Several weeks back I interviewed Greg Miller, a veteran hunter from Bloomer, Wisconsin. Miller is an author, speaker, outdoorsman, and co-hosts one of the best-rated hunting shows on TV with his son Jake. Miller was surprised to learn that he was one of the most inspirational people in my life. When I was in my late teens and early 20s attending Michigan State University, I was lost and really didn’t know myself. Similar to many college kids, I felt kind of asleep in life. I was a decent student, a decent athlete, a decent kid, and maybe a tad better than a decent hunter. Then one day I found a book called Rub-Line Secrets written by Greg Miller. From the moment I cracked the book I became obsessed!
Miller writes from an angle somewhere between storytelling and descriptive tactics for success, and it’s a lethal combo. The premise of the book is how Miller scouts out a buck he wants to hunt each season on state property in northern Wisconsin and he reveals a robust arsenal of tactics he deploys to decode the moves that deer is making and hopefully take him. A rub-line is a line of trees which a buck has rubbed his antlers on that eventually lead from that buck’s bedding area to the feeding areas and along his travel corridors.
Upon my first of several cover-to-cover reads of the book, I began to notice a raised awareness almost immediately. All of a sudden my ADD (who doesn’t have it) was subsiding and was replaced by a newfound heightened awareness, it was amazing. I began to pursue the mission of hunting mature animals as a way of life that was a passionate pursuit beyond any commitment or focus level I had achieved to that point of my life. While even then in my blurry college daze I was a highly visual and perceptive individual, this sort of disciplined commitment was something new entirely.
Within a few years I was hunting at a very high level and was finishing college and knew I wanted to accomplish big things with my career. Soon after realizing how much my hunting skills and senses had improved, I started asking myself how these same skill sets were not transferable to business, life, and personal relationships. All of these seemed like hunts to me even back in the mid 90s (man life moves fast). It did not take me long to see that hunting mature whitetail and hunting down career goals, even things like a first house, were totally interconnected–as life is a series of hunts.
Soon after this epiphany I put it to the test and it worked well, really well! Almost immediately I started experiencing business success. This was not by accident, rather by putting my rapidly developing super predator skills to the test and working hard, I’ll be damned if big bucks didn’t respond in the boardroom as they had in the field! I knew I was onto something big, and something I would have to further exploit later in my career in some change the world capacity. I can’t help it if I want to change the world, and I am going to do just that–and you can take that to the bank.
Let’s fast forward to 2013, and I begin to realize how much Greg Miller affected me. He provided me many of the secrets to goal pursuit. He armed me with many of the fundamentals that I have continued to tweak in the field and in the boardroom over the last 20 years or so. Today at 41 years of age I can say that I am proud to have founded the world-leading online outdoors media company in Outdoor Hub, built and sold several businesses, and continued to always learn in the pursuit of life, whether in the deep woods of northern Michigan or working the ad world in the streets of Manhattan, the commercial real estate industry across the Midwest, and now public speaking and even publishing a book in the spring of 2014 focused on business and hunting. Life is a series of hunts and when we learn to tap our inner hunter, our primal instincts of the predator that are in us all we begin to conquer more of what we are after in life!
Huge praise, respect, thanks, and love goes out to you Greg Miller. To me, you will always be one of my heroes in life, brother. Thanks for letting me in on some of life’s great “secrets”.
