Ep. 1045: Clay Newcomb’s Greatest Whitetail Failures and Lessons Learned

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to the whitetail Woods, presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host, Mark Kenyon, Welcome to the.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Wired to Hunt Podcast. This week on the show, I’m joined by Clay Newcomb to discuss failure in the whitetail Woods and beyond and the greatest lessons he’s learned from each and every one of those moments. All right, welcome back to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by Moultrie. And today we’re continuing the theme of failure this month, and my guest is someone who I’m sure almost all of you know. It’s mister Clay Newcomb, my good friend and colleague at Meat Eater, the host of the Bear Grease podcast, and a dang good whitetail hunter in his own right. And today I want to ask him about failure as we did or the last you know, a couple weeks ago with me and Tony. I wanted to bring this question to Clay to help me understand really how he has dealt with failure, how he defines failure, how he’s become a better deer hunter because of failure. Those are the questions I intended to bring to Clay, and I can tell you now after having that conversation with him, that he took things in a different direction, an interesting direction. We do talk about failure in the whitetail woods, but I think the more important thing we ended up discussing was how failure and how we maybe experience it and learn about it, possibly in the whitetail woods or in hunting and fishing or whatever outdoor pursuit it is that you have, how that might be applied through the rest of your life, and how this can inform who you are as a person. So I think I’m going to leave it at that. It’s a very interesting conversation. Clay is always has a has a tremendous amount of wisdom to share, and I’ve always appreciated that about him. So today an interesting, a potentially surprising conversation with Clay Nucombe about failure and what that means and what it might mean for all of us as hunters, outdoors people, and maybe more generally just as humans. All right, joining me on the line is the one and only the legendary Clay Newcomb. Thanks for being everybody. Hey Mark, good Yeah, I’m so glad that we get a chance to chat here. And this theme we’ve got this month seemed like a perfect fit for you, Clay, because I know you’ve had so much failure over the years, and the white Tail’s coming.

00:02:53
Speaker 3: The one time, the one time Mark wants me on the podcast is all about failure.

00:02:59
Speaker 4: So I’m like, yeah, count me in. I’m in. I’m your man.

00:03:03
Speaker 2: Well, in all seriousness, it’s more that I know you are wives, Clay. You are wives, and I think I think wisdom, you’re generous. I think wisdom is helpful in dealing with failure. But I want to jump right into it with you. And the thing that I think would be most interesting to me right out the gate is how you define failure, you know, in the in kind of the context of deer hunting. When I like, when I reached out to you the other day and said, hey, we’re talking about failure, what comes to mind, m.

00:03:38
Speaker 3: You know, I mean when you think about the typical idea of of failure at the most base level would be you have an objective to go hunting and to kill a deer and you don’t like that, that would be the first idea that comes to mind. But if you think like a single second longer and a step further, you realize, and anybody that’s hunted very much at all, even someone who’s maybe just beginning, you realize that most of a person’s career inside of hunting and time in the woods, if the definition of failure is that you’re going to fail a whole lot and not have a lot of fun, not enjoy it. So I mean, to me, there’s this big blurred picture of a whole lot of times in the woods that would you your success at the end would ultimately be this big connection of a bunch of individual mistakes that you had made things.

00:04:48
Speaker 4: Maybe you didn’t make a mistake, but you didn’t kill a deer.

00:04:51
Speaker 3: And so it’s I actually struggled a little bit when you told me what we’re going to talk about, not because I’ve not made mistakes. I mean I’ve made innumerable mistakes, but they all they all seem one and the same.

00:05:02
Speaker 4: I mean, the mistakes and the success, it’s it’s all like one event. It’s like one game.

00:05:08
Speaker 3: It’s like a basketball game that you know, the first quarter second quarter, third quarter, and you you ultimately come away with with a victory, which that victory could be a big buck on the wall. That victory could also be just a meaningful time in the natural world. And so I mean success ultimately starts with what’s the definition?

00:05:32
Speaker 4: They’re like, what are you after?

00:05:34
Speaker 1: You know?

00:05:35
Speaker 4: And and the timescale of it.

00:05:39
Speaker 3: You know, I mean, sometimes I go hunting and I don’t even want to kill a deer.

00:05:42
Speaker 4: That’s rare.

00:05:43
Speaker 3: But I mean sometimes you go out an afternoon and you’re just like, man, if I kill a deer, if I don’t, it’s not really consequential.

00:05:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just want to be out there.

00:05:53
Speaker 4: But most times I go to the woods, the goal is to kill a deer.

00:05:59
Speaker 2: Do you think that you’re thinking on this has changed it all from maybe when you were sixteen or twenty to where you are now. Do you think that back then would would young adult Clay Newcomb have had a different answer one?

00:06:12
Speaker 3: You know, when I was young, I used to read about the stages of the hunter, you know, like you when you’re when early on the focus is on the kill, and then as you progress, the focus becomes on the process, and later the focus comes on helping others, and I had this sense that I would fight that, that I would that I would fight that, and that I would never because it when you hear that narrative, it sounds like you lose drive and focus. And as a twenty year old, that chronology felt like drift from kind of what was fun about hunting. But now that I am definitely in the middle of life, should I live a normal lifespan, Uh, I’m less interested in fighting that because you just change over time and it’s good. Like today, I’m I’m still very focused on mission orientation inside of hunting. Like there’s times and places and seasons where I’m like hyper fixated on killing a big deer, just like I was when I was twenty, But that’s not That’s not the way it is every time I sit in the woods. There’s times when I’m not focused like that at all. And I’m much more comfortable with with with changing mentalities about hunting because now I actually feel more diversified than ever. Like last year when I was hunting in Oklahoma, I had one goal and that was to kill a big old buck with my bow, like cared about nothing else, really didn’t even care about the method, really didn’t even care about having a great deer camp with people with me. But this this was like this short window. So I can go from that hyper fixated, driven person but also go to a family deer camp with a relaxed setting and no no pressure from the outside. So age, I feel like has helped me be I can I can be in first gear, I can be in second gear, I can be in sixth gear, and I get to pick.

00:08:31
Speaker 4: I mean I’m more in control.

00:08:33
Speaker 2: Okay, you give me hope for my for my middle age as well, which I’ve am. Well, I’m not rapidly I’m there too, but maybe in denial. But I want to unpack this idea a little bit more of these different gears and and maybe if we were to talk about failure, it’s like throwing a wrench into those different gears. Right, So, what’s the most recent example of failure that you can that comes to mind for you related to deer hunting, Like the first thing you think about, however you want to define it. I know you just mentioned there’s a whole bunch of different ways to define it, but give me just unpack for me the most recent example you can think of of failure for you as a deer hunter. And then I want to kind of explore that example.

00:09:20
Speaker 3: Well, if I’m if I’m being honest with you, just as you said, Clay, what’s a failure, I would go back to.

00:09:32
Speaker 4: And I’m just going to tell you just what popped in my mind. Last year. I shot a two year old deer.

00:09:39
Speaker 3: When I shot, thought that I was shooting at least a three year old deer, and when I walked up to it, it was just way younger than I thought. And that felt like failure to me, not because of antler size. It really I really wasn’t that concerned about that, but I would in you know, six gear mode where I was trying to kill a nice deer and it was hunting a good place, and uh, basically just got excited and shot a deer that inside of this, you know, the mind frame I was in at the second seemed like a failure.

00:10:23
Speaker 4: That’s one example of failure.

00:10:27
Speaker 3: If you want to talk about that, we can, or you know, it could give other examples, and.

00:10:31
Speaker 2: Let’s let’s let’s examine that one. Did you do any kind of self assessment afterwards or thinking like how did that happen? How’d I mess that up. What did I do wrong? How would you answer that in retrospect?

00:10:50
Speaker 4: Just I think I was pressured by time.

00:10:54
Speaker 3: You know, it was the we’d been we’d been we were we were filming a but we’d been setting for four days and basically we had five days, and it was the biggest buck that I had seen on the trip. And just the second that I saw the deer from sixty seventy yards away, I was just like, I’m shooting that deer, and never really when he got up closer, I knew better. I was like, this deer’s not as big as I think.

00:11:25
Speaker 2: He is, but.

00:11:27
Speaker 3: I’m going to shoot this deer. And then after I did, I was like, I wish I hadn’t shot the deer.

00:11:33
Speaker 2: Do you ever have that experience in moments like that where you know, Tony and I were talking about this the other day, it kind of feels like you’re a boulder rolling down the hill, and once that boulder starts rolling, there’s no stopping it. Did you find yourself in that kind of moment where there’s a brief second where you see, like you just mentioned, like you see the roadblock, You’re like, ah, I’m approaching mistake. But it’s it’s too late to steer off course. Is that kind of yeah?

00:11:57
Speaker 4: Maybe?

00:11:58
Speaker 2: What?

00:11:58
Speaker 4: Absolutely? Absolutely?

00:12:00
Speaker 3: And then after I recognized that I was disappointed, I was double disappointed in myself because I was like, why I got excited about the deer? When I saw it, my heart skipped a beat. It was beautiful, you know, I’d found this little pinch point in a place I’d never hunted, just put up a stand that afternoon. It was like November sixth. It was just like the perfect situation. I mean, climbed up in the tree, been there an hour and a half and this.

00:12:32
Speaker 4: Buck walks by.

00:12:33
Speaker 3: I mean it was perfect, and that’s part of the reason I wanted to shoot it. And so then when I realized that it was probably a two and a half year old deer, I was like, why can’t I just enjoy this? I mean it worked, like, found this cool pinch point, climbed up a tree, killed a deer.

00:12:51
Speaker 4: So I was a little double conflicted.

00:12:58
Speaker 3: You know, And I’m not ready to just throw out all constraints with antler size when I hunt.

00:13:05
Speaker 4: I’m just not ready to do that.

00:13:06
Speaker 3: I hear guys talk about that, you know, just like, man, just be happy, shoot the deer you want to shoot. I’m just not quite there yet because I enjoy, I do enjoy killing the big deer, and if you’re gonna kill a big deer, you gotta let some little deer walk past you.

00:13:22
Speaker 4: Sure you know.

00:13:25
Speaker 3: So, I’m I’m I’m I’m trying to excuse me, trying to play multiple fields inside the deer hunting world where you just really enjoy deer hunting but also like to kill a big buck.

00:13:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s I’m there with you too. But it’s not an easy I don’t know if it’s an adjustment, but but it’s a fine line to try to walk in the middle where you try to have some of both. And in every different instance, in every different place, every hunt, every season, it’s it’s always gonna be a little bit different. But that navigating that terrain is tricky.

00:14:01
Speaker 3: It is, and it’s the answer has got to be inside of a person’s ability to block out the noise of every voice in deer hunting around them and recognize the unique situation that they’re inside of. And for instance, maybe this will make sense. On this hunt we were I was hunting. It was a piece of private land, big piece of private land, that I hadn’t been on the entire year, just showed up on November the fourth, started hunting, didn’t have a trail camera out, didn’t have anything, had five days, so there was a lot of there’s challenge in that, there was some excitement in that didn’t really know it was on this place. And I killed this two and a half year old deer on day four, coming through this pinch point, middle of the day cruise and just doing what he’s supposed to do. And on that same piece of property two months later is a state two buck state. I was drilled into wanting to kill a big buck and I killed I did kill a big buck. I killed a really big buck on January fourth over bait over polybate legally in the state.

00:15:30
Speaker 4: And I mean some people, if.

00:15:32
Speaker 3: They really knew my whole hunting regimen, there might be some people that were like, well, killing that deer without trail cameras, just using natural train features in pinch points with a bow on November the fourth, that is more honorable, more noble, shows more woodsmanship than killing the deer over a polybate on January fourth, and I it was way harder killing the big buck way harder, took way more.

00:16:04
Speaker 4: Strategy. And this is not defensive bait.

00:16:08
Speaker 3: My point is how complex that hunting can be when someone’s actually trying to get better, learn about deer and enjoy deer hunting. And that same person could be me in the same place on November the fourth and on January the fourth, and and like if I described that to somebody, like there were a lot of people that would be like, oh, yeah, I killed that big deer over bait. Anybody could do that, And oh my gosh, it was. It was an incredible hunt, absolutely incredible hunt. I learned so much about deer. I mean, I could tell you that story. But it’s contrasted with me by this killing a two year old and a pinch point on November the fourth.

00:17:05
Speaker 2: So you just mentioned these two different examples in how one may or may not be more noble than the other, or one may or may not have been harder than the other. But what about this, which do you learn more from? You know, I think sometimes we want to assume that when we succeed, when we win, when we get the big buck whatever, that that’s what we want, and that’s when we’re going to learn something. And that’s when we grow. But then others might say, actually, it’s the failure that teaches the most, the ones that got away or the time you screwed it all up. Do you think you learn more from that quote unquote failure earlier or the latter hunt.

00:17:50
Speaker 3: It’s a good question. I mean, it just depends on what we’re talking about. In terms of engagement with deer. I had way more engagement with deer through hunting over the bait. I mean I saw exponentially more deer, watched them, got to see how they came into a situation where they were nervous, saw how they handled unique variations of pressure from wild hogs that were trying to come into my bait, as well to daytime temperatures being really high for that time of year two. I mean, it was pretty fascinating watching how these deer engaged with this hunting. The four days that it took me to kill the deer back in November, I learned a lot. I probably learned more hunting seeing all the deer, though, to be honest with you, I saw way less deer, you know, just natural train features and whatnot.

00:19:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, So let’s let’s let’s zoom off in a little bit and make this a little bit more generically, if you had to look back on your whole lifetime of deer hunting, would you say the greatest lessons learned have come from the failures or the wins? Which of those would you take? If we if we kind of zoomed out further.

00:19:23
Speaker 3: Well, I once again go back to this idea that really they’re all one and the same, because a success is not killing a big deer is not just a one time moment. It’s a culmination of a bunch of experience that leads to this moment.

00:19:41
Speaker 4: But I can say that killing a big deer does does give you a data point.

00:19:48
Speaker 3: Of success that in an inspiration that’s hard to erase. Yeah, Like I mean, I think I think people that, well, any any successful hunter at any level, when you are successful in taking an animal, there’s there’s something I think at the DNA level inside of you that’s like success bingo.

00:20:09
Speaker 4: I can replicate that. And and man, it’s it’s hard.

00:20:15
Speaker 3: To say that that’s not extremely powerful because it gives you inspiration just to go just to go and hunt. It gives you inspiration to take off the next year. It gives you inspiration to save up money to.

00:20:28
Speaker 4: Be able to take off.

00:20:30
Speaker 3: I mean all these limiting factors really that I think are more important than where you put your tree stands just going.

00:20:37
Speaker 4: I mean, so there’s a.

00:20:42
Speaker 3: Mark this, Wow, this is going to get like you may be like Clay, were way too in the weeds.

00:20:47
Speaker 4: But I’m there’s kind of.

00:20:52
Speaker 3: A theme in my life right now on a much broader level than just hunting, but about how light and darkness inside of a person’s life ultimately are the same. By light and darkness, I mean the good and the bad, the bad things that happen in your life and the good things that happen in your life. It’s easy to segregate them into categories of this was bad and this was good. And what I’m seeing is that really they’re all connected. And I believe that ultimately the bad stuff leads to the good stuff, and so you know, they’re really all connected. I viewed deer hunting that way. I mean, all the times I got winded, all the times I made bad mistakes are connected to the ultimate victory at the end.

00:21:44
Speaker 2: Is there any one deer hunt over your recent lifetime that you can think of that illustrates that concept? The best that illustrates this idea that the good and the bad are one and the same, that the dark in the light can lead to this same place in the end. Is there any failure or situation that first felt like failure, seemed like it that ultimately you’re like, oh wow, actually it was this.

00:22:13
Speaker 4: Does anything come to mind?

00:22:15
Speaker 3: M You know, I don’t have a real poignant story on that mark. I mean, I just think, how often do you kill a.

00:22:27
Speaker 4: Big deer that you’re like, I knew that was going to happen.

00:22:30
Speaker 3: Most of the time you’re like, man, I can’t believe that just happened.

00:22:35
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know so.

00:22:36
Speaker 3: I mean, I just think about the big deer that I killed this year. I really didn’t think it was going to happen. I got pictures of this deer. It was coming in at night, it was very sporadic, and it was just like, man, this guy’s going to be hard to hunt. And then when I finally did kill him, I just almost couldn’t believe it.

00:23:00
Speaker 4: No, I don’t have a great story.

00:23:01
Speaker 3: I don’t, man, I wish I did, all right, I haven’t put it together yet if I do, But that’s okay.

00:23:07
Speaker 2: Let me let me throw another Let me throw something else at you then and just dig you in even deeper. Let’s talk about pain, the most painful moment in your deer hunting life where you screwed something up, or you made a bad choice, or things went the complete opposite of the way you wanted it to, or where you felt the most guilty or the most inadequate or the like. I don’t know like any one of those things. Does any one moment fit that criteria, because that’s something I’m interested in exploring too, And I recognize that a lot of those moments where you feel that way in that moment can change to later feeling differently, And maybe we can talk about that. But give me an example like that, where in that moment you thought, man, your deer hunting world was crumbling down.

00:24:03
Speaker 3: Well, if I can tell a story that I told last week in front of about three hundred people that happened on a deer hunt, it really doesn’t have to do with tactical things. I’ll try to make it brief. It’s a it’s a it’s a hunting it is a hunting story, and it’s very much this idea of light and darkness being the same. Mark when when I first started publishing, having a few articles published about deer hunting in like around two thousand and eight two thousand and nine, just began to tiptoe into outdoor media. Had no never envisioned being in it all the way. That wasn’t my ambition. Just started tiptoeing in, just writing a few articles, end up starting a regional magazine two years into that. And in honestly, I honestly don’t remember the exact date. I was in my late twenties and I was bow hunting in the Howard County Wildlife Management Area in Arkansas. I’m not spot burning because it’s a terrible place to deer hunt, and noted.

00:25:20
Speaker 4: I was. I’ve been scouting walking saw a gray squirrel on the ground I been hunting.

00:25:32
Speaker 3: I had my bow with me just in case I saw a deer or a hog or something. The middle of the day, hot Columbus stay weekend. I draw my bow back, I shoot the squirrel with my bow, walk up to the squirrel, and I did something that I honestly don’t think that I had done up until that point, and I certainly knew better. But I’d shot the squirrel right through the hips and I left the squirrel there, I didn’t take it out. I walk back to the truck, and my truck is parked at the end of a dead end road in this little management area. And as I’m coming through this thick timber, I see kind of light coming through. I know the roads right up there, and I hear the gravel popping on the road, and I can see through the trees. I see a gray truck pass by, and the truck is headed towards my truck at a culver sac and I kind of rushed to the road and jump out into the road and see that it is a game Ordens truck headed towards my truck and Mark at this point in my life, my father was a serial law abider, and I was too.

00:27:05
Speaker 4: I’d never broke the law on purpose.

00:27:08
Speaker 3: Raised a bunch of amidst a bunch of outlaws down in Mena, Arkansas. I love those guys, yes, And somehow the culture of our home was strong enough that I truly never purposely broke the law.

00:27:24
Speaker 4: Gary Nucan built that into me.

00:27:26
Speaker 3: But I was sloppy, just not mature, didn’t really take care of business on the details, and a lot of my life as evidenced by me knowing better but just being like, man.

00:27:46
Speaker 4: I shot it. Why did I shoot?

00:27:48
Speaker 3: I regretted shooting the squirrel immediately, just say why did I do this? And did something that honestly I cannot recall ever doing before left the squirrel. Step out into the road. There’s a game warden driving towards my truck. He’s not seen me, Mark, he’s not seen me. All I had to do was step back into the timber and let him turn around and come back out.

00:28:11
Speaker 4: And when I was standing in that road.

00:28:12
Speaker 3: I knew that I could not step out of that road like I had. It was not a voice, but it was a sensation that I was familiar with at this point in my life that I recognized as God was do not step out of that road, walk straight back to your truck and talk to this man. I didn’t have intentions of admitting it to him. I mean I honestly didn’t. I just knew what I had to do, but I knew that it was going to come up. I walked back to the truck, game Warden standing there, He’s like, how you doing, son?

00:28:51
Speaker 4: What you been doing? Talk to him? Within like two minutes of talking to me.

00:28:57
Speaker 3: His countenance changes, his voice change, and he says, what’s that on your boot?

00:29:01
Speaker 4: And he sees a.

00:29:02
Speaker 3: Speck of blood on my boot like half the size of a pee. And I say, that is squirrel blood.

00:29:09
Speaker 4: Oh it is. Where’s the squirrel? I left the squirrel in the woods. Oh you did.

00:29:15
Speaker 3: Well, that’s a problem. And I said, I know it is. And he said, well, let’s go find the squirrel. We go find the squirrel. We barely found it. I mean, I was so far back in there. He proceeds to write me a ticket for wanton waste. Ticket was two hundred and seventy five dollars, and I was absolutely devastated, devastated. There’s not a human on planet Earth that could have got that ticket that would have been more upset about it than me.

00:29:46
Speaker 4: That prepared me for what was coming in my life.

00:29:50
Speaker 3: About diligence, there’s a scripture that’s set in Proverbs that says a lazy man doesn’t even roast the game that he kills, but diligence is a man’s precious POSI. There’s a lot of variations of the scripture, but essentially I knew exactly what I had to do and what I had to get cleaned up in my life, which was far more consequential than hunting.

00:30:12
Speaker 4: I mean, I really did, like I knew.

00:30:15
Speaker 3: I mean, it was like a just a moment when I knew that I had to do a bunch of stuff different, and I did. From that day to this day, I’m still on a track of becoming diligent and just and I mean and specifically in this case with wildlife law. And and that wasn’t even the main part that I became diligent in. And I’m not claiming to be there today, but it’s something that was permanently implanted in me.

00:30:46
Speaker 4: Of clay.

00:30:47
Speaker 3: You have a tendency to get off the rails. You have to be diligent inside of everything you do. Just pay attention, you know, dot the i’s crossed the tee And and what I’m what I know is that people have different strengths.

00:31:05
Speaker 4: And my that was not my strength. My strength was in other stuff.

00:31:09
Speaker 3: And I felt like that I was being prepared for where I was going to stand years later.

00:31:16
Speaker 4: Today. I’m I’m where I’m at today.

00:31:18
Speaker 3: I feel like, not not like in because I working outdoor media, but just as a man. A lot of it came from that moment that was like a touchdown moment. That was a major mistake that ultimately in the time I actually thought it was going to crush my little bitty baby career in outdoor media. I actually thought I’m done and ended up writing about it in a regional article pretty pretty soon after that. The game warden told me that he was like, you should write about this. He’s like, this is he said, You’ll be fine. He said, this is not a big deal. Really cool guy. And uh so there’s there’s there’s my uh light and darkness are the same story.

00:32:11
Speaker 2: It’s a great example. And it’s funny though you mentioned earlier how success can be such a touchstone and it can inspire you and it can be this important data point. But I do feel like there’s something unique about pain or mistakes or failure in which it’s it’s it’s searing, right. I mean what you described that was like a slap to the face that all of a sudden made you notice things in your life that you otherwise wouldn’t have. And I think sometimes when everything’s going well, we can be fooled by randomness. Sometimes, like if stuff’s going well, we might just assume, like, oh, things are going well because I’m doing everything right, when sometimes that might not not actually be the case, but you’re just enjoying some good fortune in the moment or or whatever. But when something goes wrong in a really noticeable, painful way that like shocks the system all of a sudden, like your eyes have to be opened in a different kind of way like yours was. And I think that’s the power in interpreting failure in that way. I guess is like lots of times when something goes wrong, it’s easy to say, oh, this is the end of the world, or this is the end of my dream, or this is the end of my goal. But if you look at it instead as, oh, this is a pivot, this is a inflection point. This is a moment that I can really learn from or change because of you know, in your case being a perfect example. But all that’s easier said than done. I’m wondering, and I know this is something that probably you know, maybe you haven’t even thought directly about. But has there been anything in your life that’s helped you actually do that to take like that leap between making a mistake such as that you did, to actually following through on learning from it, whether that’s you know, the specific example you just gave or something else entirely. But how do we go from like, oh I screwed up to okay, now this is how I grow from it, or this is how I change, or this is what I’m going to do next. A lot of people don’t take that next step. How have you done that?

00:34:39
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.

00:34:40
Speaker 3: I think a lot of it has to do with your your perception and kind of really the worldview that you have. And ultimately I would say that I have a worldview that would would say that the human life is a chrenology of getting better, stronger, more whole, having more integrity. It’s a it’s a redemptive journey. And I mean that’s really powerful because if you take any moment individually, it can it could wreck you, crush you. But if if all these moments are connected to something bigger, then they become these granular moments that you know, are adding up to something more. And it could sound really generic to say that, but probably the undeniable theme of anybody that’s been successful will be that it was the crisis in their life. It was the difficult things that made them who they are. There’s no matter what picture of someone you have, that may just be all success.

00:35:57
Speaker 4: I mean that’s.

00:35:57
Speaker 3: The challenge of today’s world. World when we see social media and stuff, it’s like, I don’t I mean I didn’t post. I didn’t have social media at that time, but I would not have posted a ticket of that wanton waste on my social media. I don’t think I would have. You know, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t see that. You just see all these like success points in people’s lives, and that’s just not true. I mean you kind of have to calibrate that in that like your perception of other people’s lives is probably not accurate. People struggle, people have challenges. And that’s the best answer I’ve got, Mark, is that it’s all about your your perception of of where this thing in your life is going, you know, kind of.

00:36:48
Speaker 2: Related to that and take this where you will. But how does forgiveness factor into something like this, or or grace, you know, being a man of faith as you are, how does how is any of this related to being able to forgive yourself for mistakes or being willing to accept yourself as an imperfect vessel. Right, We’re going in a wildly different direction than I thought with this conversation. But talk to me about that a little bit, because I think that you probably have some thoughts on that, and I think that that’s actually something that’s awfully relevant to our journeys as outdoors men and women and hunters. I’m curious to think about or hear about that well. I think the most powerful component of my faith is forgiveness, but also being able to forgive, having a muscle inside of you that is able to extend forgiveness to others, because I mean, the biggest human problem that we have is other people hurting us and doing us wrong. I mean really, I mean all the way down to like your boys, Mark that probably daily almost have conflict. I’m just guessing if you’re like every other family in the world, and the ability to forgive a sibling, to forgive people that would do you wrong is powerful because it’s so non intuitive in some way.

00:38:24
Speaker 4: We have a tendency to harbor.

00:38:29
Speaker 3: Ill will towards someone their bitterness that’s wronged us. And I mean, that’s the most powerful thing that my faith gives me, is the ability to forgive other to forgive others. But that only comes when you understand how much you yourself have been forgiven.

00:38:42
Speaker 4: When you have this awareness, we.

00:38:45
Speaker 3: Have a very unique view of ourselves in the world that’s unique to the world. Like and when we have an awareness that you know, what I have done other people wrong, I have made so many mistakes, and forgiveness just becomes this like thing that flows through your blood that you extend to others, but also you know it has been extended to you. And obviously inside of the Christian faith, I think we see in scripture where God offers something to us that I don’t think any other of.

00:39:22
Speaker 4: The major faith really deal.

00:39:24
Speaker 3: With quite like Christianity does, where where the premise of the faith is that we are forgiven because of what Jesus did.

00:39:36
Speaker 4: And that’s powerful.

00:39:37
Speaker 3: I mean, it sounds like religious talk, but really it’s very fundamental to human existence.

00:39:43
Speaker 4: I feel like being able to.

00:39:45
Speaker 3: Not have this this guilt of wrongdoing, you know, and I think that also translates into in a very different scale, but it’s got to start at this epicenter of.

00:40:00
Speaker 4: You know, being able to forgive yourself for.

00:40:03
Speaker 3: Make mistakes and not I’m not eating with guilt about that. That’s the reason I can talk about it and not have shame or not have fear. I’m not worried about what you think about me, because I dealt with all that and it was very hard, and I think today I would I would deal with it even more efficiently because I have no illusions of my own perfection.

00:40:28
Speaker 2: I mean yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, And you’re right like it. It seems a little bit trivial to relate this to hunting after speaking about the broader life side of this as you did, but I think it does apply. And I think that for a lot of people hunting or whatever outdoor thing it is for them, those accomplishments that can be their identity. For a lot of people, that can be what you know, your whole life in some cases can feel like it’s wrapped up in and then when you screw it up or when you quote unquote fail, that can be really damaging to people who don’t have that other thing to center themselves or have worked that muscle like you talked about, to be able to give themselves permission to not be perfect, to forgive themselves for screwing up, to forgive themselves for not being great at everything, for not living up to the expectation of everybody else. That’s a hard thing to get to. It’s a process that probably all of us have to go through in our own way. But it’s really interesting to hear about how some of those core tenants of your life outside of the outdoors relate to and strengthen your ability to do that in the outdoors. And I guess that’s one of the interesting virtues of hunting is that it can go both ways too, right. You can if you are a hunter and you get outside do these things, you can work that muscle the reverse way. You tell me if you agree with this or not. But I think, like by screwing up in the white Tail woods a lot, making mistakes and then forcing myself to like, look those mistakes head on, learn from them, get better because of it, forgive myself for making those mistakes. I think that works a muscle that builds something in my character that allows me to do that throughout the rest of my life too. Forgiving other people, or learning from other mistakes, or being able to more easily recover from mistakes along the way, whether that’s in my professional life or my personal life or whatever.

00:42:41
Speaker 4: I think that.

00:42:42
Speaker 2: Stuff translates across and that’s that’s one of the great things I think about the outdoors is tremendous canvas for learning these things and building those those those patterns.

00:42:55
Speaker 4: M h, you know you agree. I do agree because I think that.

00:43:01
Speaker 3: We display our humanness in every single sector of our life in basically identical ways. Like you are, Mark Kenyon. What does that mean? You are essentially a set of ideas, worldviews, motivations, doctrines. You are you, you, you, your your character, just your personality. I mean, it’s like this really complex thing. And I mean you’re the same Mark at home as a husband and father as you are in the deer woods. You’re doing the exact same thing. You are expressing your humanness and exercising your character, your judgment, your temperament, your view on life.

00:43:51
Speaker 4: In every way.

00:43:52
Speaker 3: I mean it, You’re you are the same everywhere you go. If you were if you were a competition cyclist, you would have the exact same struggles that you do with that that you have.

00:44:06
Speaker 4: In deer hunting, because that’s what you’re focused on.

00:44:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I mean it’s different applications, that makes sense. So so yeah, is the outdoors a place where we can see ourselves in a unique way and have experienced growth that’s going to help us in our life. Absolutely, Is it unique? I don’t really think so. I don’t know that it is. I think it’s just a place that we express ourselves with a lot of passion and energy and it really comes through. And I mean a perfect example is my wanton waste story. I just why did I shoot that squirrel? I mean, I was bored. I just wanted to see if I could hit it. I was interested in my precision and archery, like it was a long shot.

00:44:53
Speaker 4: Just like I mean, there was a whole lot of.

00:44:55
Speaker 3: Dumb things, and I was making similar mistakes as a parent, as a husband, as an I didn’t have a boss at the time, I was self employed, but as an entrepreneur I was doing the same stuff. Like if you could look at my life, you would have seen dumb stuff like that happening in other areas.

00:45:17
Speaker 2: But well, I wonder if if the outdoors and I don’t I don’t disagree with you that this is true across all aspects of our lives, but I do wonder if the outdoors gives us just enough distance from the rest of our lives and puts us through just enough adversity to make those lessons pop out a little bit more. They’re they’re they’re separate enough from the rest of our lives that they seem different and unique enough to be able to like see and hold in our hand and make oh, yes, this is a thing. And then if we’re patient enough or wise enough, or or or whatever to then recognize how that applies to everything else, then we’re then we’re golden. Yeah, it’s interesting.

00:46:06
Speaker 4: Here’s an example.

00:46:07
Speaker 2: Mark.

00:46:08
Speaker 3: Think about the way that you deer hunt, and I’ve hunted with you some and like you would be highly analytical. You would wait until the conditions were perfect. In ninety percent of the times, you would wait till the conditions were almost perfect. You’d rather sit out a hunt than go hunt another place. You’re going to scrutinize the thing to a t, and the success that you have is going to be really clean and feel like a result of kind of this strategy, which I think you really enjoy.

00:46:44
Speaker 4: That’s your story.

00:46:46
Speaker 3: Every single place in your life. I would, And that’s a compliment. I mean, I’m just saying I’m trying to paint this picture.

00:46:56
Speaker 4: I would.

00:46:56
Speaker 3: I would probably be a little bit more of a gambler. I would probably be like there’s a thirty percent chance the win is gonna be wrong, seventy it’s going to be right. I’ve got other places to hunt. I’m gonna gamble, roll the dice and go. And there’s been times when that you’ll win that one, but then also times that you lose it. And I’m now becoming more and more conservative in the way that I hunt, and I’m also becoming more conservative in the way that I think about life. And there’s pros and cons to all these things, but I just yeah, just think about who you are as a in your career. You’re the exact same person everywhere you go. So if you could, if you could analyze and not to just like turn this into like some big intellectual conversation, it’s really not.

00:47:50
Speaker 4: It’s really pretty functional. It’s really pretty it is.

00:47:56
Speaker 2: And then also the wonderful thing though, is that you can also change, you can also evolve, right, you can also grow, and that’s that’s an exciting concept too. Yeah, I want to I gotta wrap this up, Clay, but I want to give you one last question to to just give me your quick one off thought on on this topic of failure. What is the one thing that you would want your children to understand more than anything else. And you know, at least I know, like you’ve got one of your one of your kids, Bear who spends a whole lot of time hunting. What might be a let’s just take him for example, what might be one thing around this theme of failure that you’d want to make sure that he understood, whether that be applied to his hunts or otherwise.

00:48:52
Speaker 4: Mm hmm.

00:48:54
Speaker 3: Just that success is the culmination of a lot of failure, and so you can’t disconnect it from the success.

00:49:06
Speaker 4: You know, It’s just it’s this, it’s this one.

00:49:10
Speaker 3: Linear line that because it could be you could view it as fail fail fail fail fail fail success.

00:49:20
Speaker 4: What did I do right?

00:49:22
Speaker 3: I would view the whole thing if you get your success as a success. And I realize that’s kind of splitting hairs a little bit, but but.

00:49:38
Speaker 4: You know that’s my best answer. Mark.

00:49:42
Speaker 2: I like it, Clay, and I like that you took this in a different direction than I was expecting. I always know that when I talk to you, Clay, you’re gonna get me thinking, You’re going to get me outside of the box. And I appreciate that a bunch you. So thanks for doing this well.

00:49:57
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me. Mark appreciate it.

00:49:59
Speaker 3: Man, we could have talked about sink control and all the mistakes that we’ve both made in sink control.

00:50:07
Speaker 2: That’s next time, next time, Thanks Gleat. All right, and that’s gonna do it for us today. Thanks for joining me, thanks for being here for this episode, and until next week, stay wired to Hunt.