is now, but at least for some period of time, the big slogan was it's not a it's not a passion, it's an obsession. So there exactly. Um So, I mean this is definitely something within our world, like like hunters are self admittedly and glorifying being obsessed, and like you're going all in and you're this is what you're doing all the time. But to your point that the rub is knowing when the outcomes are negative versus pausitive, what that passion energy is going towards. Yeah, And again this is the philosophical stuff that's never talked about, but it's so important and and I want listeners to like pause and really reflect on this. Are you doing it out of love or are you doing it out of ego and the need to be relevant? And and it can be both, and at times it is both, but the majority of the time, what is it about? And if it's about ego and being relevant, that is a warning sign that hey, I better rein this in and we can get into it. There are ways to rein it in. If it's about love, then that's great. So same behavior, same amount of time spent hunting, it could be the same anything. But if the if the deep motivation is love, it is freeing, it's expansive, it's it's incredible. If the motivation is ego or needing to be relevant, then that can lead to anxiety. Is that the main way to identify if your passion has gone too far, if your obsessive passionate or is there some other way to like, like, how do I how do I know if I fall into that camp? So I think that a big way to do it in in fields where there are pretty clear outcomes. So writing I'm super familiar with, there's very clear outcomes. You know, how many people read your essay, how many people bought your book? Hunting? I imagine the outcome like you can freaking way the outcome. It's pretty clear. If you spend more time stressing about those outcomes and sharing those outcomes and focusing on those outcomes than the love of the actual pursuit, that to me is a telltale sign that I need to course correct and the way that you course correct is simply by getting back to the work. Um, so I'll let you translate to hunting. I'll tell you how this shakes out in writing. So I write a book or I write an article. If it does really well, and I start to spend a lot of time refreshing Twitter, looking at my sales rank, reading reviews about the book, and it's like ego candy. It feels really good to eat in the short term. But if all I do is spend a week thinking about that stuff, I start to feel kind of gross by the end of the week. So what I've learned to do is that when I catch myself kind of starting to obsess over that ego, over that relevance, the the external validation, I literally and it feels like I'm forcing myself. I force myself to get back to doing the work itself. So for me, that means I start researching my next piece, or I start writing my newsletter, even if I'm ten newsletters ahead, I just start writing because that it sends a very visceral, embodied reminder that what I actually like is writing. Not all the validation. The validation stuff that's a nice byproduct, but the true love is writing. But the more time you spend obsessing about that external stuff, the stronger those roots get and the more you're going to come to create it. Is there any value too, because because the scenari you just outlined is is so spot on for folks in the hunting world, I know that there's a tremendous amount of whether you want to admit it or not, there's a tremendous amount of ego attached to the outcome of hunts. It's just it's just like many things. You you win a gold medal in the Olympics, you win a basketball game. I don't like the idea of of labeling the outcome of a hunt, which is a very serious thing, right, killing an animal. I don't like to label that as a trophy, but that is kind of terminology that's used a lot um. But but whatever you call it, it is this thing that is very tangible and that other people can see and that other people assigned value too. So if you were to kill a big deer, um, that is a thing that people in our community assigned value too. And we'll give you accolades for and we'll like your Instagram picture a lot and we'll think that you are, you know, skilled in some way and all those things, right, whether we want admit or not, those are things that feel good strokes that ego. Um. And so yeah, there's a ton of this going on within our world and it's it's rampant, but it's hard to to get outside of it. I mean when it comes to like, do you is there what am I trying to say here? Is there any value to going cold turkey on the outside validation side of things? So, for example, if this is something that I feel like, if I'm if I'm hearing you saying this, and I'm like, oh, wow, you know what, I don't want to say it. I hate that this is true, but I do find myself thinking about these things. Is there any value to pulling the plug and saying, you know what, I'm just gonna stop posting my dear pictures on Instagram and I'm gonna see if you know what that does, if that kind of helps rain things in. Is that kind of cold turkey approach helpful or is that not? I think it depends on the situation. Um, I think it can be. Uh. And then when you kind of go back, you can kind of go like you know, head over heels back into it. I think that there's like a uh maybe a less extreme approach, which should be let's say that you're an Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, you pick one of those, you only use one, and then you only check it once a day. Um, so just having some rigid boundaries. Um, for me, that meant taking all social media and internet off my phone. So now the only time I can check that stuff is when I'm at my actual computer. So it's just like less accessible. Uh and again, like I'm a freaking like expert on this stuff in my willpower is not enough because it's like telling someone with a gambling addiction to like hold a casino in their pocket, which like if you carry a phone with Instagram and you posted a picture like you have a casino in your pocket, you know it's so So what about though, the passion? What about because the scenarre of the a lot of folks deal with in our world? Wait wait wait real quick, real quick, Mark, just to wrap that thought up, sorry, because I do think, like I think, less than eliminating this stuff is just realizing, like when they're urged to check it is coming up and up and up it again and again and using that as a cute to get back to something about the actual thing that you love, like not the validation, but the activity. So granted, like if you're checking this stuff at eight pm at night, maybe you like can't go outside and start hunting from your front yard, but like start researching you know, the next thing, like start outlining your next training plan, Like do something that is driven towards improvement in the craft, not external validation. Yeah, that makes sense. Now what if, though, you're what if your passion or obsession manifests itself not just in you being obsessed with the validation of your outcome, but what if it simply leads to you making decisions that are negative to other parts of your life. So I'm thinking of examples such as, I'm so obsessed with hunting that I spend every for a week and I have out in the field, and I take weeks and weeks off of time, and instead of taking vacation time with my wife and son, I use my vacation time to hunt, and I'm neglecting family duties Because you're just so all consumed with this drive and you don't have control of that drive and your your relationship with your wife falls apart, of your husband falls apart, and your your children suffer because of it. Um, that's the thing that happens to I'm sure it happens in a lot of supports and other things. What about that kind of situation, So this is tough man. In My approach is to be very values neutral on this. Um. What I mean by that is, I don't label that a I don't label that a bad thing or a good thing. It just is, like the force of passion just is. The bad thing is when the inertia and the momentum of the passion stops you from thinking clearly. So if you are thinking clearly and you realize that your passion for hunting is stronger than your passion for your marriage or whatever it might be, and you make a conscious decision to prioritize is hunting over that. That is not a good decision or a bad decision. That's your decision, and you made it consciously, so you should be okay with it. Um if that decision is kind of like not really conscious because there's like this craving to keep hunting and there's so much momentum that you can't possibly see outside of it. Then that's the kind of decision that you often regret. What's interesting is and really passionate people, the people that make decisions to put their pursuit above all else, including things like marriage, If they feel like they made that decision from a conscious, wholehearted place, they're actually like pretty happy and fine and they don't have regrets. The issue is when you make that decision from being kind of swept up inside of the storm of your passion, and then the storm kind of passes a couple of years later, that's when you get filled with regrets. Uh. So it's really hard to see outside of that inertia. It's like if you're addicted to something, it's very hard to make any kind of rational decision. Passion not too dissimilar. Um, But it's about trying to get some distance, some self awareness to make that decision. Um. It is true that some of the most passionate people, like they're single, they don't have marriages because they just put their pursuit above all else. And and again like I'm not here to judge people that change the world and in science often are divorced because their research came above all else. And I wouldn't want to be married to that person. But I'm really glad that they figured out the polio vaccine. Um. So it's like this is a value's neutral thing. I think the main thing is just really bringing full awareness to it. And it's also to say that most people can be passionate about two or three things at the same time. So there are a lot of people that are world class at what they do that also have good loving marriages and are good parents, but they probably don't have a lot of friends and and they're probably not the person caring for their parents when their parents get sick, and they're probably not going to church every Sunday, and they're probably not watching Game of Thrones, right, So, like it's this kind of fine line about figuring out what really matters to you and then being self aware enough to prioritize between those things. Yeah, this, this concept of self awareness seems to be such an important one, um because because you guys talk about this idea of the unbalanced life and how that's actually okay. Um, how there's so much in society put people saying you gotta have balance, gonna have balance. But to your point, if you know, if Elon Musk had balanced in his life, we wouldn't have SpaceX, we wouldn't have Tesla, we wouldn't have the PayPal account that I'm using to pay for something on the online. Um. So there's good things that come out of passionate people that maybe sometimes don't have that balance. Um can you can you expand a little bit on what you mean by the unbalanced life and and how you maybe yourself or remember I remember hearing Steve on a podcast talk about this where he he talked about, you know, at times having an unbalanced life and going all in on something but having the self awareness to know when to go in and out of that phase. Can you talk about that? Yeah, for sure. So so I'm a big believe in an unbalanced life because I'm a passionate person. I feel very fortunate that I cared deeply about certain things and they make me tick. And I think that that's like a privilege to to be able to find things that make you feel that way. So for me to try to be balanced would be so frustrating because most people here balance in the self help world and they say, you know, be balanced, and that means like equal things and equal proportions so you mentioned this earlier, like I'm gonna wake up, I'm gonna take the kids to school, I'm gonna exercise for half an hour, I'm gonna work at nine to five, I'm gonna come home, i'm gonna have a beer, i'm gonna watch Game of Thrones, and i'm gonna go to bed. And then I'm gonna repeat that the next day and just do that in perpetuity. Um again, values neutral. If some people are content with that, all the power to them. I can't be content doing that. So I'm all about unbalanced, which for me is like finding what are these things I really care about and then giving myself permission to go all in on them, but with enough self awareness to know what I'm giving up as a result. In so long as I maintain that self awareness, what tends to happen in my life is I have some seat, like some seasonality, and there's a season where I'm putting writing above just about everything else. I mean, I'm a new parent. I have a fifteen month old, so now he comes above everything else. But right there with that, like like um, you know, like and even now like there are times when I'm making a choice where it's like, wow, like I should probably be playing with my kid, but like I really am in a writing groove. I'm gonna finish this essay, but then tomorrow I'm gonna shift and I'm gonna go all in. I'm being there for my kid and I'm not going to be thinking about writing at all. Um. So the unbalanced life with self awareness instead is about identifying what are the things that really matter to me, and then how can I make the trade offs between those things, um day to day, week to week, month to month, and then over the course of a year. Uh, A lot of really passionate people talk about they have seasons over the course of a year. So there's a season for getting promoted or launching a business, or you know, really focusing on hunting or running a pr in the marathon, and then there's another season that year where you put your professional pursuits in your hobbies behind that if your wife or your kids, and then it's like that, then the season is being a great family member. But it's very different than trying to do all things great at the same time, because I think that's impossible. Yeah, and this this is perfectly literally applicable to hunting. As there are federally mandated seasons when you can and can that hunt. So there's really easy boundaries to to help you with some of this in in our hunting you know, pursuit. But but yeah, it's it's oftentimes comes back to the ability to identify when you're doing it. That's self awareness. And there's something you talked about, um you guys labeled as self distancing UM as a way to help foster that self awareness to know when am I going all in and when it's okay? And when when do I need to be able to say, you know what, mark this is what time you gotta pull back and be the only man right now or whatever might be. Can you talk about what you meant by that and how to you know, develop that or foster that self awareness for sure. So so when you're really passionate about something, you tend to lose self awareness UM. And the best way to get it back is like ironically, to get far outside of yourself. Uh. There's some fascinating research that we cover in in the book in the Passion Paradox on the linkage between really passionate people and people suffering from eating disorders. So you might think like, what the heck do these two things have in common? It turns out a lot. When someone with an eating disorder looks in the mirror, they don't see somebody that is like gaunt and skinny, they see someone that is fat. When someone that is in the throes of a passion evaluates their life, they don't see everything else that they're sacrificing. They only see that they're not putting enough into their passion. So when you're caught up in that storm, you've got to be able to step outside of it. And that's what we mean by self distancing. It's about getting outside of the inertia in the momentum of your passion, so that you know, rather than being in the horror movie, you're watching the horror movie, and when you're in the horror movie, you're just like there's no time to evaluate, like you're just in it, Whereas when you're in the movie theater, you might be watching a slow moving train wreck. But then you can realize it's a slow moving train wreck. So then the question is, well, how do you create this distance? Uh, there are a few ways that are that are proven in the research that really help with this um. One way is a mindfulness meditation practice. So just to sit for ten to thirty minutes a day and meditate, And the goal of meditation is not to feel relaxed or enter like this woo woo feel good land. Meditation actually often sucks because what happens is the stuff that you're oppressing comes up over and over again. And if when you meditate, what's coming up over and over again is Wow, I should be spending more time with my family, or wow, like I'm letting my career go because of this hobby, then that that's probably a pretty good sign to pay attention to to that and like, maybe that will help give you some of that self awareness to to to make different choices. Another great way to get self awareness is to spend a day in nature with no goal. So don't don't spend a day in nature hunting, just go on a day hike all alone and just taking the beauty of nature. Uh. There's something about being in the natural world that gives us perspective and reminds us how small our lives are, and um kind of puts that back in perspective and then helps us see our lives outside of the inertia of that passion. And then my favorite way to do this is I think the hardest, and that is uh to read memoirs or watched like movies about people that are dying or have died, um, reflecting on death and mortality. It's kind of shitty and hard, but nothing helps you realize what actually matters to you and what you want to spend your time on. Most then reflecting on death and mortality. I've never met someone that read a beautiful memoir of someone describing the dying process and then said I need to spend more time on social media and need to spend more time on message boards, like it never happens. But if we don't expose ourselves to that, it's really easy to get sucked into the momentum and inertia and spend tons of times on message boards, especially if the message board is something we're passionate about. Yeah, that's a very good point. Um. You know another one that you guys had mentioned in there, which I found could work for me. I thought was the idea of of pretend like you are giving a friend advice. So yeah, that's a good one. So I can see this working from me, because you know it'll be the middle hunting season, and I'm always struggling with this um inner dialogue where I'm like, gosh, I have this goal. I'm trying to get a deer, and I have you know, it's gonna take, you know, so many days of effort, so many different hunts. There's all this work I've put into it all through the winter and the spring and the summer. Now it's fall. I've got so much invested, um, and this is the weekend to do it. There's great weather, there's great conditions. I should be out there. Um. But then I'm also thinking, but you hunted all the last four or five days, and your your son, You're I have a fifteen month or say I think sixteen month old son, how to um? And he, you know, he's being really tough. And your wife's struggling because she hasn't really getting work done, and like all these different things, and I'm thinking, well, what do I what should I be doing now? Should I keep pushing towards this thing? Or do I need to take the weekend off and just be a good dad? Um? And sometimes maybe that that exact scenario, but various scenarios I'll find myself giving into the inertia of the passion, and right, I want to do this thing. It's I enjoy it so much. The goal is so important to me that I'm just gonna go do it. Um. But if a friend told me that exact same scenares said, Hey, I'm thinking about going home in this weekend, but I was going the last five days and so on and so forth, I probably would very quickly say, you know what, man, you probably need to give your wife and sons sometime. It's so much easier when you pretend like you're giving advice to your friend. And but I would have never maybe been able to say that about myself. Right, Yeah, that's like that's the self distancing for sure, because you you get outside of yourself. Um. And it's not just like about these big things like family. An example for me, and maybe this is applicable in your world, Maybe not is Um. I do a lot of strength and conditioning training, and I'll often try to train through injuries that I shouldn't and I'll literally be like on the way out the door to the gym, hobbling on like a strained quadrisap and I'm like, if any of my training buddies told me that they've got a badly strained quadrisap and they're gonna just get that get that day of front squats in. I'd be like, dude, like, nothing's gonna happen if you don't train to like rest one day now so you're not injured for one month later and then I turn around and go home. But if I don't give that advice to a friend, I'm gonna go to the gym and I'm gonna like mess up my leg even more. Um. So it can be helpful and even smaller scale decision making. Yeah, it's And I feel that this is a universal principle, right, Like I think many times we are really good at pointing out flaws and other people, but the same flaw we might have, and it's it's it's invisible to us. Like self awareness is not something that I think comes easily to a lot of folks. Um. It almost requires a thoughtful development of it, Like we have to we have to choose to say, you know what, I want to try to become a little bit better at this because it's an important thing. Um. Otherwise, like all these other things going on in our mind make it really easy to try to kind of plaster over the flaws and plaster over the cognitive dissonance that makes us not feel so good because it's it's a lot easier to ignore it, right Yeah, yep, yep, I mean, and that's the crux of it, Like this is this is the book that um And like again, I wrote this book for myself, not because I have this figured out, but to to to figure things out. It's a pretty It was uncomfortable writing because I saw a lot of myself in this and and I've gotten feedback from readers that it's like a very uncomfortable read because it makes you look in the mirror and like realize some parts of yourself that aren't so pretty. But it's so freaking important because if you just repress that or you just ignore it, then that cognitive dissonance builds and builds until it blows up in your face. Versus if you can confront that stuff and not judge yourself and be like, yeah, I have an ego because I'm a human and like, yeah, there are some days I'd rather hunt than be a parent, not because I'm a terrible parent, but because I'm passionate and kind of look at these things non judgmentally, but then really dive into them, uh and do some of that like self exploration and work. I think, like again, it's the difference of walking that fine line of being passionate and having it be super productive and energizing versus getting into a spot where it blows up on you later on. Yeah. Yeah, very true, which is probably pretty easy to do. Um, what what have we missed? Like? Are there any other foundational principles or major takeaways that you know now that you've heard a little bit from me as far as the things that that I deal with and other hunters might be dealing with along these lines. Is there any other concept or idea that we haven't touched on yet that you'd want to make sure that we we left folks with. I think the the only other one is um And this has been such a good, far, far ranging conversation. UM, So I think we've covered a lot. I think the only other thing worth mentioning is around transitioning and retirement and how hard that can be. UM In retirement can be forced sometimes by injury or by age. Uh. And if it's not retirement, just declining performance. So I assume hunting is like other sports where at a certain age it's going to be really hard physically to keep on having new like new prs, new breakthrough performances. So how do you cope with declining and eventually not being able to do the thing that you love? Uh and and that's super hard again, It's one of these paradoxes of passion is the more passionate you are about something, the more likely you are to have depression when it becomes time to move on. Um And, I think the biggest takeaway there is when you are in one of those transition or or age related declined periods, is to surround yourself with other people they have been through that before and use them as a support system and then find other ways in other ways to stay involved in the sport. So maybe physically you can no longer go out and spend you know, weekends or weeks on backpacking trips or get onto the back country, but maybe now you mentor people, or maybe you write for a hunting publication or you start a blog. Um. So like, just find other ways to stay involved in the sport and in the community. Because so many people they think that what they love is hunting, but what they actually love is the community. Yeah, that's interesting to bring that up because there's this kind of idea and this probably applies to a lot of things, but I know that in the hunting world there's and I'm gonna I'm gonna forget a step here, but people often talk about these like five phases of a hunting life. Like when you first get into it, you're just like trying to figure it out. You're just trying to figure out how to get your first deer or whatever. And then in your next stage, you you figure it out, and then usually it's just wanting to have, you know, a lot of success. So people want to go out hunt a bunch and have a lot of success with it. And then there's this next phase where they figured out how to have a lot of success, and now it's trying to add a different layer of challenge. So instead of trying to go out there and you know, get a bunch of ducks or whatever, get you know, numerous deer, it's I'm gonna hold out for the oldest, most rare um you know, old elk or whatever it might be, because that's the greatest challenge. Will push me as far as I could possibly be pushed to be the best hunter possibly could be, but then eventually kind of come to realize what you just said that very you know, all these things maybe aren't what really mattered in the in the first place, and they start realizing that they just want to mentor a new hunter helps someone get into it, helps someone else experience what they've come to enjoy so much, and eventually they don't even they just want to be out in nature with the people that they love. Um. So it's this kind of trajectory kind of similar to that that you described in which you you go through these different levels of passion and you come to find that it was not the outcome, but the process in the end that was what mattered most. And I guess that study of mortality that you talked about a second ago, that's a good way to kind of fast forward that mindset to remember that what happens if you're going to die tomorrow, Do you care about getting that buck, do you care about somebody in that mountain? Or what what really matters maybe is spending time with your son outside doing it. You know, yep, And that's going to change at different points in your life, like when you're a young gun and you're twenty four just getting into it, Like the answer might be summoning that mountain, and then when you're thirty five with a kid, it might be taking your kid out there, and then when you're sixty it might actually be like sipping on bourbon, just having a good time. So, like I mean, these things, these things change over the course of a life. So I think the key thing is to just keep on forcing that that self awareness and that honest reflection. Yeah, I think, uh, I think that's so important. And it's easy to just getting caught in the inertia. It's so easy just to do the thing you do, um, to do what feels good, and we can very quickly lose sight of of what we've actually done. So I think having conversations like this and reading books like The Passion paradox Um just really, really, really important. So I appreciate you taking the time to write these books, to share these ideas and and to chat with me about it. So thank you, Bred, Thank you Mark. I really enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, And for people that want to learn more about all these ideas, um, can you can you just give us quick rundown where they can learn more about the books you're self where they can connect with you. Yeah, for sure. So the easiest place is probably just my website, which is www dot Brad Stallberg dot com uh or Twitter where I'm at b Stallberg And um, the books are on Amazon in bookstores. I mean, if you just google my name in the books, you can get them pretty much anywhere you can get books. Perfect, and you you write a pretty pretty frequent column for Outside too, right, Yeah, so I've I've got a twice a month column for Outside. Uh that's titled do it Better? And I joke that as long as as long as it's a little bit better versus do it worse than I'm on I'm on brand, but I got I got a poke fund it myself. But yeah, so I write about performance and well being for Outside. Awesome. Well, everything I've read from you so far has just been really helpful. These concepts are are fascinating and uh and I appreciate sharing. So thanks Brad, and uh, let's chet again someday soon. All right? Sounds good? Thank you, Mark? All right, and that is a rap. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Um ma'am. I'm just digging these concepts, these different ways we can apply lessons from outside the hunting world into what we do. I think there's a lot a lot to be learned from these other fields and my plans to continue doing it. So hopefully we're gonna have some more episodes like this in the future. I hope you will tune in for those. If you enjoyed this, definitely check out Brad's books. Highly recommend them. They're they're easy to read. I like the way they have it organized. They've got little call outs of key quotes and key concepts to make it make it easy to to harness and to focus on the very most important takeaways and uh, as you heard in the conversation, there's a lot to dive into, So check those out on Amazon or wherever you want to head to and otherwise. I'm hoping that you have a great week a great weekend, hopefully enjoy some time outside and until next time, stay Wired to Hunt.

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