Ep. 574: Foundations - Dealing With Failed Plans

that it rarely goes as plan. That's why the best of the best scout so much. They know it's a necessity and if they do, they might find one of those magical in the moment spots where they can point to the stands, Babe Ruth Style, and call their shots. Most of the time, when you do that, White Tail wise you don't end up taking a slow jog around

the aces while the crowd showers you in adoration. Instead, you do that kind of sad Charlie Brown walked back to the dugout after a strikeout, and I used that example specifically because I saw a guy named Aaron Foreman do that in Little League one time, and that sucks, but it happens what you do when it does happen. That's what matters, though, and usually pretty common during the first week of the season. So that's what this episode

is really all about. One of the things I enjoy most in life is something that I just didn't see coming. I mean, if you went back in time and asked me, I don't know ten years ago, if I'd ever coach any sport for any reason, I would have said you're off your rocker there, Betty Crocker. But now, with my little girls in basketball and softball, I love coaching. Maybe it's is my competitive nature, something else, I don't know, but I just enjoy it so much. Well, most of

the time. Last year, after a regular Basketball House League where we did pretty well, my wife mentioned that she wanted the girls to do a taste of travel league. Now, I'm sure this is the case in an awful lot of places, but if you're a suburb dweller in the twin cities like I am, people take traveling basketball very, very serious, even with third and fourth graders. I didn't know this until we went to our first tournament, and there we actually managed to get third place out of

six teams. But we played some teams that were pretty bad, which helps a lot. We also played one team that was so much more advanced than us it was a freaking miracle that we scored it all, and I mean we barely did score. And then we went to another tournament and like every team there was that good. Then we went to another and again we got stomped. We

got smote. We didn't stand a chance. Now I don't mind playing up to see some real competition and to learn a thing or two, but I'm also forty two and I've dealt with a fair amount of loss and failure and a hell of a lot of different forms in my life. For Nine and ten year olds staring down the barrel of an absolute ass whooping, it was a lot to handle. You could see during warmups the look on the girls faces as they watched the opposing teams exhibit a level of basketball skills that would just

beyond our crew. Our girls were defeated between their ears before the ref ever blew the whistle and lined up the teams to kick off the game with a jump ball. And, to be fair, the girls really weren't wrong. We were outclassed mostly, but not all the time. We had a few games where we could have stayed in there and maybe, maybe, squeaked out a win, but we didn't and we didn't even get close because they expected failure and they leaned right into it. I bet you might be able to

guess where I'm going with this. White Tail hunting is a game of failure. Hell, all hunting usually is, and if it isn't, it's actually not that fun. I know a sure thing sounds amazing. Put an awful lot of folks who have a sure thing, or as close as you can get to a sure thing hunting. Wise they tend to give up hunting after a while. We need a challenge, we need hard but achievable goals, but we also need to recognize how we deal with the inevitable

failure that comes along with white tail hunting. It's everywhere in the woods, just waiting for you. Failure gets carried in on the breeze right into a deer's waiting nose. It's in the slight squeak and your stand, that squeak that you should have taken care of before the season, but you didn't because you didn't think it'd be a big deal. It's in the panic of the moment when you just are compelled to draw your oh at the wrong time, when he's looking up at you, facing your way.

Failure is the devil on your shoulder that convinces you to hit the snooze button or, worse, just roll over and go back to sleep, because you talk yourself into believing that, since it's, I don't know, a full moon, or since it's pretty windy or whatever, that there are better uses of your time than hikings through the woods in the dark to sit in a stand and probably

not kill a deer. Failure is the best friend of that little deer hunting devil perched on your shoulder holding a mini pitchfork, who says that maybe tonight the good one you had on camera in August will just magically show up in front of the field edge stand that you've already sat seven times and you've burned right to the ground. If you think I'm being facetious, I'm gonna

let you in on a little secret. The whole reason I'm any good at white tail hunting, which really seems to vary by the day, in the sit in the season, is that I've failed so much. When I turned fifteen, I got permission to hunt a farm in Minnesota that was a hung buck factory. Now I can't remember the exact number of four keys and basket rack sixes and eights that I missed that season, but I'm confident it was in double digits. That was a lot of failure

crammed into a small season. Or, more recently, I spent some time hunting in northern Wisconsin for a deer, just a deer, dough buck whatever. I had tags for both and I had some space in my freezer and over the course of three weeks I sat probably, I don't know, nine or ten times, or at least part of nine or ten days over there, mostly on public land but some on private, and I never saw a deer during that whole span. And when I say I never saw one,

that's what I mean. I wasn't passing on dear, I wasn't watching them browsed to the far side of a clear cut, I mean I never saw a single freaking deer. That's a shot to the old deer hunting ego, my friends. When that bad spell finally broke, I managed to Arrow an old long nose dough on a track of public land. End that has mostly kicked my ass, and I'll tell you what it was so wheat another time. If you

want another example how bad I can be. Happened in South Dakota while trying to kill a dough in a buck on public land. I sat six times in spots that I fully believed in, fully believed in. You know what I saw? I saw mostly cows and one day I had five coyotes coming through together. I don't know, maybe I saw crow or a blue jay or something too, but I didn't see any deer. I couldn't lay eyes on a deer, and that was in a place with good visibility and a great dear population. But on the

fourth day I did see a deer. In fact I saw a dough in a buck and I killed both of them within ten minutes one another. It happens like that. This is mostly failure, with these random little bouts of success. That's what makes deer hunting deer hunting, and you might be experiencing that right now with many of the White Tail seasons open up across the country, and I think the first week or two of this season is really the best time to address failure for what it is

and just move on. You want to know why? Because all summer long, you know, we run cameras, we scroll through photos of velvet racked bucks. We build a plan around those images. We Scout. We scout more than any other time of the season. We eat, Scout, we walk our dear spots, we get into the freaking preseason groove and we shoot a lot more than any other time of the season. We organize our gear, we pack our packs, we wash our clothes, we prep and we prep and

we prep. We hang stands, we brush in blinds. We do all of this work so that we can hit the ground running. But you know what mostly happens? We don't kill deer. Oftentimes we don't see dear or we don't see the dear we are really hoping to see. So in that way we fail, and you know what that failure in finds us off all the past seasons where we've had similar results, the anticipation is so high that the letdown, if it comes, it's pretty bad. The best laid plans turn out to be turd sandwiches and

that old familiar feeling comes creeping right back in. Do you know what's almost worse than not seeing dear or killing a buck when you have put in so much work, actually having him come in and then either spooking him or missing him. That's a big time failure in a lot of ways. Now, when you're in the I don't know, shoot a scrapper stage, yeah, a mishurts, but at least you know that another dink six pointer might walk down

the trails through this season. Probably will. When you have your heart set on a I don't know, a hundred forty inch or and he shows up and then he buss you or you shoot over him, it's not so likely that he or another bucket his caliber is going to show up for the rest of the season. In my experience it's not so were likely, even if you have tons of time to put in one or two good encounters throughout the season is often all we can ask for. And boy does it staying when you piss

that right down your leg. But you know what's crazy about that? It happens. It happens all the time. It happens to weekend warriors with one bow season under their belt and it happens to seasoned veterans with a whole trophy room full of mature public land buck mounts. It might happen to the last category of hunters a little less than the former, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still happen, because it does. But you know what's different

about those hunters, though? They understand that it's a part of the deer hunting game. They understand that their job is to mitigate the ways in which they cause their own failures, because there are enough variables out there that aren't in their control that will tank the best of deer hunting plans. They understand that cliched statement that goes something like failing to plan is planning to fail. Except in a way, they do plan to fail in the big picture sense, but they also plan to win on

a smaller scale. With every sit with every scouting trip and every hunt, they're hoping to learn something, something that can be put to good use now or in the future. Enough of those some things and you guess what, you have a hunt that is not a failure on the big picture scale. Let me frame this up a different way to drive this point home. Let's say it's time for you to pick up a new Labrador retriever puppy.

So your research and pedigrees, you do your due diligence and you settle on a litter that should have the kind of blood you're really looking for. At eight weeks you pick up an adorable little sausage legged pupster. You take it home and you think about all the birds will shoot over him, all the ducks and the roosters, the GROUSE, woodcock whatever. You think about all the shed antlers you'll train him to vacuum up during those winter scouting trips. But that a puppy doesn't know anything other

than what his instincts tell him. He knows he likes to pick up stuff in his mouth, he likes to run around a little chew on stuff, he likes the smell of a rooster or grouse feather, but he doesn't know what you want out of him yet. In fact, he's mostly just an adorable idiot. My Wife's uncle likes to say that you can look right into a puppy's eyes and see all the way to its asshole, because

there's nothing in between. But there is, and there is the chance to help him learn simple behaviors that can be daisy chain to bigger, more desirable, more complex behaviors. Take a simple retrieve, for example. A good dog is a steady dog with rock solid recall and the understanding that if he is to hold an object, he is to hold an object. There's no spitting it out to sniff where other dogs Pete. There's no dropping at three yards from your feet. It's delivered a hand or nothing.

So you start with some steadiness with that puppy, maybe some healing work. You make the pup wait a few seconds to eat so he learns a little patience. You encourage retrieving desire, but really only to stoke the flames and keep him wanting more. You don't want to Overdo it and you work on recall with a check cord and a handful of Kibbl in a way, you're working on several different behaviors that eventually will all coalesce into

the kind of retrieve you want. Eventually that PUP will be a dog that heals at your side and marks the bumper, waits for the release, takes a straight line to it, comes back to heal and waits until you say drop or give before he gently places the bumper in your hand. Deer hunting is like that in a weird way. You have to fail at setting stands to learn how to set them better. You have to fail at timing your draw when a deer is closed to learn how to read when exactly you need to get

that bow back to your face. You have to rattle at the wrong bucks to know what might make the right bucks come in. You have to cheat the wind a little, a little too much, to listen to a bunch of snorts from some Mama does to learn what you can get away with and what you can't. You got to shoot under a few and over a few more to learn where to aim and how to aim during the moment of truth and how to read a

buck that might jump the string. You have to develop a Badass no way can this fail, opening week plan only to have it fizzle and sputter out right before your eyes, to learn how to develop a better plan for next year and how to cope with that failure and how to just move on from it to week two of the season and then week three or whatever.

And this part, this is one that is most important, you have to learn to let those failures just go, like a toxic person in your life who always drags you down, even though you want to like them, or hell, you even love them so much. But you gotta let that ship go, my friends. You have to learn from that. You have to use it to inform better decisions in the future. Failure in the woods it's like that. It's actually valuable. In fact, it might be the most important

aspect of becoming a good deer hunter. And listen the big winds. They're sweet too. The first big buck you kill, that one is going to stick with you in an awful lot of ways, and man is it nice. But developing as a deer hunter is an awful lot like how we use and view social media. No one posts the boring stuff, the little stuff on instagram. Alright, some

people do, but they are freaking psychos. They are the people who post every meal they eat, as if anyone in the world cares what a stranger head for breakfast. They're the ones who post, I don't know, pictures are they're freshly painted toenails. are a stupid selfie while fishing, of every single bass they catch, even if it's an eight in sure that couldn't barely pulled out a bobber. Aside from those looney tunes folks, social media is mostly

the curated big winds of life. That people post. You know, the weight lost journey, the personal best cutthroat trout, Ahem Mark Kenyon, the enormous buck, where they sit cross legged style and gaze longingly into its dead eyes while someone frames up the image with some soft focused vegetation in the foreground and maybe, I don't know, maybe the setting sun in the background. Most of life isn't social media worthy, just as most of hunting isn't a big event one

way or the other. Most of the time we scout and hunt, it's not really going to result in one of our worst days, anymore than it will be the day that we finally air a two inches so we can see our smiling faces on the cover in North American White Tail magazine. It's the middle of the road, boring stuff that makes up most of life and most of deer hunting, and in that stuff there's an awful lot of failure, but that's also an awful lot of

opportunities to improve. It's good to get comfortable with that failure, invited in for a nightcap, have a little conversation, just tease out the value with it and then send it on its way. I guess I really want you to think about that as we slide into this most wonderful time of the year, the time of year when we finally get to do more than scout and more than shoot, more than just think about what the deer are doing

out there. We get to hunt them, we get to go sit in trees and we get to watch the sunrise and hopefully hear a stick crack in the distance or see that too big to be a squirrel movement in your peripheral vision. That tells you a deer has entered the game and it's time to focus on what could become the next best few minutes of your life. And if it goes wrong, which it mostly will, who cares? There's a lesson there that will help you the next

time and the time after that. And at some point that buck that surprises you by showing up when you're not paying attention, he's going to go for a at home in the back of your truck and you'll get to shoot some hero photos and post them up for the world to see to show them you're not a failure, at least not today, and that's pretty freaking sweet. My friends, learn from your failure, accept it. It's okay. You're gonna get better because of it, and we're all going through

it now. Next week I'm going to get into the topic of hunting one target buck, of setting your sights on a rider didear that's the only one you're going to pick up your bowl rifle for, and how that can make for a great season or an absolutely miserable fall. That's IT, folks, I'm done for this week. This has been the wire to hunt foundations podcast, which has brought to you by first light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and I just want to say thank you so much

for listening and for your support. I really appreciate it. And if this episode didn't quite scratch the itch enough for you, feel free to head on over to the meat eater dot com slash wired to read some articles written by myself for mark or whole slew of White Tail Killers, and you can also drop into our ware to hunt YouTube channel to check out the weekly how tube videos that we throw up every single week to help you become a better hunter.