July 28, 2016

I was honored to be a guest on Jim Harshaw's podcast, Wrestling with Success yesterday.  This is an excellent podcast by a Division 1 All American wrestler and also a wrestling coach.  Jim has a message that I particularly like and that is that failure is essential to success.  We should embrace failure because it ultimately reveals the path to success. 

My career in fishing has had so many failures.  Fishing in itself is mostly failure when I think about it.  We cast and cast and cast with about a 90% failure rate only to make small adjustments that lead to success.  About 90% of the expensive lures we buy don't really work that well and lots of crazy ideas are tried with nothing but complete failure.  In a business sense, my partner and I have failed on our first attempts at lots of things over and over.  We make changes, alter our course and continue to try until we are successful.  We throw out the stuff that doesn't work, keep what is useful and continue to move towards improvement.

Wrestling taught me that you can really only fail when you stop trying or just roll over and get pinned.  Never quit...ever...Never get pinned, always continue to fight.  Pay attention to the failures, learn from them, and move on toward success.  As your path begins to lead to success, guess what... there will be more failures.  Rinse, repeat and complete the cycle again.

Jim and I discussed my career path, SealFit Kokoro Camp, daily rituals, and my workout group.  It was a great discussion that I really enjoyed.  When it is live, I will let you know.

We hit it hard at the garage this morning with a hero workout.

Riley

Run 1.5 miles

150 Burpees

Run 1.5 miles

Wear a 20 lb vest and get after it.  The burpees were more difficult than I thought they would be.  The vest was crushing my performance and I was only able to get in one set of 20.  I had to do sets of 10 the rest of the workout.  The good news for me is that my calf had no issues and I seem to be back to 100%.  Ill slowly add more miles and try to get my running back to where it was earlier in the summer.  40:24 with a 20 lb vest.

Army Sgt. 1st Class Riley G. Stephens, 39, of Tolar, Texas, assigned to the 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group (Airborne), died Sept. 28, 2012, in Wardak, Afghanistan, of wounds caused by enemy small-arms fire. Stephens is survived by his wife, Tiffany; three children, Austin, Morgan and Rylee Ann; parents, Michael and Joann; brother Ken; and a number of family members.