Hunter, husband, CEO—I wear a lot of titles. But I never forget that what I truly am is a human being, a role I succeed in by being at home in my skin and at peace with the world I live in. A big-picture perspective matters to me, not just because it helps me understand the challenges and opportunities around me. It also keeps me very aware of my tiny role in a very big, complicated, and connected world. I know that nothing happens in isolation in this life. Before I act, I make it a point to think about how my actions will play out. I try to imagine how they’ll shape my hunt, the world around me, and the experience of all of us who live in it. I’m in the hunt to win, but I don’t believe in winning at any cost. In fact, I’m a spiritual person—just like most of the True Hunters I know.
Don’t let the term “spiritual” spook you. Being a successful hunter involves a certain level of faith in the power of the natural order and your ability to succeed within it. You never hear True Hunters talk about “conquering” nature. Whether it’s building a business, outperforming a competitor, creating a secure and satisfying life for their family, strengthening their community, or taking a trophy buck, True Hunters achieve their goals by learning to be a powerful force within the natural order. We use our human capabilities to leverage the nonstop opportunities life sends our way, and the power of that momentum keeps us moving on to the next hunt, the next achievement, and the next breakthrough moment. When you bring the pillars of The Hunt to your pursuits, you position yourself for just that kind of lifelong achievement. You have faith in your vision, your methods, your decisions, your skills, and your motivations, and faith in the natural order. You aren’t just hunting in your life; you are living The Hunt. And you’re finding the flow that carries all True Hunters forward.1
Flow is a term for the kind of intense, focused, self-propelled, outcome-oriented experiences you’ve been learning about through this book. Finding flow is the primary work of The Hunt—work that is its own reward. Our ability to successfully leverage the skills we build over our lifetime and to continue honing those skills is the true trophy we take from life. When you understand that, every day’s hunt falls into place as another step along your path. You can expect that path to bring more hunts, more allies, more learning experiences, more wins, more life your way. Finding flow is the ultimate payoff you get from bringing the pillars of The Hunt into your own approach to life. And that’s an outcome that benefits everyone—the hunter, the hunted, and the world we all walk through.
The word “flow” has been around for a long time; in fact, some researchers think it’s one of the oldest words used on the planet.2 The ancient roots of the word make perfect sense, because it describes an almost primal process in which any number of individual elements—drops of water, grains of sand, migrating birds, whatever—come together and then move in a fluid but connected “whole” in a single direction. And like the flowing water that carved out the Grand Canyon, the power of flow can be mighty. That’s the experience of The Hunt: by aligning your actions and decisions with your authentic motivations and skill sets, ultimate goals, and true Desired Outcomes, you put yourself in the most powerful position possible for achieving results. That’s how you live The Hunt. You’re aware of your individual actions, but powered through them by the real-time, evolving effect of their combined momentum.
When you’re hunting in flow, you accomplish one step, then the next and the next and the next, and soon you find yourself moving toward the finish line, pumped and ready for the next ride. All of those positive results generate an abundance of positive energy. This process allows you not only to achieve the DOs you’ve set out to take down on this hunt, but also to actually pull more potential success into your path. You meet more of the people you need to know, uncover more creative ideas, take bolder steps, find bigger wins, and leave a wake of success and possibility that makes everything and everyone around you better. Flow may sound incredible—because it is. But it’s also very real.
As much as the process sounds like a bolt from the blue, it doesn’t just happen by accident or to a chosen few. Flow naturally follows real-time execution, which—as you’ve seen—is the result of
When you’re hunting in the field, you just know the buck is coming your way, but that knowing isn’t some psychic phenomenon; it’s your interpretation of data. You’ve studied and leveraged the variables. You’ve studied your animal, positioned yourself in the right spot, and planned your movements in synch with the season, the weather, and the prevailing conditions of the territory. You’ve seen the successful outcome playing out in your mind. When this bump or that pothole has appeared in your path, you’ve been ready and able to skirt it and keep moving forward. Because you’ve known where you’re headed, obstacles are momentary interruptions or detours in your progress, not dead ends that stop you cold. You can have faith that everything is going to come together just the way you’ve planned for it. So when that trophy moves into your shooting range, you’re ready to close this hunt with focus and purpose, and then move on to the next. That’s flow.
I try to stay in flow as much as possible in my life. I expect success, because I’ve covered the ground necessary to reach it.
I once went on a trip to Cuba with a group of business leaders. I left for this trip expecting to gain some wins from it—speaking opportunities, powerful connections, and a new understanding of a nation, economic setup, and culture with which I had no previous experience. All of that happened, just as I thought it would.
Now, I could have spent my time in Cuba missing my family back home, worrying about how things were going at the office, or focused on some kind of hypercritical judgment of communism. A trip bounded by that kind of negativity would have been the ultimate waste of time and energy, an experience that—at best—would knock me sideways instead of moving me forward. Instead, I generated new third-party connections with people and organizations I had never worked with before. I had key meetings with some people I had been trying to get in front of for months. And I learned that Cuba and its people are a whole lot more than just a “communist country.” That trip flowed for me, because I made it happen. I did the things I knew I had to do to position myself so that these results would come to me, and then they did.
Flow is about living in rhythm with the world around you. You hit that rhythm by aligning your ideas and actions so that your momentum pulls you toward your DOs, instead of trying to push your way through to achieving them. When you’re in flow, moving with the real-time events and data around you, you can almost hear the harmony of your progress playing in your head.
Flow helps you surf the waves of the world around you instead of fighting against the tide. That kind of coordinated progress moves you forward more quickly and easily than the struggle ever could. And because the natural world moves in flow, you’re really just trying to tap into that bigger river of momentum. You can get stuck going 35 in a 50 mph stretch of roadway, and if you allow yourself to trust in the flow around you, to move in a stream with the other traffic, you’ll usually start catching a green light now and then, find a workable detour, or simply adjust to the slower speed and—one way or another—arrive in time for whatever you’re moving toward. Of course, you could try to buck the flow by slamming back and forth between lanes, riding the bumper of the car in front of you, or shouting obscenities at the jerks around you who are doing the same thing. Ever tried that? If so, I bet you know how useless it is.
That’s the difference between finding flow and fighting the tide. You’re in alignment with life, so hitting a traffic jam is just a natural part of your journey for the day. Either it’s a normal rush-hour experience, which you bought into by driving in this place during this time, or there’s something out of the ordinary going on up ahead, which presents you with a situation you can either accept or abandon at the first exit ramp. You can find a way to use the time spent in traffic—listening to music or books, thinking through issues you’ll need to take care of when you hit your destination, or just practicing patience—but once you’re in a traffic jam, it’s yours to deal with.
In every area of your life, the world will sometimes throw obstacles at you that can put a serious kink in your flow. So what? Moving fluidly in, around, and through obstacles is what a skillful hunt is all about. But you’re the only one who can stop your movement altogether. Anger and ego will knock you out of alignment and stall your progress every time.
But I hope that you’ve also seen how I’ve “eaten” all of the lessons dished up by my experiences—the incredible leg-up of self-confidence and business savvy I got from my parents; the predatory skills and understanding of nature I gained from a lifetime of hunting; the ego-checking lessons in personal growth dealt out to me during the WHA fiasco. Every step—and stumble—along that trail has made me a smarter man, a more responsible family member, and a stronger leader. And it’s helped me learn to keep every subsequent step in alignment with the overall direction I’ve set for my life. Everyone’s life, including mine, is a work in progress.
Of course, to get in alignment with your destiny, you need a really clear idea of what your ultimate life goals actually entail. Some Desired Outcomes are relatively easy to ID. Short-term goals—like landing a promotion, buying or selling a home, or learning a new language—are driven by circumstance and the moving flow of our lives. Opportunities arise; needs evolve; circumstances change. That’s why our DOs need to be clear and well-defined, but also flexible enough to allow us to grow in our hunt.
But ultimate goals—life goals—are bigger than most Desired Outcomes. When you’re deciding where you want your life to take you, you have to go deep. Whatever Q&A you have to undergo to choose a Desired Outcome takes on about one hundred times the importance and detail when you’re considering the overall direction for your life. Those ultimate goals have to stand up to some of the toughest questions you’ll ever have ask yourself—and they fall into three main categories:
Or let’s say your goal is to get married and raise children. Again, what is it about that goal that matters most to you? What part of having those kids do you most want to experience? What does having a family really mean to you? Would you be unwilling to marry someone who didn’t want kids, but who you were wild about? Would you marry someone you weren’t that in love with, rather than be single?
Maybe you want to devote yourself to conservation. What does that mean to you—protecting the environment from the destructive impact of people? Or making the natural world more accessible to more people? Are you ready to direct your life toward this effort, through hands-on field work or organizing or political lobbying? Or are you really just interested in being a good citizen of the earth?
You get the picture. You have to dig down into the real reasons you’ve decided that this choice is a meaningful direction for your life and then fully understand what that meaning is.
Every pillar of The Hunt you’ve learned about in this book helps keep your choices and actions in alignment with your ultimate goals, because
Big issues require big understanding and offer big rewards, and finding flow is one of the biggest rewards you can bring to your life. By learning about and understanding the pillars of The Hunt, you’ve prepared to think about your life through a panoramic lens that allows you to see how you’re connected to the rest of the world, and how each of your decisions guides your life journey. You’re ready to address the big picture questions that will align your thoughts and actions and ideas with the most important decision you can make—what do you want to do with your life? You may not know the answer today. But don’t worry; you don’t have to. You just have to start asking the questions, actively thinking about meaning and purpose, and letting those thoughts guide your day-to-day choices about how you’ll spend your time, energy, and focus. Just by wading into those waters, you’re entering the flow of life.
You also don’t have to worry about forcing your life into alignment. Throughout this book we’ve talked about ideas and practices that naturally move your choices, your actions, your understanding in alignment with your life. The trickier issue is learning to stay in alignment. When it comes to carving your path through life, the most dangerous detours can seem like the most attractive options. That’s where your ultimate life goals become your safeguards. Think of them as something like those fluorescent metal lane markers and rumble strips that keep you in your driving lane.
Whenever you reach a branch in your path, test all potential options against your ultimate goals. If an immediate choice doesn’t fit with the long-range goals you’re tracking down, then you know it’s a no-go. Very few of us actually “jump the lane”; that is, make a single decision or take a particular action that causes them to go completely off course. Instead, we tend to wander; we move just outside the boundaries of our values, principles, and goals, then drift a little bit further off course, then further, and before you know it, we’ve been off the trail for so long we can’t even see our way back or remember what we were heading toward. But if you make it a practice to test your decisions against your ultimate goals, you’ll have the rumble strips in place to warn you when you first begin to drift off course. Then you can decide what needs to change; your short-term direction or your long-range target.
I’ve had to make those same kinds of drift tests at OHub, and they’ve resulted in a number of shifts. I saw the potential when we first pivoted from the WHA to our new business model. I made a commitment to one critical DO: to make this brand as big as it could possibly be. I realized that in order to do that, I had to take it through three levels. First, we needed a viable business model. Second, we had to become the best business-to-business organization in our arena. Third, we’d have to take our model directly to consumers.
I had known that I would be the right leader for the organization during the first two steps of the process. But I also knew that I would be moving out of my authentic territory when we started the climb into the third level. I would need to stay focused on my hunt and turn the leadership of OHub over to someone whose skills were better aligned with its new direction—a leader who could take it through that section of the trail.
After some heavy scouting and a long search, I landed the right leader—someone I knew would be able to take OHub to the next level. That decision freed me up to keep moving down the path toward the ultimate goals I’ve set for myself. I felt comfortable because I knew I’d made sure that OHub had the leadership it needed. At the same time, I positioned myself to bring my professional life more closely in alignment with the DOs and ultimate goals I’d been chasing.
Within just a few months, everyone was able to relax and see the benefits of all that realignment. Now the business is moving forward with real-time execution. That doesn’t mean that the shift took place without a hitch. We had arguments, we hit potholes, we had to tweak processes and practices. But in the end everyone—even the folks who told me I was crazy to make the move—agrees that OHub has never been tighter, more efficient, better positioned to own its territory. In other words, the company is in alignment with the destiny we all envisioned for it.
Think of alignment as power—to move forward, build momentum, and achieve. As you carve the path toward the outcomes and goals you’ve chosen in your personal and professional life, keep checking your progress for drift. Be present, be aware, and most important, be real. We get only one life. If we spend too much of it hunting down the wrong trails, we run the real risk of running out of time and energy before we even get close to our target.
Seasons change. As a hunter, I don’t lead a climate-controlled life, and I don’t track seasonal shifts by watching the changing promotional displays at the drugstore. But, as much as my awareness is tied to the seasons, I don’t get too emotional about the passage of time. That’s part of the True Hunter thing, too. Life isn’t a series of straight lines that begin at Point A and end at Point B. Life is a cycle, and hunters get that completely. A season isn’t a season if it never ends; a living thing isn’t a living thing if it doesn’t die. It’s not that we’re not moved by death. We know what death looks like, and we also know that every year, we’re getting closer to our own.
But one of the biggest lessons we all can learn from nature is that every death is a beginning. A tree falls, and hundreds—thousands—of other life forms surge forward, fed, sheltered, or given a new opportunity to thrive by this stage in the tree’s cycle. And life is all cycles, curving pathways, winding rivers, crashing waves—flow.
When you’re hunting in flow, you know that where you are now isn’t where you’ll always be. The season will change. This hunt will end, and another will begin. The river bends, but the water keeps flowing. A True Hunter isn’t concerned about stopping that forward movement. Rather, he cares about feeding it, building momentum and leveraging past successes—not resting on them. And, maybe of greatest importance, every True Hunter is concerned about leaving a clean wake—a clear, healthy trail that offers as much opportunity to the hunters who follow as it offered to those who went before.
The idea of leaving the path a better place than it was when you found it isn’t particularly difficult to grasp. It can be totally confusing, though, to listen to the people who don’t get it. I once heard some people discussing how a new bill that was making its way through Congress would shape the environment one hundred years down the road. One of these guys said, “Well, I’m not going to be around in a hundred years, so the people who are alive then will have to figure it out.” Now, I’d bet that just about everyone reading this book would call that statement shockingly stupid. But a lot of people live their lives with the same total disregard for the future that those words demonstrate. Instead of leaving a clean wake for the folks who follow, these people just keep walking away from all of the messes that they’ve either created, contributed to, or done nothing to prevent. And, whether they know it or not, the mess is going to come back and bite them. That’s not some kind of magical karma; it’s reality. It’s how a cycle works. So, leaving a clean wake is not just a good idea. It’s a form of self-preservation—for you, your family, your business, your planet.
Leaving a clean wake means much more than being a good steward of nature, although that’s one of the most important responsibilities we have. It’s just as important to be a good steward of the personal and professional world you build and live in. That’s what leaving a clean wake means: approaching the need to follow a new direction honestly; tying up loose ends, swallowing your ego, and supporting new ideas, structures, and visions. It requires that you build an environment—a culture—that’s strong enough to shape the DNA of everyone in it in a way that promotes new life and drives success. You’re leaving behind a place that you would be happy to find yourself walking into again, if the cycle of your life brought you there. You know this stuff; you just have to remember to live it.
Now, I’m going to branch off from this hunt and leave you to follow your own path forward for a while. That’s not to say that I’m tagging out, or that our trails won’t cross again. We’re hunting the same territory, after all; we all want to leverage our human nature for all it’s worth, to push our primal instincts to the next level, to get our energy and interests in alignment with the great flow of life around us. This book is just the beginning of my journey down a new trail, and I look forward to many more opportunities to share that hunt with you. In the meantime, I’ve left you with a lot of useful tools, ideas, and techniques you can use to make your hunt more meaningful and productive. Grab your gear and hit the woods, hunter. And never forget that success is always in season—and The Hunt is on.