You know, it's really nice to watch yourself get better at something.

I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about. I have to imagine you're the kind of person who likes to improve, otherwise this wouldn't be the journal for you.

Now, I used the word "best" in the title of this article. That might have been a wee bit inflammatory.

However, what I'm about to offer you is the process I use for improving my hunting skills...and everything else I want to get better at.

I've honed this practice over the course of 20 years, and as with everything else, I'm always working to improve it. (So, you can expect an update somewhere down the road.)

You'll often hear that experience is the best teacher.

I think that's mostly true, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

Informed experience is the best teacher.

You need some raw materials to put your experience into context in order to extract the lessons.

You have to know some shit, and you have to enter the situation with the right frame, otherwise you're left with a million guesses about what happened and no real clarity.

That requires fundamental learning.

For example, you can't put a thought on paper without first memorizing the alphabet, learning how to read, and learning basic grammar.

Literacy is a pre-requisite for most forms of advanced thinking. And literacy is a concept that extends beyond understanding language.

There's financial literacy.

There's training literacy.

There's hunting literacy...and so on.

Each breaks into specific subsets of understanding.

For example, general hunting literacy is based on the fundamental truth that each animal requires three things: food, water, and cover.

Then we apply that knowledge to the specific species, the time of year, and the landscape on which you're hunting them.

Different critters do different things in different environments based on how they use their innate drives to adapt, breed, and survive.

So, you take your general knowledge about hunting, then you nest your species knowledge inside of that, then you nest your knowledge of the species in the given environment inside of that.

Then you hunt, pay attention, and see what happens.

The process begins with mentorship.

Now, mentorship comes in different forms.

Many of us initially learned to hunt, and fell in love with it, because an older relative took us to the woods, fields, marshes, and mountains.

They taught us what they knew, hopefully to the best of their abilities. This is direct mentorship.

Coaching is also a form of direct mentorship.

But we also gain mentorship by consuming books, articles, videos, podcasts, seminars, etc.

This is indirect mentorship. By and large, we have more access to this form of mentorship, especially as we get older.

No matter the form, we extract information and use it. Then we see what it produces.

Did it move us forward or not? 

Forward doesn't necessarily mean successfully making a kill (more on that in a second).

Each form of mentorship also raises questions.

Sometimes, the question is a straightforward, how do I do that?

Other times, it's more of a twinge that tells us we aren't sure we agree.

They're both points of struggle, and that's a very good thing.

So, we take that specific bit of information and test it by seeking out other viewpoints, testing it on our own, and trying to simultaneously build it up and dismantle it.

At the end of the process, we've either confirmed the information, disregarded it, or learned how to apply it in a way that works for us.

That's learning. That's an improvement.

We gather info. We do the thing. We pay attention to our points of struggle. We repeat the cycle.

That's how we get better.

It's also important to know what kind of mentorship works best for you in different lanes of life.

For example, I work hard to improve my writing. But sitting in a seminar with some slap dick droning on about his proven formula would make my eyes glaze over.

I seek writing mentorship by reading a lot of solid writing, and also in the form of editors who tell me when my work isn't good enough.

It's important to develop that same kind of understanding for yourself.

How do you like to learn in different lanes of life, and what makes the lessons stick?

Learning is the crux of it all.

That's the new definition of success. 

Yes, we all want to go home with meat, fur, and bone.

However, it's difficult to make long-term progress if that's our ultimate definition of success.

If instead we head into the field with the goal of learning one more thing about the critters we're hunting or the environment we're hunting them in, we can be successful every time we hunt.

The curious thing about it -- if we make learning the goal instead of killing, we're far more likely to go home with meat, fur, and bone.