August 8, 2023 • 18 mins
On this week's show, Tony discusses the psychological phenomenon known as hindsight bias and how it relates to hunting. Through multiple examples, he explores how we come to have regrets in the outdoors, and how we can best mitigate them for our future selves.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, 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
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about our hunting
regrets and how to avoid them in the future. Life
(00:42):
mostly sucks and then you die, hopefully not by a
crocodile attack, which is one of my worst fears after
very recently going down a rabbit hole on saltwater croc information.
I'm sure there are worse ways to shed your mortal
coil than getting pulled under by a giant dinosaur lizard
that we should have gone extinct like fifty million years ago,
(01:02):
but that's way on the top of my list. Anyway,
Life doesn't actually always suck, and that's a good thing.
The one way that life does suck for all of
us at different points is that we all have regrets.
We have all experienced things if we wish we would
have done, but we didn't, and those things haunt us.
That's what this podcast is all about. Although it'll be
(01:24):
more cheerful than I'm leading on, trust me. Is there
a sweeter feeling than making a prediction about something and
then that something actually happens. No, well, unless your prediction
is that I don't know, all of our over the
counter elk hunting opportunities are going to go away, and
(01:44):
from here on how the chance to chase bugles in
the mountains is going to be greatly diminished for the
average hunter. That's one you actually don't want to be
right about. Or I guess if you follow the stock
market and there's a company you're interested in that you
think could go on to make tons of money, and
you think, I need to buy some shares in that company.
(02:04):
I know it's going to explode, but you don't. Then
guess what happens That company invents a new widget, or
they announce a partnership with Apple or something, and then boom,
your little four dollars a share stock suddenly jumps to
forty dollars a share and you realize that you could
have had your dream beach house and maybe put your
kids through a sweet college, but instead you're just some
(02:27):
poor loser who knew, just absolutely knew that buying into
that company was the right call. This is called hindsight bias,
and it's ripe in the world of finances. It's mostly
a psychological issue that is also known as creeping determinism
or knew it all along phenomenon. That's not actually a joke,
(02:51):
my friends. It's called that. It's a weird thing that
we all do where once an event happens, we think
we predicted it, and that makes us feel two things,
overconfident in our abilities to see the future, and sad
that we didn't act on those predictions, at least when
those predictions are actionable, like during the dead years of
(03:15):
Microsoft's rain under Steve Balmer, where the stock traded sideways
before finally finding its legs and shooting up to the
moon while making lots of people who stuck around insanely wealthy.
This is happening in the stock market right now. Do
at least partially to the artificial intelligence feeding frenzy out there.
Every earnings report where companies can talk about their artificial
(03:36):
intelligence ambitions is an attempt to be a part of
the it crow to attach themselves to this what some
might call a little bit of a bubble. They want
to be a part of this AI movement. They want
to capitalize on it. So do the average people who
want to buy into stocks. The thing is, even if
your gut said you should have bought Pallunteer Technologies or
(03:58):
Google or whatever, if you didn't at whatever time, you
probably weren't that convinced. After the fact, of course, you
know that you were right, but during the moment you
didn't believe it, at least so much that you dumped
a bunch of your money into those tickers and cross
your fingers. This isn't limited to the Wall Street bets
(04:21):
crowd over there on Reddit either. Hindsight by us is
rampant in our lives, and it mostly sucks. But it's
also a reminder that you don't have to suffer regret
unnecessarily all of the time. You can take control of
your life and you're hunting future at least to some extent.
Look at it this way. You want to own land, right,
(04:44):
of course you do, we all do. But land is expensive,
and it's always expensive, and interest rates suck right now
and there will be a better time for you to
pull a trigger. Right, No, there probably won't. Land is
going to stay expensive. It's going to get more expensive,
and interest rates might come down or they might go up.
(05:04):
But the truth is it's not likely to get any
easier for you or I to buy something unless a
rich uncle we have gets eaten by a crocodile and
we suddenly find ourselves the benefactor of this diligent saving
and is untimely chomping to death. I have experienced this
on the land front recently. A lot back in twenty fifteen,
(05:26):
I bought thirty acres in north central Wisconsin that was
priced like a couple from Chicago owned it and they
didn't ever want to use it, and we're sick of
paying the property taxes on it. So I got it
at a good price, but it didn't seem like crazy
cheap then, and it was still a lot of money
for me at the time. When I paid that property off,
another parcel one hundred yards down the road came up
(05:48):
for sale. It was a little bigger, had some egg
on it, which is like an animal gold mine in
that region, and was generally priced pretty well for the time.
I looked at it a lot. I thought about it
a lot, but I decided I wasn't interested in immediately
putting myself into more debt right after cling my way
out of my last land debt. And you know what
(06:10):
happened right That property sold, and since I'm right next
to it often I get to see the deer that
use it. This year in July, I drove by that
property on my way to work on my ground and
there was a very nice velvet buck, nice eight pointer
standing in their field, just taunting me. I should have
figured out a way to buy it, because I regret
(06:32):
it now and I knew, and I mean I just
knew it was going to be a good deer property.
It's also probably worth double what it was just seven
years ago, maybe more. This happens on a smaller scale
with hunting, too. It's not all about real estate. Most years,
Minnesota and Wisconsin opened their bowseason on the same Saturday
(06:53):
in mid September. This forces me to make a choice
on which state I'm gonna hunt, But every so often
Wisconsin has an opener that is a week earlier than Minnesota.
The last time this happened, I was stoked. I knew
I was going to hunt both states on back to
back weekends and not miss out on anything. And since
Wisconsin was up first, I hung some stands, I scouted
(07:14):
my happy ass off, and I had a pretty solid
plan for opening weekend. What I wasn't super confident in
was a morning stand that I had that was in
a staging area off of some destination food. I knew
I could probably get there undetected, but there was a
chance i'd blow the whole spot up. I also knew
from in person scouting and trail cameras that there were
(07:37):
some bucks using the trail right by the stand, and
that one of them was still in velvet. I don't
know why this is, but it's just cool arrowing a
velvet buck, and it's really really cool to do it
in a state where it's very rare to even see
one during bo season. Anyway, that opening morning alarm went off,
and I sat in bed and I talked myself out
(07:59):
of going. I had a really good evening planned and
so I skipped the morning, but I didn't feel good
about it, and I really didn't feel good about it.
When I went in there later that day and I
checked my camera by that stand, that velvet eight pointer
went right on through late in the morning. Now, if
I had been there, you know, he might have winded me,
(08:19):
he might have saw me, he might have heard me going,
and he might not have gone through. I'll never know.
What I do know is that I think about that
decision and that buck a lot more than I should.
I just knew I should have gone, and I didn't,
or at least that's kind of how I think about
it now. The truth is, I made a call and
(08:41):
it turned out to be a bad one. But I
did kill a buck that evening, which is kind of crazy.
But he wasn't that velvet eight, and I don't know why,
but it still stings. Hunting is like that. But mostly
we don't know who came through when we weren't there.
That's probably a good thing, otherwise we'd be all press
even more than we already are. Hindsight bias happens in
(09:15):
other ways too. I'm experiencing some serious and I do
mean serious fomo right now. I'm not going elk hunting
this fall, and in fact, I'm not going west at
all this whole season, at least unless something changes, which
I don't think is gonna happen. And I know I
only have so many elk hunting opportunities left, and I
(09:37):
could probably swing in an early season hunt this year
if I wanted to. But my September is going to
be busy and the girls and I have some bear
tags and some other plans, and I'm trying to ignore
the fact that I know, I just absolutely know that
my elk hunting partner is going to go have an
amazing time in the mountains and he'll probably kill a
bull right where I was gonna hunt. That's enough bitching
(10:00):
about that on my part, because you know what, that's life.
Complaining about not going on another l hunt because you
get to bear hunt with your daughters is dumb. Complaining
that you didn't buy Google back when the Internet looked
like it was created by kindergarteners is dumb. Losing sleep
over one hundred and ten inch buck that walk by
your stand when you were snoozing away, it's dumb. But
(10:22):
all of those things are lessons. To experience regret now
is to understand how to possibly avoid regret later. How's
that for a philosophical quote You definitely never get from
that guy, Mark Kenyan. The truth is you're going to
face many, many choices in your hunting life, and throughout
this hunting season, as we gear up to get going,
(10:43):
ask yourself what you can do. What situations in your
life are right for regret if you don't take care
of them, if you don't do them, are you talking
yourself out of an opportunity because it'll be easier to
just not go. Will it save a fight at home?
What's the motivation for your decisions? Or let's look at
this another way. What's a hard decision you could make
(11:05):
this year that will most likely cause you to not
regret it. I'll start. It's not going out hunting. I
want to selfishly for all the obvious reasons. But I
know if I stay home and I can bait bears
more and set up for the early deer season better,
and I can spend some time fishing with my girls
when the trout will be hungry and this mom mouth
(11:27):
will be schooling up, I'm not going to regret it now.
Is that stuff as cool as arrowing another bull in
the high country? I don't know. Maybe maybe not. But
the right decision is sometimes shrouded in mystery when you
make it. What's going on in your life where you
could make a better hunting decision now, one that will
wipe away some potential regret and give you the feeling
(11:47):
that you'd have now if you looked into your brokerage
account and saw a cost basis for your apple shares
that is in the single digits. Let's look at an
easy one here. How much are you shooting your bow?
If the answer is not much, okay, But what's something
you'd likely regret for the rest of your life. How
about missing a buck that you could easily have hit
(12:09):
well or worse? How about hitting one poorly when you
have a perfect shot lined up in front of you.
Maybe there's nothing you could really do about a whiff
or a bad hit, but oftentimes there is. Maybe it's
a matter of taking fifteen minutes today and tomorrow and
the next day to shoot your boat. Because if you
sit in that stand or saddle and that buck of
(12:30):
your dreams walks into twenty three yards and you shoot
over his back or under his belly, because you're straight
up shook. As the kids would probably say, you know what,
You'll get to experience hindsight bias in real time, because
you'll not only think about how you knew you should
have executed better during the shot, But how you could
have shot more all summer long and you didn't. You
(12:51):
just knew you should, but you didn't. Let's take that
example and go a step further. This summer has been hot,
so stupid bit hot in fact, that it's kind of
crazy in a lot of places, going out to work
on stands and the scout deer on many of the
days we've had this summer just straight up nightmare fuel
and mostly a non starter for a lot of folks.
(13:14):
But what if you could have and if you had,
you would have trimmed your stand sites up nicely so
you could shoot the most likely spots for a buck
to be, but you didn't. And now it's mid September.
There he is mowing away on the beans while you
couldn't get an arrow through there to save your life,
which ironically saves his life. What will you regret if
(13:35):
you don't do it? What's something you could do now
to alleviate that sinking feeling of suddenly knowing you should
have done something, something that you knew you should do
and you didn't. Maybe it's as simple as you've been
seeing some bucks in a certain corner of a field
and you know you should get a blind in there
or a stand, even though you have a setup already
(13:56):
in place that's just down the woodline another one hundred
and fifty yards. Guess what's going to happen on opening
weekend if you don't set up right where you know
you should. Or how about this, I recently got permission
to hunt twenty five acres by my house. Now that
might not sound like much, but where I live it is.
It's a huge wind for me and the girls. The
downside was the guy who gave me a permission has
(14:19):
been kind of flaky, or I thought he was anyway.
The first few times I tried to get him to
commit to taking a quick walk back there on his
land to see the property lines and just what his
ground has to offer, he either didn't respond or always
had some excuse. I could just feel that permission slipping
away and was hit with the old familiar feeling of
(14:39):
being excited about something only to really be disappointed. Soon after,
I told myself it was a lost cause and I
almost gave up. But looking at the bulldozers and the
mc mansions popping up on that only spot within two
hours of my house that I have permission prompted me
to give it one more go. I hate bothering people
(15:00):
and have grown to really really hate talking to strangers,
so it was easy for me to adopt the mindset
of the whole thing being another lesson learned. But I
texted the guy anyway and just said that my schedule
was opened for a quick walk if he was available.
I left it at that, and he responded with a
time to come over and said get on over here,
And he couldn't have been nicer. And I couldn't quite
(15:22):
believe it when I was standing over a secluded pond
in the middle of his property looking at a stupid
good spot to set up a blind. And then I
couldn't quite believe it when I saw some long beards
feeding away and he told me I could turkey hunt
anytime I wanted to. There, we jumped a few deer,
found some absolute deer highways. I left the day in
(15:43):
a way where I would only describe our relationship as
being super best friends. Now, this guy's a very casual
bowhunter who was about to learn a lot about bow hunting,
and I'm a very serious bow hunter who is very
happy to have some ground to hunt where the dough
tags are unlimited, and the drive to get there is
like eight minutes. If I hadn't texted him, i'd have
regretted it forever. But you know what, I figured it
(16:07):
was going to be a no, and so my hindsight
bias was actually wrong, dead wrong. The lesson there is this,
my friends, despite us believing from time to time that
we can actually predict the future, we can't. The best
minds on Wall Street can't definitively say what company is
going to have the next trillion dollar market cap any
(16:28):
more than the average person can accurately predict the share
price of any given publicly traded company at any point.
The best minds in the hunting space don't know what
the landscape looks like in ten or fifteen years. That's
just the truth. Hell, they don't know what it looks
like next year. We have to work with what we
know and what we believe to be coming down the
(16:48):
old pike which is short for turnpike. And I only
know this because I had to look it up and
make sure that it wasn't actually supposed to be coming
down the pipe, which makes more sense for modern humans
and super Mario Brothers enthusiast alike. The future is a mystery,
but you can take a look at your life thus
far and tally up some of your bigger regrets. Use
(17:09):
that list to help you make better decisions from here
on out. This, at least in the realm of hunting,
will get you into more beautiful places. It'll help you
fill more tags, It'll help you fill the freezer. It'll
help you fill up that intangible part of yourself that
just needs to spend some time in the woods to
shake off the ick that comes from work in life
(17:30):
and then not so fun stuff we fill our days with.
So think about that and think about coming back next
week because I'm going to talk about elk hunting, or
more specifically, how to get out on your first elk
hunt before it's too late. That's it for this week,
my friends. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired
to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by
(17:51):
First Light. If you're out there sweating and you want
to get some deer work done, you should at least
check out our trace lineup from first Light. Super cool.
It's built from fabric that really allows like a ton
of breatheability and It's kind of become my go to
for a lot of my early season and my summertime stuff.
(18:11):
You should also check out the Origin pant, which is
like this weird pajama type pant but works really well
for early season hunting. And as always, I want to
thank you for listening and for your support for myself
and Mark and everybody at Mediator here. We really appreciate
you guys coming and giving us the support that you have.
(18:33):
If you want to check out some more hunting content,
head on over to the mediater dot com. You'll see
tons of articles, video series, how to stuff, you name it,
it's all there, go check it out.
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide
to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, 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
Tony Peterson.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wire to Hunt Foundation's podcast,
which is brought to you by first Light. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about our hunting
regrets and how to avoid them in the future. Life
(00:42):
mostly sucks and then you die, hopefully not by a
crocodile attack, which is one of my worst fears after
very recently going down a rabbit hole on saltwater croc information.
I'm sure there are worse ways to shed your mortal
coil than getting pulled under by a giant dinosaur lizard
that we should have gone extinct like fifty million years ago,
(01:02):
but that's way on the top of my list. Anyway,
Life doesn't actually always suck, and that's a good thing.
The one way that life does suck for all of
us at different points is that we all have regrets.
We have all experienced things if we wish we would
have done, but we didn't, and those things haunt us.
That's what this podcast is all about. Although it'll be
(01:24):
more cheerful than I'm leading on, trust me. Is there
a sweeter feeling than making a prediction about something and
then that something actually happens. No, well, unless your prediction
is that I don't know, all of our over the
counter elk hunting opportunities are going to go away, and
(01:44):
from here on how the chance to chase bugles in
the mountains is going to be greatly diminished for the
average hunter. That's one you actually don't want to be
right about. Or I guess if you follow the stock
market and there's a company you're interested in that you
think could go on to make tons of money, and
you think, I need to buy some shares in that company.
(02:04):
I know it's going to explode, but you don't. Then
guess what happens That company invents a new widget, or
they announce a partnership with Apple or something, and then boom,
your little four dollars a share stock suddenly jumps to
forty dollars a share and you realize that you could
have had your dream beach house and maybe put your
kids through a sweet college, but instead you're just some
(02:27):
poor loser who knew, just absolutely knew that buying into
that company was the right call. This is called hindsight bias,
and it's ripe in the world of finances. It's mostly
a psychological issue that is also known as creeping determinism
or knew it all along phenomenon. That's not actually a joke,
(02:51):
my friends. It's called that. It's a weird thing that
we all do where once an event happens, we think
we predicted it, and that makes us feel two things,
overconfident in our abilities to see the future, and sad
that we didn't act on those predictions, at least when
those predictions are actionable, like during the dead years of
(03:15):
Microsoft's rain under Steve Balmer, where the stock traded sideways
before finally finding its legs and shooting up to the
moon while making lots of people who stuck around insanely wealthy.
This is happening in the stock market right now. Do
at least partially to the artificial intelligence feeding frenzy out there.
Every earnings report where companies can talk about their artificial
(03:36):
intelligence ambitions is an attempt to be a part of
the it crow to attach themselves to this what some
might call a little bit of a bubble. They want
to be a part of this AI movement. They want
to capitalize on it. So do the average people who
want to buy into stocks. The thing is, even if
your gut said you should have bought Pallunteer Technologies or
(03:58):
Google or whatever, if you didn't at whatever time, you
probably weren't that convinced. After the fact, of course, you
know that you were right, but during the moment you
didn't believe it, at least so much that you dumped
a bunch of your money into those tickers and cross
your fingers. This isn't limited to the Wall Street bets
(04:21):
crowd over there on Reddit either. Hindsight by us is
rampant in our lives, and it mostly sucks. But it's
also a reminder that you don't have to suffer regret
unnecessarily all of the time. You can take control of
your life and you're hunting future at least to some extent.
Look at it this way. You want to own land, right,
(04:44):
of course you do, we all do. But land is expensive,
and it's always expensive, and interest rates suck right now
and there will be a better time for you to
pull a trigger. Right, No, there probably won't. Land is
going to stay expensive. It's going to get more expensive,
and interest rates might come down or they might go up.
(05:04):
But the truth is it's not likely to get any
easier for you or I to buy something unless a
rich uncle we have gets eaten by a crocodile and
we suddenly find ourselves the benefactor of this diligent saving
and is untimely chomping to death. I have experienced this
on the land front recently. A lot back in twenty fifteen,
(05:26):
I bought thirty acres in north central Wisconsin that was
priced like a couple from Chicago owned it and they
didn't ever want to use it, and we're sick of
paying the property taxes on it. So I got it
at a good price, but it didn't seem like crazy
cheap then, and it was still a lot of money
for me at the time. When I paid that property off,
another parcel one hundred yards down the road came up
(05:48):
for sale. It was a little bigger, had some egg
on it, which is like an animal gold mine in
that region, and was generally priced pretty well for the time.
I looked at it a lot. I thought about it
a lot, but I decided I wasn't interested in immediately
putting myself into more debt right after cling my way
out of my last land debt. And you know what
(06:10):
happened right That property sold, and since I'm right next
to it often I get to see the deer that
use it. This year in July, I drove by that
property on my way to work on my ground and
there was a very nice velvet buck, nice eight pointer
standing in their field, just taunting me. I should have
figured out a way to buy it, because I regret
(06:32):
it now and I knew, and I mean I just
knew it was going to be a good deer property.
It's also probably worth double what it was just seven
years ago, maybe more. This happens on a smaller scale
with hunting, too. It's not all about real estate. Most years,
Minnesota and Wisconsin opened their bowseason on the same Saturday
(06:53):
in mid September. This forces me to make a choice
on which state I'm gonna hunt, But every so often
Wisconsin has an opener that is a week earlier than Minnesota.
The last time this happened, I was stoked. I knew
I was going to hunt both states on back to
back weekends and not miss out on anything. And since
Wisconsin was up first, I hung some stands, I scouted
(07:14):
my happy ass off, and I had a pretty solid
plan for opening weekend. What I wasn't super confident in
was a morning stand that I had that was in
a staging area off of some destination food. I knew
I could probably get there undetected, but there was a
chance i'd blow the whole spot up. I also knew
from in person scouting and trail cameras that there were
(07:37):
some bucks using the trail right by the stand, and
that one of them was still in velvet. I don't
know why this is, but it's just cool arrowing a
velvet buck, and it's really really cool to do it
in a state where it's very rare to even see
one during bo season. Anyway, that opening morning alarm went off,
and I sat in bed and I talked myself out
(07:59):
of going. I had a really good evening planned and
so I skipped the morning, but I didn't feel good
about it, and I really didn't feel good about it.
When I went in there later that day and I
checked my camera by that stand, that velvet eight pointer
went right on through late in the morning. Now, if
I had been there, you know, he might have winded me,
(08:19):
he might have saw me, he might have heard me going,
and he might not have gone through. I'll never know.
What I do know is that I think about that
decision and that buck a lot more than I should.
I just knew I should have gone, and I didn't,
or at least that's kind of how I think about
it now. The truth is, I made a call and
(08:41):
it turned out to be a bad one. But I
did kill a buck that evening, which is kind of crazy.
But he wasn't that velvet eight, and I don't know why,
but it still stings. Hunting is like that. But mostly
we don't know who came through when we weren't there.
That's probably a good thing, otherwise we'd be all press
even more than we already are. Hindsight bias happens in
(09:15):
other ways too. I'm experiencing some serious and I do
mean serious fomo right now. I'm not going elk hunting
this fall, and in fact, I'm not going west at
all this whole season, at least unless something changes, which
I don't think is gonna happen. And I know I
only have so many elk hunting opportunities left, and I
(09:37):
could probably swing in an early season hunt this year
if I wanted to. But my September is going to
be busy and the girls and I have some bear
tags and some other plans, and I'm trying to ignore
the fact that I know, I just absolutely know that
my elk hunting partner is going to go have an
amazing time in the mountains and he'll probably kill a
bull right where I was gonna hunt. That's enough bitching
(10:00):
about that on my part, because you know what, that's life.
Complaining about not going on another l hunt because you
get to bear hunt with your daughters is dumb. Complaining
that you didn't buy Google back when the Internet looked
like it was created by kindergarteners is dumb. Losing sleep
over one hundred and ten inch buck that walk by
your stand when you were snoozing away, it's dumb. But
(10:22):
all of those things are lessons. To experience regret now
is to understand how to possibly avoid regret later. How's
that for a philosophical quote You definitely never get from
that guy, Mark Kenyan. The truth is you're going to
face many, many choices in your hunting life, and throughout
this hunting season, as we gear up to get going,
(10:43):
ask yourself what you can do. What situations in your
life are right for regret if you don't take care
of them, if you don't do them, are you talking
yourself out of an opportunity because it'll be easier to
just not go. Will it save a fight at home?
What's the motivation for your decisions? Or let's look at
this another way. What's a hard decision you could make
(11:05):
this year that will most likely cause you to not
regret it. I'll start. It's not going out hunting. I
want to selfishly for all the obvious reasons. But I
know if I stay home and I can bait bears
more and set up for the early deer season better,
and I can spend some time fishing with my girls
when the trout will be hungry and this mom mouth
(11:27):
will be schooling up, I'm not going to regret it now.
Is that stuff as cool as arrowing another bull in
the high country? I don't know. Maybe maybe not. But
the right decision is sometimes shrouded in mystery when you
make it. What's going on in your life where you
could make a better hunting decision now, one that will
wipe away some potential regret and give you the feeling
(11:47):
that you'd have now if you looked into your brokerage
account and saw a cost basis for your apple shares
that is in the single digits. Let's look at an
easy one here. How much are you shooting your bow?
If the answer is not much, okay, But what's something
you'd likely regret for the rest of your life. How
about missing a buck that you could easily have hit
(12:09):
well or worse? How about hitting one poorly when you
have a perfect shot lined up in front of you.
Maybe there's nothing you could really do about a whiff
or a bad hit, but oftentimes there is. Maybe it's
a matter of taking fifteen minutes today and tomorrow and
the next day to shoot your boat. Because if you
sit in that stand or saddle and that buck of
(12:30):
your dreams walks into twenty three yards and you shoot
over his back or under his belly, because you're straight
up shook. As the kids would probably say, you know what,
You'll get to experience hindsight bias in real time, because
you'll not only think about how you knew you should
have executed better during the shot, But how you could
have shot more all summer long and you didn't. You
(12:51):
just knew you should, but you didn't. Let's take that
example and go a step further. This summer has been hot,
so stupid bit hot in fact, that it's kind of
crazy in a lot of places, going out to work
on stands and the scout deer on many of the
days we've had this summer just straight up nightmare fuel
and mostly a non starter for a lot of folks.
(13:14):
But what if you could have and if you had,
you would have trimmed your stand sites up nicely so
you could shoot the most likely spots for a buck
to be, but you didn't. And now it's mid September.
There he is mowing away on the beans while you
couldn't get an arrow through there to save your life,
which ironically saves his life. What will you regret if
(13:35):
you don't do it? What's something you could do now
to alleviate that sinking feeling of suddenly knowing you should
have done something, something that you knew you should do
and you didn't. Maybe it's as simple as you've been
seeing some bucks in a certain corner of a field
and you know you should get a blind in there
or a stand, even though you have a setup already
(13:56):
in place that's just down the woodline another one hundred
and fifty yards. Guess what's going to happen on opening
weekend if you don't set up right where you know
you should. Or how about this, I recently got permission
to hunt twenty five acres by my house. Now that
might not sound like much, but where I live it is.
It's a huge wind for me and the girls. The
downside was the guy who gave me a permission has
(14:19):
been kind of flaky, or I thought he was anyway.
The first few times I tried to get him to
commit to taking a quick walk back there on his
land to see the property lines and just what his
ground has to offer, he either didn't respond or always
had some excuse. I could just feel that permission slipping
away and was hit with the old familiar feeling of
(14:39):
being excited about something only to really be disappointed. Soon after,
I told myself it was a lost cause and I
almost gave up. But looking at the bulldozers and the
mc mansions popping up on that only spot within two
hours of my house that I have permission prompted me
to give it one more go. I hate bothering people
(15:00):
and have grown to really really hate talking to strangers,
so it was easy for me to adopt the mindset
of the whole thing being another lesson learned. But I
texted the guy anyway and just said that my schedule
was opened for a quick walk if he was available.
I left it at that, and he responded with a
time to come over and said get on over here,
And he couldn't have been nicer. And I couldn't quite
(15:22):
believe it when I was standing over a secluded pond
in the middle of his property looking at a stupid
good spot to set up a blind. And then I
couldn't quite believe it when I saw some long beards
feeding away and he told me I could turkey hunt
anytime I wanted to. There, we jumped a few deer,
found some absolute deer highways. I left the day in
(15:43):
a way where I would only describe our relationship as
being super best friends. Now, this guy's a very casual
bowhunter who was about to learn a lot about bow hunting,
and I'm a very serious bow hunter who is very
happy to have some ground to hunt where the dough
tags are unlimited, and the drive to get there is
like eight minutes. If I hadn't texted him, i'd have
regretted it forever. But you know what, I figured it
(16:07):
was going to be a no, and so my hindsight
bias was actually wrong, dead wrong. The lesson there is this,
my friends, despite us believing from time to time that
we can actually predict the future, we can't. The best
minds on Wall Street can't definitively say what company is
going to have the next trillion dollar market cap any
(16:28):
more than the average person can accurately predict the share
price of any given publicly traded company at any point.
The best minds in the hunting space don't know what
the landscape looks like in ten or fifteen years. That's
just the truth. Hell, they don't know what it looks
like next year. We have to work with what we
know and what we believe to be coming down the
(16:48):
old pike which is short for turnpike. And I only
know this because I had to look it up and
make sure that it wasn't actually supposed to be coming
down the pipe, which makes more sense for modern humans
and super Mario Brothers enthusiast alike. The future is a mystery,
but you can take a look at your life thus
far and tally up some of your bigger regrets. Use
(17:09):
that list to help you make better decisions from here
on out. This, at least in the realm of hunting,
will get you into more beautiful places. It'll help you
fill more tags, It'll help you fill the freezer. It'll
help you fill up that intangible part of yourself that
just needs to spend some time in the woods to
shake off the ick that comes from work in life
(17:30):
and then not so fun stuff we fill our days with.
So think about that and think about coming back next
week because I'm going to talk about elk hunting, or
more specifically, how to get out on your first elk
hunt before it's too late. That's it for this week,
my friends. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired
to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by
(17:51):
First Light. If you're out there sweating and you want
to get some deer work done, you should at least
check out our trace lineup from first Light. Super cool.
It's built from fabric that really allows like a ton
of breatheability and It's kind of become my go to
for a lot of my early season and my summertime stuff.
(18:11):
You should also check out the Origin pant, which is
like this weird pajama type pant but works really well
for early season hunting. And as always, I want to
thank you for listening and for your support for myself
and Mark and everybody at Mediator here. We really appreciate
you guys coming and giving us the support that you have.
(18:33):
If you want to check out some more hunting content,
head on over to the mediater dot com. You'll see
tons of articles, video series, how to stuff, you name it,
it's all there, go check it out.
Host
Mark Kenyon
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