A Weekly Column On Living Well

Denver, again.

This week I am writing to you from within Terminal A at Denver International Airport.

I mentioned briefly in a prior issue that I recently started a new job. A job that aligns much closer with the person I see myself as both personally and professionally. Now three weeks in, it’s just as close to what I had hoped it would be on paper.

While the work so far has been great, my commute is now 1,618 miles away from home. Every few weeks for the foreseeable future, I will make the pilgrimage from my sleepy village in Ohio to Billings, Montana, almost always by way of Denver.

Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t mind Denver International. Once you accept the clear evidence of being an Illuminati stronghold, I have found DEN to be a fairly efficient experience in comparison to the other transitory hellholes like O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth.

If I didn’t have two-hundred years of pure Ohio lineage running through my bloodstream, I believe I would have made a decent mountain man. I regularly hear the same siren call of peaks and elevation that Muir spoke of, even when I’m back home in corn country.

At least you can see the mountains in Denver.

It’s a funny thing to be a regular work traveler now. I have traveled for work many times prior to taking this job, but rarely was it to the same places on a consistent cadence.

You start to settle into the routine. I have to remind myself which of the three identical hotel room keys being collected in my wallet is the right one for this week. When I checked in this time around, the hotel manager greeted me with a “welcome back.”

Never did I think that I would start to know the individual gate agents, rental car advisors and coffee stand attendants at Billings-Logan airport. A regional landing strip I didn’t even know existed a few short weeks ago.

As you might imagine, leaving my wife and our freshly turned one-year-old son is not easy. It is deeply challenging on many levels both mentally and logistically. Dad usually handles the final steps of bedtime. When I’m gone, Mom takes the whole shift on top of all of the other ones. We are also lucky to have two sets of loving grandparents to fill in the rest of the gaps.

He doesn’t understand yet why some mornings I am a face on a screen instead of being there to play with him in person like usual. But I know what the trade is. I also know why I made it.

A short while ago, finding a fulfilling job in the outdoor + adjacent industry without having to uproot my family from our Ohio home felt very much impossible. The things I wanted to do for work did not take place in Ohio, and the outdoor industry job boards often read as “remote applicants need not apply.”

On more than one occasion, I found myself between a rock and a hardline recruiter.

That was until this opportunity presented itself. Now I can work a job that feels much closer to what I have always wanted to do without packing up the house and moving west. And while there is a definitive cost that takes the shape of missed bedtimes and FaceTimes, there is something positive in this arrangement, too.

Years from now, when he starts deciding what he wants his own life to look like, I can tell him with some credibility that the map often looks wider than it appears.

It might require a connection through Denver. It might mean a few nights in a hotel each month. But it also means finding a life where worklife and homelife are two sides of the same coin.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

ROADRUNNER: A Film About Anthony Bourdain

This 2021 documentary from director Morgan Neville provided this week’s in-flight entertainment. I’ve written about and have included plenty of references to Anthony Bourdain here in The Field Review, hell, I even have the Anthony Bourdain Reader on my desk right now. But I came away from this documentary feeling like I have been consuming more of the legend than the actual person. I felt like I knew the voice, the attitude and the mythology, but far less about the man.

This film fills in some of the blanks many of us including myself didn’t know about because they weren’t talked about in the books and television shows. Bourdain was more interesting, and clearly more troubled, than the version of him many of us envision.

What I didn’t know until after I started doing some more digging into the film was the controversy around using AI models to recreate Bourdain’s voice to speak lines he wrote, but never spoke aloud. Even way back in 2021, we were starting to wrestle with the power of AI and the ethics of putting words into a deceased man’s mouth.

Good transition into MARGIN Story #2 this week…

Mossy Oak Draws a Line on AI Artwork

This internal memo from Daniel Haas to the team at Mossy Oak has been bouncing around my corner of the internet. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the line that stands out to me is “People confuse efficiency with improvement.”

As a member of the Haas family (founders of Mossy Oak), this memo reads to me less as a company AI policy and more like a family member protecting a legacy. Mossy Oak patterns were handcrafted from elements found in nature which is why they’re taking a stand on keeping human hands part of the creative process.

I’m not saying that every brand needs to take the same black and white approach, but I do believe every brand should know themselves well enough to know where that line is for their business.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

My son turns one tomorrow.

It feels impossible to write that sentence without sounding like every other parent who says, “it goes so fast.”

But it does.

I remember the weeks leading up to his arrival with vivid clarity. Around this time last year, many issues of The Field Review were focused on the change that was about to happen in my life. I was trying to figure out what kind of dad I would be. Whether I was ready.

Then our boy finally made his arrival.

Our lives changed, of course. But in a lot of ways, he fit into what we were already doing much better than I expected.

He has been easy to love since the moment we met him. Easy to enjoy. Easy to be proud of.

I don’t discount the blessing it has been to parent alongside the most amazing wife who makes the hard days feel more manageable and the good days even better.

The crazy part is how quickly a full year just disappeared.

For most of my life, I treated time like something I could always recover. Like one of those board game hourglasses. When the sand runs out, just flip it over again. Or like a long roadtrip where you may lose a few minutes when you stop for gas or hit construction, but if you drive a little faster later, you can gain some of that lost time back.

Wasted Saturday? There will be another one in six days.

Worked too much this week? It’ll balance out next week.

This is how I’ve thought about time for the majority of my twenty nine years. But now, a full year into fatherhood, that mental math has changed.

His first year is gone. Never to return.

We won’t ever get the chance to bring him home for the first time. I’ll never again hold the seven pound version of him. I won’t get to hear the first giggle or see the first step for a second time.

All of those things are behind us now. There is no hourglass to turn over.

There is plenty of road still left ahead, but this first year of his life is now in the rear view.

I’ll spare you the advice of presence because it’s a virtue I’m still trying to live up to myself.

After all, knowing time is finite does not mean you’ll be any better at spending it. The best I can do is to try to notice more of the moments while they’re here.

To remember the weight of his head on my chest. The remember the uncontrollable wave of giggles. To remember the way he reaches for us while we are still his entire world.

I know these moments too shall pass.

Happy Birthday, Wells. We love you.

Live Well. Tell No One.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

I am in the final year of my twenties.

God willing, I still have plenty time left to do plenty of things. But even with that remaining time, it is fair to say that the number of genuine “firsts” in my life will continue a downward decline in quantity and frequency from here on out.

Reflecting on the last twenty nine and a half years, life handed out firsts without asking early and often. First days, first dates, first apartments, first jobs. You didn’t have to go looking very hard for them. They just kept showing up.

There are still plenty of things I haven’t done, places I haven’t seen, and skills I haven’t learned. But many of the big firsts are already behind me.

I will never have another first day of school.

My son will always be my first child.

My wife and I are already living in our first home.

Eventually your life becomes filled with things you’ve done before. Another Monday. Another meeting. Another birthday. Another duck, deer or turkey.

But tomorrow, I will get another first. Tomorrow, I start a new job.

On paper, it is almost too perfect of a description for the dream job I drew up for myself a few years ago. An alignment of my professional skillset with a level of personal passion and purpose I haven’t had in my work for the majority of my career.

I’ve spent the last two weeks doing what I tend to do before doing anything new, thinking about it from all angles.

How fast can I get up to speed? What don’t I know yet? How quickly can I make an impact?

I know there will be plenty of time to learn the business, the work, and the people. But tomorrow only gets to be tomorrow once. In a season of life where firsts are few and far between, tomorrow I get another first day.

I intend to enjoy it.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

LIV Golf lives to see another day

LIV Golf released a statement this week that it has secured a lead investor (remained unnamed) to keep the league operating beyond the close of the 2026 season. I know the inner workings of the business behind professional golf is probably pretty low on most people’s list of concerns, but as a golf sicko, I remain fascinated by this PGA Tour vs LIV Golf saga.

It’s a story that includes tradition, money, player personalities, international business, media, loyalty, morality and occasionally golf, too. Even if the next version of LIV will look smaller than the one we’ve known for the last few years, this experiment has forever changed the history of professional golf.

Dan Rapaport has the recap as always in the latest episode of Dan on Golf.

Surprisingly electric NFL Hall of Fame game

The 2026 NFL season officially kicked off in Canton, Ohio this week with the annual Hall of Fame game. Usually the excitement around this game has little to do with the football, as it has historically been a sub-par game featuring a bunch of guys who will likely not make a team roster.

But this year was different. It was a great representation of what American football is supposed to look like featuring a true battle from start to finish between Arizona Cardinals rookie QB Carson Beck and Carolina Panthers undrafted free agent rookie QB Haynes King. It was a back and forth game, with King scrambling for a walkoff no-time-left-on-the-clock touchdown that gave Carolina the win.

I have no idea if Haynes King or Carson Beck will become starting QBs in this league, but after Thursday night they are both now on my radar.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

I remember my first deer hunt like it was yesterday.

The date was September 25, 2021. I was 24 years old.

At the time, I didn’t personally know anyone who hunted. I had no mentors, no property, and no one to ask for permission. With that in mind, I picked the most deer-friendly piece of public land I knew, a state park about an hour north of home.

This particular area held many of my favorite childhood outdoor memories. I spent many weekends camping and hiking here with my family, and spent even more time here throughout my time with the Boy Scouts.

And while I was familiar with the general area, I had never actually set foot in the pull-off I pinned on OnX a few days before.

On opening morning, I pointed my truck north and made what I thought was good time. That confidence was diminished when I found another pickup parked where I intended to walk in. Discouraging, sure, but at least it confirmed that I hadn’t picked a place with no deer.

I drove farther up the dirt lane and found another pull-off. This one was empty. The reflective yellow WILDLIFE AREA sign flashed as my headlights passed over it.

I killed my lights, put on my headlamp, and opened the door.

Silence.

The park that held so many good memories felt different now in the pitch black darkness. It felt different alone.

I gathered my gear, carefully closed my rear driver-side door, and turned back toward dark abyss of the woods. I remembered reading that you’re better off walking to your stand without a headlamp. That sounded logical when I read it at home, but now standing here alone in the middle of the night with no clear idea of where I was headed, I decided that the deer could live with a little light.

I took one step, then another, and left the road.

I followed a trail until it became nothing more than a matted pad of pine needles winding between the trees. Every few minutes, I pulled out my phone to make sure I wasn’t walking in circles.

In the darkness, my imagination was running wild. I could feel eyes watching my every move just beyond the edge of my light.

Increased sweat on my back and elevated breathing told me that it was time to stop. I picked a tree at complete random, dropped my pack and strapped on the first climbing stick.

As a I hung the second, something rustled ahead of me. Then another came to my left, and a third behind me. I told myself it was just a bunch of squirrels. Definitely not coyotes.

But even as a first time hunter, I knew they were coyotes. (Confirmed after finding their tracks on the walk out).

As they continued to make noise, I continued to climb. Twenty-five feet later, I reached the safety of elevation.

To no one’s surprise, I did not take a deer that day. Around mid-morning, a doe tore through the brush ahead of me at a full run. A few seconds later, I heard a bowstring snap, followed by more commotion.

I stayed around long enough to confirm that I had no shooting lanes and to hear the other hunter I didn’t even know was there climb down from his tree. On the walk back to the truck, I came across him beginning to drag out the doe.

“Congratulations”, I said. He thanked me, and I kept walking.

The woods started to feel familiar again.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I shut that truck door and headed into the unknown. The darkness held plenty of variables that I could not account for. Hidden dangers, risk, success, and ultimately, experience.

These were all reasons to go.

Fear makes the unknown feel full. Experience gives names to the things you can’t see from the road.

The only way to learn is to go far enough to find out. The risk of entering the darkness never disappears. You can choose the wrong path. You can make mistakes. You can come home without what you went looking for.

Most people will never leave the safety of the truck. They will wait for sunrise to come and reveal the way. By that time, the coyotes will be in their dens… but the deer will be long-gone, too.

The dark will always hold things you can’t account for. To not enter is to not live.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Big Ten football continues to win the off-season

I am a Buckeye for life, but Indiana head football coach Curt Cignetti just had the quote of the off-season at Big Ten media days last week.

After three state seasons with a Big Ten National Champion (including one from my Buckeyes)… the Midwest conference continues to beat those boys from the SEC on and off the field.

If this doesn’t get you excited for football season, I’m not sure what will.

Remi Warren hunts a wolf with a bow

I recently watched Part I of Remi Warren x First Lite’s Northwest Territory caribou hunt film. Starting out with a bow that got lost in travel, about halfway through the first installment, Remi takes down a black wolf that wanders a little too close.

Talk about a 180 degree turn of events. Enjoyed Part I of this adventure filled with wolves, grizzlies, and some of the biggest caribou I’ve ever seen on camera. Looking forward to catching Part II on YouTube next.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

I played organized basketball from the fourth grade through my junior year of high school. When we weren’t practicing specific plays for the next opponent, we worked on the fundamentals of strategic basketball. Put-backs after a missed free throw. Baseline inbounds under pressure. And at least once a week, the full-court press.

The full-court press means that before the other team even inbounds the ball, you’re working your ass off.

You pick up your man as soon as the ball drops through the basket. You deny the first pass. You take away the second pass. You trap along the sideline. Everybody moves at once, gambling that enough pressure will force a bad decision before the offense crosses half court.

When it works, it works fast.

A tipped pass. A loose ball. An easy layup before the other team knows what happened.

When it fails, five defenders end up chasing the ball in the wrong direction while somebody scores relatively uncontested at the other end. A failed full-court press makes you look like a bunch of idiots and question why you decided to do it in the first place.

No sane team runs a full-court press for an entire game.

A good press demands too much energy. Legs get heavy. Communication breaks down. One late rotation opens the whole floor. The same pressure that can create an advantage for a few possessions becomes a major liability once fatigue sets in.

A few months ago, I wrote an issue called “Know Your Season.”

I’m here to raise my hand and admit that both my wife and I have been living in a season of pressing.

Long hours. Full go. Maximum effort.

Work has asked a lot from both of us. Our son has entered his eleventh month of life and moves faster by the week. He needs more from us now than ever before. We have kept our jobs moving, kept the house moving, handled what needed handled, and have made progress along the way.

Good things have come from the effort, and visible wins make the press hard to abandon.

You remember the steals. You remember the easy points. You convince yourself that one more hard push will create another break.

So you keep pressing, even as you feel the fatigue set in.

Longer hours solve more problems. Extra effort opens doors. Staying ready has helped us take advantage of opportunities when they came.

Pressing worked, so we kept doing it. The problem is we’ve now been pushing for so long that we’ve failed to notice our situation has in fact changed. We’ve kept playing like we were down by ten when in reality, we’re already up by forty before halftime.

Effort has became so familiar that easing off feels irresponsible, even when we know the game no longer requires it. And if we’re being honest, running a full-court press when you don’t need to makes you look like a real asshole.

You can work hard to put yourself in position. You can prepare, stay ready, and make the most of the chances that come. You still cannot force good things to happen on your schedule, or just because you feel like pressing.

When something good does happen, you have to take time to notice and you should adjust course.

Otherwise, you end up sprinting around the court, trapping a team that has already lost, while the people who came to watch wonder why you refuse to take your foot off the gas and just enjoy playing the rest of the game.

The press got us here. It does not need to take us through the final buzzer.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

The Creek Kings Ohio Poaching Case

My home state of Ohio has produced yet another major whitetail poaching case in the last few years (see 2023 CJ Alexander poaching case), this time even closer to my actual home. Two Columbus, Ohio men behind the Creek Kings Outdoors YouTube channel pleaded guilty to a combined 40 charges after illegally taking deer from a protected Columbus Metro Parks property.

I found the most interesting part of the ODNR breakdown was how they identified this situation as the latest evolution of wildlife commercialization. Throughout American history, market hunting meant harvesting wild animals over sustainable limits to sell the meat or hides for profit. In 2026, a big buck isn’t sold for meat, but it can be converted into views, sponsorships and online fame to help individuals profit just the same. The whitetail deer is still being commercialized. The storefront just looks different.

Full ODNR report HERE

Pennsylvania Court Rules Against Game Warden Surveillance on Private Property

Along a similar line as the first MARGIN story this week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ruled that game wardens cannot enter and surveil clearly posted private property without a warrant.

I’m torn on this one. I don’t think wearing a badge should give anyone unlimited access to private property without cause. But I also know poaching usually happens where nobody is watching, and the Boone and Crockett club estimates 95% of game violations already go undetected. Property rights matter. But so does protecting a public resource. I also know that people are more ready to break the rules when they know no one is looking.

I’m not sure there is a clean answer beyond outdoorsmen doing a better job of governing ourselves.

Summer-maxxing vs Summer-saving

I enjoyed this one from the Huckberry Journal this week, a gut check on whether we are making enough of the warm weather season while it is still here. It raised a question I’ve been kicking around for awhile, not just on summer but life in general. Should the goal be maxxing or minimizing? Do you pack the schedule with the time you have left, or slow everything down enough to notice it?

They sound like opposites, but they may be two versions of the same idea. This article from Alex Tzelnic has some ideas to help you do both.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

The Fourth of July has always been one of my two favorite holidays. And just like December 26th, the days following our annual celebration at the family lake house feel like a letdown as Ohio settles into its late-summer rhythm.

The social calendar quiets down. The crowds thin out at the lake. The fireworks (eventually) stop.

By July, the humidity has settled into everything. It hangs in the air from morning through dusk, turning what should be a gas into something that feels closer to a wet blanket. The truck seat is scorching hot before you turn the key. Your shirt sticks to your back just walking across the yard. You step into the woods hoping they’ll be cooler and find they’ve been holding heat since yesterday.

The hydrangeas wilt in defeat under the oppressive weight of the late-summer sun. At least the grass slows down. After two months of chasing the mower, I can leave it in the garage for a few extra days as the shade of the lawn turns from emerald to chartreuse.

The corn stands taller than road-level view. Soybeans fill in until the fields look like one solid wave. Sweet corn signs appear at the ends of driveways.

The cicadas carry their buzz from sunup to sundown. The ducks are still in Canada. The deer don’t know I’m thinking about them yet.

Their antlers keep growing under velvet while I bide my time before putting cameras out to take inventory. Tree stands need hung before the leaves get any thicker. Trails need cleaned. The bow needs reps.

We’ll make preparations soon enough.

In July, football begins creeping back into this state’s bloodstream. The World Famous Buckeyes will report to camp soon. Freshmen and transfers will start losing their black stripes as they earn their place on this year’s team. Every proper Ohioan will begin talking about the upcoming season with the shared understanding that yes, we’ll be good again.

There’s plenty to do if you want to stay busy in July. But I’ve been busy for a while. It has been a season of pushing, so for now, I think I’ll enjoy a few more cold beers on the back deck, listen to the cicadas, and let July have the rest of its days.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

QUARTERBACK Season 3

I’ve tuned in for every season of Quarterback on Netflix, but I’ve been especially excited for this one because it features the quarterback that started my interest in the NFL, Baker Mayfield. I’m still of the belief that Cleveland forcing Baker out was a massive mistake for the organization (add it to the list).

Season 3 also features a quarterback from a different era who stills find himself on rosters in 2026, Joe Flacco. I’ll always have a soft spot for Flacco after the strange little run he had in Cleveland a few seasons back, and for playing for both of my home state teams last season, the Browns and the Bengals. More than anything, I like this show because it gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the wear-and-tear of an NFL season. This is where you see how things really go down beyond Sundays.

Huckberry Homes with John John Florence

Huckberry Homes is easily one of my favorite series on the internet. This episode follows 3x World Champion surfer John John Florence living aboard his boat in Fiji. I loved this one for the same reason I love this entire series, I’m always interested in seeing how people build their lives and their living space around the things they actually care about.

For someone born and raised in central Ohio, I’ve had an oddly long-running fascination with surf culture. I used to tear pages out of Surfer magazine and hang them on my bedroom wall, and John John was one of those guys which is why this one hit a nostalgic nerve for me too.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

I have built my life around belief in the idea that effort compounds.

Work hard enough for long enough, and eventually the world will reward that work. I believe in the basic math of the American dream. I believe in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Outworking the guy next to you. Leading by example. Staying useful. Staying hungry.

That belief system has worked well so far. It gets me out of bed. It gets me to work. It gives shape to otherwise shapeless days. But as I add a few more years and a little more life experience to my resume, I can see now that the formula is not foolproof.

Because effort can create opportunity, but it cannot create chance.

Those two words are close enough that most of us use them the same way. A good chance. A good opportunity. A chance to prove yourself. An opportunity to take the next step.

But they are not the same thing.

Opportunity is a favorable junction of time and circumstance. A window. An open door. A place to stand.

Chance has luck baked into it. It’s built on probability and randomness. Chance does not care how hard you worked or how badly you need or wanted said thing to happen.

Life is full of opportunities, but you only get so many chances to do something with them.

If you’re still not following, my 2025 deer season makes the distinction pretty clear.

I gave myself the opportunity to encounter a mature whitetail buck. I put in the off-season work. I scouted. I played the wind. I carefully picked my days. I put in the hours. I did see two shooter bucks from a tree stand.

But both were well out of range.

There was opportunity. There was no chance.

That is hunting, which is to say it is also a pretty good representation for everything else. You can do a lot right and still not get the moment you need. The deer does not care how much effort you put in. Neither does the workplace. Neither does life most of the time.

This is the part I hate admitting because I like to believe effort should create outcome. Do the work. Get the result. Put in the time. Earn the return.

Sometimes it works that way. Plenty of times it does not.

Opportunity with no chance is frustrating because you were there. You were ready. You did what you could. You put yourself in position and still came home empty-handed. That is a hard pill to swallow, but it is not the worst version. The worse version is chance with no opportunity.

That is when the deer walks by, but you are not in the stand.

The job opens, but you have not built the body of work to get it.

The idea shows up, but you have made no room to pursue it.

The door cracks open, but you are standing too far away to get to it before it closes again.

These scenarios bother me more because they have less to do with luck and more to do with whether you were willing to be in position before you knew your chance was coming.

You cannot force the deer to walk by, but you can decide whether to be in the tree. You cannot control the timing of every chance you’ll get in life, but you can do the work that puts you in a good position when the timing finally turns your direction.

Effort may not guarantee the outcome, but it does give chance somewhere to land.

That is the best we can ask for.

Live Well. Tell No One.

P.S. -

While today’s topic isn’t necessarily patriotic, I do want to acknowledge yesterday marking the 250th birthday of the greatest country in the history of the world.

Not perfect. Never has been. Never will be. But still the place where the basic promise set forth two hundred and fifty years ago remains alive enough to believe in today. Work hard. Build something. Raise a family. Speak freely. Disagree loudly. Fight for what you believe in. Begin again.

I am immensely proud and lucky to be an American. Yesterday and every other day. And for all the noise, fracture, and uncertainty of the current era we find ourselves in, I remain hopeful for the future of our great nation.

Happy Birthday America.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Checking in on the the modern bobcat fur trade

I enjoyed this one for two reasons. First, this coming season will be my sixth as a hunter, and while I’ve done and seen a fair amount at this point, trapping remains one of those pursuits I haven’t stepped into yet. Second, bobcats have always felt a little mythical to me, especially in Ohio. For a long time, they were something I knew existed in theory but never expected to actually encounter. That has changed in the last few years as I’ve started seeing more and more of them on trail cameras. With the debate over an eventual trapping season in Ohio still hanging around, this was an interesting look at what the bobcat fur trade actually looks like in modern America.

The Pursuit of One of Nature’s Best Killers On A Fly

MAKO from YETI and Flylords follows Capt. Conway Bowman, a pioneer of mako shark fly fishing, and uses that bizarre, high-risk pursuit as a way into a larger story about fatherhood, loss, and the influence of the men who shape us. I’ve been waiting for this one as part of the broader launch around SITKA’s fishing line, and it delivered because it does more than just showcase a niche fishing story. But with that in mind… catching the world’s fastest shark on a fly rod is absolutely absurd.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

This day last year, I was already a father on technicality, but still waiting for the part where I could hold my first born son in my arms.

Today marks my first official Father’s Day with someone who is just starting to mentally attach the syllables “da-da” to my image and likeness.

Having a a child is without question the greatest achievement and greatest joy of my life. I know my wife would say the same. We truly don’t remember what it was like prior to our little buddy joining us on our journey through life.

I can only speak from our experience, but he has taken it relatively easy on us.

A great sleeper. Curious. Kind. Strong. Happy. And so very smart. He has had a personality for a while now, and I can’t wait to see what he does with it.

I remember writing a few issues of The Field Review in the weeks leading up to his arrival last summer. They were filled with excitement and nerves and the strange anticipation of waiting for a person you already love but have not yet met.

Before having a child, I thought a lot about what it would be like.

What kind of dad did I want to be?

I planned to take a few lessons from my own father. Virtues of hard work, strength. and intelligence.

I also took a few notes from my grandfather. Lessons in how to be patient. Respectful. Fair. And to offer a helping hand no matter the circumstances.

There are other dads I’ve watched over the years, quietly filing away things they said or did and hoping that someday, if I found myself in a similar moment, I might be able to pull the right lesson from memory.

And truthfully, there have been plenty of dads I knew I did not want to take lessons from.

But even with some kind of plan in place, fatherhood is hard to understand until you are standing inside of it. Especially with your first child.

In the months before he arrived, when I was lying awake at night thinking about becoming a dad, I wasn’t thinking about teething. I wasn’t thinking about trimming fingernails the size of pencil shavings. I wasn’t thinking about how many times he would pull his mom’s hair or how proud I would be the first time he figured out how to clap.

I was thinking about the bigger, more obvious stuff.

Teaching him how to shoot a BB gun. How to ride a bike. Taking him into the woods. Showing him how to hold a golf club. Letting him think he is helping me with projects around the house long before he is actually helping at all.

I was thinking about the classic dad lessons because, from the outside, that is what fatherhood looked like to me.

A dad teaching something. A child watching. Some small piece of wisdom being passed from one generation to the next.

Before I became a father, I thought mostly about what I wanted to teach.

But in these first ten months of his life, I’ve learned that a lot of the job starts on a much smaller scale.

At this stage, my son does not know what kind of man I am trying to become or the life lessons I hope to instill. He just knows whether I’m there.

Being a father means carrying him around the house when he wants to see what you are doing. It is offering a hand when he wants to stand. It is being the safe chest he can hide in when something new gets a little too loud or too strange.

Fatherhood is equal parts unconditional love and inexcusable presence.

It is showing up again and again until he believes, without needing to understand it, that you will be there. No matter what.

I know we will get to the BB guns and bikes and deer and golf later.

Wishing a Happy Father’s Day to all of the dads out there, new, old and otherwise.

Live Well. Tell No One.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

To understand life is to understand that every day is an exchange.

We give things. We receive things. Time, money, attention, energy, praise, criticism, responsibility, opportunity, disappointment. All of it moving back and forth in ways that feel fair on some days and wholly unequal the next.

On this spectrum of exchange, there are payers and there are collectors.

We all pay for something.

We pay for the job. We pay for the house. We pay for the family. We pay for the dream. We pay for the version of ourselves we’re trying to become. We pay in early mornings, late nights, long weeks, difficult conversations, missed opportunities, quiet compromises, and the steady drain of forward momentum.

The difference between payers and collectors is what comes back.

Between you and me, I’ve been a payer for the last few weeks, the exact number of which remains a blur in itself.

I’ve been burning the candle down. Giving away my time and attention. Letting the best hours of the day get swallowed by things that leave nothing behind. Paying for small frustrations that become impossibly larger inside my skull.

I find myself at the end of each week realizing that I paid out plenty, but didn’t collect much in return.

No stories. No scars. Just a smaller mental account balance.

I have reached a point where the payments have stopped producing anything useful. Hours give no clarity. Attention gives no peace. Energy gives no progress. Each morning the same problems are still there with their hands outstretched.

The frustrating part is knowing what it feels like when the cost comes back with something attached to it. When a long week still feels productive. When a hard conversation clears up more than anticipated. When an early morning takes sleep but gives back a little sanity. When the thing you almost talked yourself out of doing becomes the thing you’re glad you did.

I have been a collector, I just haven’t been one lately.

Make no mistake, collectors still pay. They don’t get discounts. They still spend time, attention, energy, pride, comfort, money, and sleep. They still get tired. They still take wrong turns. They still come home empty.

But they collect something for their troubles.

A story. A skill. A better eye. A little more patience. A sharper sense of what matters. The lessons you can only collect by entering the room, asking the question, taking the trip, starting the project, missing the deer, playing the round, having the conversation, or staying with the hard thing long enough to let it teach you.

That sounds obvious until you realize how easy it is to forget.

A good life will and should cost something. Marriage costs something. Fatherhood costs something. Work costs something. Ambition costs something. Building anything worth having will eventually ask for more than you originally planned on paying.

I’m fine with that. Happy to do it.

Because I’m not looking for a life without cost. I just have higher expectations for the return.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

THE WIZARD OF ODD

Golf.com recently profiled Adam Schriber, the longtime coach known around Tour circles as “Shribes,” who coached J.J. Spaun to the last year’s U.S. Open title. Described by his own son as “a surfer bro golfer”, he’s unlike any other coach on tour.

From the outside, golf can look buttoned-up, country-club clean, and suspiciously polished and uninviting for those who don’t fit the stereotypical mold. But in reality, the game is full of oddballs, obsessives, drifters, and original characters if you look closely enough. I had never heard of him before watching this, but Schribes seems to be one of those guys I’ll now have to look out for.

Arthur Brooks

Chop Wood, Carry Water

Everyone wants to find their calling. What most people mean by that is: finding the right job. By this, they mean the one that fits—that feels like it was made for them…

Read more

3 months ago · 438 likes · 31 comments · Arthur Brooks

Chop Wood, Carry Water by

This past week, I stumbled across Chop Wood, Carry Water where Arthur Brooks uses the old Zen story to make a point about finding what has already been chosen for you. The part that stayed with me is the idea that callings reveal themselves not always on the good days, but on the bad ones. Plenty of things feel meaningful when life is flowing. The better test is what you still drift toward when you’re tired, discouraged, or a little lost.

For anyone currently looking for their next thing, I recommend giving this one a read.

Wired To Hunt on deer-hunting failures

Every summer I start to feel the whitetail itch creep back down my neck, and whether I mean to or not, that usually leads me back to Mark Kenyon and the Wired To Hunt podcast. I’m not a week-in, week-out listener, but this recent episode with Tony Peterson was especially relatable because it focused on mistakes instead of the heroics which seem to be the only story coming out of outdoor media nowadays.

What landed for me was Mark’s point about giving bucks too much credit and turning every little mistake into a catastrophe. That feels painfully familiar for me, I even wrote about this last year in TFR-073: Whitetail Anxiety. Bumping a deer, getting winded, making a little more noise than you wanted to are all things that will happen if you call yourself a whitetail hunter. The bigger mistake is often letting the fear of messing up keep you from making a move at all. That is true in deer hunting and true in plenty of other parts of life, too. Sometimes you get punished for recklessness, but you will get punished harder for hesitation.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

When I first started writing The Field Review in the spring of 2024, I had no set plans and no real purpose beyond collecting my thoughts somewhere that wasn’t in the margin of a work notebook or the notes app on my phone.

I first started on Beehiiv. Just a few issues and a few weeks later, I moved everything over to Substack because I had already subscribed to a few writers here and wanted a more consistent reading + writing ecosystem.

Unlike some of the Substack growth hackers you’ll find around here who brought tens of thousands of emails with them, I started with zero subscribers. Sure, I told a few friends and family members I was starting a newsletter, but that imported list was less than ten people.

Now one hundred issues and a thousand subscribers later, I’ve learned a lot about what comes with publishing your thoughts on the internet.

Whether you’re a writer, a reader, or someone who has been quietly talking yourself into starting something of your own, here are ten things I’ve learned from hitting publish the publish button one hundred times.

1. Build in public

When I first started The Field Review, this plane didn’t even have wings.

I had no audience, no format, no real thesis, and very little idea of what I was trying to do. Early on I wrote about business trends, workplace culture, personal development, random observations, and a lot of other things I thought a newsletter was supposed to include.

Some of them were fine. A lot of them were forgettable. Looking back, most of those early issues feel like they were written by someone still trying to find their voice, purpose and format. Probably because that’s exactly who wrote them.

It took more than a year to land on the format you’re used to now: The Lede, The Margin, and Standards. That wasn’t part of a pre-baked master plan. It came from trying things, realizing most of them weren’t quite right, and keeping the pieces that felt strong.

I once heard talk about the power of building in public, and I think that’s the best way to describe what this journey has been. I continued to build The Field Review while people were reading it instead of keeping things hidden in the shadows aiming for secret perfection. If you’ve been a longtime subscriber you’ve had a front row seat to this evolution. Whether or not you’ve even noticed the changes along the way is a different question I’m not entirely sure I need to know the answer to.

Starting with no one helped as there wasn’t much to protect, no audience to disappoint and no expectations to manage. Just a blank page and a weekly deadline I imposed upon myself.

From the jump, I debated writing under an alias because I didn’t know if I wanted people I knew in real life to find this side project. Now two years in, I’m happy I made the decision to write under my real name because not wearing a mask on the internet is a superpower.

My thoughts are mine. My name is attached to them. I stand behind what I publish, even when I look back and think I could have said it better.

I’m a real person with real ideas. Google me.

2. Have a point of view

For the first handful of issues, I didn’t really have any strong perspective.

I had opinions, sure. Everyone has opinions. But a point of view is different. A point of view has a spine. It carries a little risk. It gives a reader a reason to come back because they can feel that there is a person behind the words, not just someone aggregating thoughts from the internet (or from AI) and sending them back out a little duller than they found them.

I didn’t have a voice because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was also still worried someone I knew in real life might find this secret side project and ask why I was writing about flow states and office dynamics on the internet.

Eventually I stopped caring as much.

You’ll find a lot of people here writing about the same broad categories. Business. Culture. Life. Work. Ambition. Family. The outdoors. None of those topics are rare.

The difference is whether you’re writing from real experience, or just writing to meet the needs of what you think people want to read.

3. Be niche, but not too niche

I don’t know the exact interest breakdown of my subscriber list, but I imagine it’s a pretty broad spectrum.

Some of you are probably here for hunting. Some of you are here for lifestyle. Some of you are here for the living well stuff. Some of you might enjoy the occasional rant about the never-ending dumpster fire that is Cleveland sports.

I know that every issue I write will not satisfy every person every week. That’s fine.

But I like having range because I think people should have range. I don’t want to be one thing all the time. Most interesting people aren’t.

A person can care deeply about deer season and still have a perspective on the corporate workplace. A person can love golf while also wrestle with ambition, fatherhood and contemplate the ethics of fair chase. A person can pursue a good pocket knife, a better morning routine, a cleaner garage, a full freezer, a stronger marriage, and a life that feels a little more intentional across all aspects without having to put themselves into just one of those labeled boxes.

The topic may change. The way of seeing the world remains the same.

4. Find your people

I didn’t expect to meet so many cool people on this app. But through Substack I’ve encountered a group of internet acquaintances that I would have never crossed paths with otherwise.

On Fridays, I get updates on radical living from . is the first Alaskan this Ohioan has ever known. I get my style and gear updates from . I turn to , , and for strong perspectives on the cultures I care about.

There are plenty of other writers here I genuinely look forward to keeping up with, despite knowing there is a slim chance we ever meet in person. I encourage you to check out my recommendations list for other writers you should subscribe to if you’re not already.

The internet is mostly terrible until it isn’t. Every now and then, it still works the way it was probably supposed to. You find people with shared interests, different lives, and unique perspectives to keep paying attention to.

5. Progress over perfection

I’m not a perfectionist by nature, which has probably helped me here. I’m willing to send something that feels strong even if it still has a few loose boards.

I have enough faith that readers of The Field Review have enough mental capacity to understand what I’m saying even if I don’t spell it out word-for-word. No hand-holding required.

There is a point where polishing becomes hiding. You keep editing because editing feels safer than publishing. You keep adjusting the sentence because the sentence can’t be judged while it’s still sitting in drafts.

I’m a firm believer that a half-baked good idea is often better than a fully-baked dead one. The work has to leave your hands eventually, don’t be afraid to ship it out even it might not be 100% perfect.

Nothing ever is.

6. Write on experience, not on topics

The issues I like the least are usually the ones where I went hunting for a topical idea. The issues I like the most are the ones that were already sitting in front of me.

The good stuff usually doesn’t show up as lightning strike. More often, it shows up as a moment that felt bigger than it should have. A good morning in the woods. A bad morning in the woods. A frustrating week at work. A conversation. A fatherhood milestone.

The good ideas are already happening in front me. I just have to notice them before they slip by.

Some weeks I forget that and start trying too hard. I’ll read a few posts, check a few headlines, poke around until I can convince myself I’ve found a topic. Those issues almost always feel thinner than the ones that came from a real moment in my actual life.

That might be the most practical writing advice I can give. Live your life. Pay attention. Write down the ideas, problems and memories won’t leave you alone.

7. The numbers matter less than you think

I’d be lying if I said I don’t check the numbers. Subscribers. Opens. Likes. Comments. Restacks. The little scoreboards behind the curtain.

Some weeks the numbers make me feel like I’m onto something. Other weeks they make me wonder if I’m the only person on the planet who understood that week’s issue.

For the record, my favorite issues of The Field Review are not the ones that had the best numbers. But that’s part of the deal.

I want The Field Review to grow. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But if the numbers become the reason I write, the writing will get worse.

That’s a bad trade.

8. Keep going

I believe that consistency is the only reason this thing made it to one hundred issues.

There was no major growth hack. No secret distribution or conversion strategy. No viral moment that changed everything overnight. Just Sundays. One after another.

At this point, publishing every week has become a mental game I play with myself. I don’t want to miss. I don’t want to break the streak. That might sound stupid, but it works.

There have been plenty of weeks where I didn’t feel like writing. Weeks where work was heavy, life was busy, the idea was foggy, or sleeping in sounded a hell of a lot better than opening my laptop and trying to flush out an idea. But week by week, the rhythm started to matter. The act of showing up became part of the point.

That’s what consistency does. It removes some of the negotiation. I no longer have to wake up every week and decide whether I’m the kind of person who writes. The decision has already been made. Now I just have to keep the appointment.

Now… consistency does not make the work automatically good. Plenty of consistent things are bad. But consistency gives the work a chance to become something. It gives your voice time to sharpen. It gives your ideas time to repeat, evolve, and eventually get better.

The advice I got in the beginning was right. Just keep going.

9. There will be critics

A few weeks ago, I wrote what was probably my most negative issue ever published, Spectator Behavior. I wrote it in a pissed off mood because I was tired of my thesis, Live Well. Tell No One., being torn apart by people who didn’t take the time to understand what it meant.

That’s on me to some degree. Even I can recognize that it’s a somewhat controversial line published on the open forum of the internet. People can react however they want.

After two years of writing online, I now know that many people live to “shitpost.” Some people want to rage bait other people they don’t know. They sit behind a screen name and scroll around looking for something to hate on because criticism gives them a cheap sense of authority.

As Alfred says, “some men aren’t looking for anything logical... they can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. They simply want to watch the world burn.”

You will eventually encounter these people if you keep putting your work into the world.

Don’t take it personally. Keep walking. Keep writing.

10. Don’t just write it, live it

The longer you write online, the easier it becomes to turn your life into material. Every thought becomes a possible note. Every moment becomes a possible issue. Every frustration becomes a paragraph.

That can be useful. It can also get gross fast.

Writing The Field Review can’t become the whole point. The point is to be in it. To work. To hunt. To golf. To be a husband. To be a father. To keep learning. To keep paying attention. To keep doing the things that make the writing possible in the first place.

Live Well. Tell No One. was never supposed to be a content strategy.

It’s a reminder to live well first. To tell the story when it’s worth telling. And to keep the rest for myself.

--

So here we are, now one hundred issues in, and I still don’t know exactly what The Field Review is supposed to become. Maybe that’s why I keep coming back. There’s still room to figure it out.

What I do know is that writing this every week has made me pay closer attention to my own life. It has made me more honest about what I value. It has given shape to ideas I might have otherwise ignored. It has introduced me to people I otherwise would have never met. It has given me a reason to keep asking what it means to live well in a world that keeps trying to make everything louder, faster, easier, and emptier.

To anyone who has read one issue, ten issues, or all one hundred, thank you.

Thank you for giving me a little piece of your day. Thank you for reading the long ones, the strange ones, the hunting ones, the overly serious ones, and the ones that probably should have stayed in drafts. Thank you for trusting me with your hard-earned, valuable time and attention. I promise you, it does not and will never go unnoticed.

The advice I received in the beginning was right. Keep going.

So I will.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Jack Nicklaus on the origins of Muirfield Village and the Memorial Tournament

This weekend is the Memorial Tournament here in my home city of Columbus (technically Dublin), Ohio, founded and hosted by the unquestionable GOAT of golf, Jack Nicklaus. This year carries a little more weight because it marks the tournament’s 50th anniversary.

Jack’s interview from earlier this week gets back to the origin story of not just the tournament as a date on the PGA calendar, but the early vision for the course, the work of building it, and the legacy it now carries after half a century.

Rich Eisen’s This Was SportsCenter with Dan Patrick

Despite him being a Michigan-Man (gross, Go Bucks!), I have been a longtime listener of the Rich Eisen Show as part of my sports media circuit. Eisen was one of the ESPN OGs as a host of Sportscenter through the late nineties into the early 2000s. In this first episode of his new project “This Was Sportscenter”, he brings in another OG, Dan Patrick, to look back on his years at ESPN helping to turn SportsCenter from a highlights show into a foundational pillar of sports culture.

As a marketer by trade, I loved the behind the scenes look into the history of some of the most iconic creative work ESPN ever produced, especially the original ‘This Is SportsCenter’ commercial spots. Those ads are some of the best examples of sports marketing done right.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

This is the 99th issue of The Field Review, which means this time next week I will be hitting the publish button for the 100th time in about just as many weeks. A hard number to fathom when I first started this side project.

I will save everything I’ve learned about writing 100 issues for next week… this week I would like to talk about two words that have been swirling around inside my brain; appetite and agency.

I’m well into the final year of my twenties. I find myself with a beautiful wife, an incredible son, and a sturdy house in the little village we grew up in. Looking backward, I’m pretty damn close to where I hoped I’d be. Looking forward, I’m nowhere near where I want to be.

I spend a lot of time and energy living in that gap.

Some of it is ambition, which I still believe is useful. Wanting more out of life is not a crime or defect. Wanting more has done a lot for me. It has allowed me to work harder than what was required and to take swings at things before I knew what I was doing.

Still, some of it is just plain old sinful greed. Call it what it is.

Greed for more money, sure. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like to see a few more digits on those paychecks. But also greed for control. Greed for time. Greed for impact. Greed for a life that feels a little more like mine and a little less like a series of meeting obligations and calendar invites from outside parties.

I have an insatiable greed for more agency over my own life.

That’s what I’m really after. More room to move. More say in how my days are spent. More ability to choose what gets my attention and what doesn’t. More freedom to build a life for my family without feeling like every decision must be made within someone else’s schedule.

As it often happens, the things I consume often have direct correlation to the thoughts I’m having internally. My wife and I were watching an episode from season two of Your Friends & Neighbors this week, and there was a scene where Jon Hamm’s character was giving some life advice to to a junior associate.

When talking about advancing up the career ladder, he says“there is no there. Only here.”

Feels about right.

I have spent most of my adult life chasing “there.” The next job. The next title. The next house. The next project. The next opportunity that might finally create enough leverage to step out of hamster wheel. “There” always looks cleaner from a distance. A mental utopia with more freedom and more meaning. A version of life where you’re able to make a conscious decision to leave the table instead of being force fed another full plate.

But the idea of “there” can be a deceiving one.

It’s a mental block that’s easy to put up when you need to put your head down and get through another tough week. It convinces you that the current state of grind you find yourself in is only temporary, and that the next door will open soon.

Sometimes that’s true. But “there” can also become a habit. A safe place you keep running to because standing still would force you to admit how tired you really are.

What if you never find “there?” What if “there” doesn’t actually exist?

Forgetting about “there” forces me to build agency “here” first.

Here is where the actual decisions get made. Here is where I decide whether to say yes or no. Here is where I decide what gets the best of me and what gets whatever is left. Here is where the work gets done, where the words get written, where the life I want is either built or deferred.

The next job won’t fix a lack of presence. The next house won’t fix a life I don’t know how to inhabit. The next opportunity won’t create agency if I keep handing all of mine away.

I don’t want to stop wanting. I don’t want a smaller life. I don’t want to dress up complacency as wisdom and call it maturity.

I have appetite for agency.

I want to chase the things I want for my life and my family without letting the chase make me absent from the life I already have now. I want to build toward there without treating here like a waiting room.

Agency here, so I can actually live now. Agency there, so the next door doesn’t just open to more obligations instead of opportunities.

Because if I can’t live well with the plate I currently have here, a bigger one there probably won’t save me.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

SITKA Presents: Casting for Ghosts

Given the choice, I’ll choose hunting over fishing every time. Still, a record muskie is very much on the bucket list. Sitka’s latest Beyond the Layers film drops us into the strange, obsessive world of Midwest musky fishing through the lens of Chris Willen and with musky legend Larry Dahlberg. The real takeaway is the mindset required to become a complete musky fisherman, and the willingness to keep casting long after most people would have packed it in.

DIRT Hawaii

Huckberry’s DIRT Hawaii drops Josh Rosen and the Huckberry crew into the Hawaiian islands to spend some quality time with locals who each connect to this unique island culture differently through food, hunting, surf, or landscape.

My wife and I went to Hawaii on our honeymoon, and it was one of the best trips of my life. There are not many days where I don’t think about getting back there. Our experience was similar to what this episode of DIRT shows. Hawaii is not just one thing or one landscape. It is not just beaches, or food, or surf, or scenery. It is a culture and a way of life that shows up in all of those things at once. A whole wide world tucked inside a collection of tiny islands.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

Most of my professional work lives somewhere between thought and execution.

As an integrated brand strategist, my job is to help corporate health and wellness organizations better understand their audience.

Most days, I like the work. I like the cultural analysis and the psychology behind it. I like figuring out why people do what they do, what they believe, what they ignore, what they need to hear, and how a brand might fit into that journey.

Still, most of my work lives upstream in the theoretical realm.

My daily deliverables usually consist of some variety of presentation deck. A brief. A strategic recommendation. A messaging platform. A set of slides that often take weeks to think through and a few minutes to attach to an email. Some of it gets executed. Most of it disappears into the corporate fog where even the best work goes off to be “revisited later.”

That’s the part that gets to me.

That my work can be valuable and still feel weightless. That I can put real thinking into a strong recommendation and watch it stall out because the timing was wrong, the budget shifted, or the organization simply moved on to the next urgent thing.

After enough of these cycles, it becomes necessary to pursue a different outcome. The need arises to make something that exists outside my computer screen. Something tangible. Something with real world utility.

This week, that something just happened to be a leather headcover for my fairway wood.

I dusted off some old tools and a leftover Veg Tan side from a short-lived leather craft phase I went through a few years back. I didn’t follow a pattern. I just started cutting, shaping, punching, and stitching until the idea in my head became something I could hold.

It came out better than I expected. The lines weren’t perfect. The stitching had a few spots that would probably make an actual leatherworker wince. But it fit. It held. It looked like something made by a person for a specific purpose.

More than anything, it helped to burn off some of that aforementioned fog.

There is a numbing mentality that comes from living too long in the abstract world. A state of too many screens and too many open tabs. Too many partial conversations and unresolvable decisions. Everything stays fluid, editable, debatable. Nothing feels fully finished because it can always be revised one more time.

Working with your hands on something even for just a few hours can break that spell pretty quickly.

Tangible work forces attention into the present. It gives you immediate feedback. The cut is either straight or it isn’t. The stitch holds or it doesn’t. The pieces either fit or they don’t. There is no narrative to build around it, no meeting to explain it, no strategic rationale to soften the edges. The work tells the truth.

I have been thinking about that more as AI keeps moving into the white-collar world I find myself in. A lot of the work many of us do for a living involves writing, summarizing, organizing, presenting, and explaining. AI is rapidly changing how that work gets done. Some of it will get faster. Some of it will get cheaper. Some of it will become less dependent on people like me spending hours staring at a screen trying to turn messy inputs into clean strategic direction.

I’m not panicking about that evolution. But I’m also not pretending it isn’t real.

I know that the era of professional work my son will inherit will treat knowledge and synthesis differently than the one I find myself in now. The clean, computer-based jobs that have been seen as the “safe path” for decades may not feel as safe in the coming years.

The ability to move information around will still matter, but that ability will likely not be enough on its own. This is why I think the ability to make things with your hands is going to matter more, not less, in the years ahead.

A table. A meal. A farm. An engine. A home. A road. A leather headcover. A clean floor. The size of the thing made matters less than the act itself. As the world seemingly gets more artificial, physical competence can keep you grounded to what’s real.

If everyone can generate more words, more ideas, more drafts, more versions, more options, then “making more” won’t make the difference it used to. The future of work will put a higher premium on judgment. Taste. Direction. Knowing what matters. Knowing what should be ignored. Knowing how an idea becomes useful once it leaves the screen and meets the actual world.

That’s where working with your hands has value, even if it has nothing to do with your job.

Hands on work provides psychological insulation.

It won’t protect you from change, but it can protect you from becoming too dependent on the abstract. Protection from forgetting that your value is not limited to what you can type, present, send, or optimize.

Hands on work serves as a stark reminder that your value is not limited to the work you do on a screen. That you can still learn a material, solve a problem, fix a mistake, and make something useful with your own hands.

Because no matter how much AI disrupts, abstracts, accelerates, or automates, a person who can still make something tangible with their hands will always have a place in this world.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Huckberry Homes: JT Van Zandt

Huckberry’s latest edition of Huckberry Homes heads to Rockport, Texas, to spend time with fly-fishing guide JT Van Zandt and look inside a home built around order, utility, and obsession in the best sense.

I like this series for the same reason I like seeing a good workshop, mudroom, garage, or office tour. You can learn a lot about a person by how they build their sanctuary.

Middle Class Pizza from The Old Ghosts

This superb piece from The Old Ghosts landed in my inbox this week. Eric Twardzik argues that like the rest of America, the middle class is disappearing from pizza, squeezed out by precious artisanal pies on the other.

I loved this because I’ve been an active enemy of overpriced, undertaste “fancy” pizza for years. I’m a cheap pizza guy. Always have been. Always will be. I prefer to support local family-owned pizza shops, but I’m also not above a Domino’s or Papa John’s pie. Not everything has to be elevated, especially not pizza.

YETI Presents | Bloodlines: Bucktown

I didn’t grow up watching bull riding or rodeo, but even I know who JB Mauney is. YETI’s Bloodlines: Bucktown takes viewers inside Bucktown, the bull-riding ground built by two-time world champion JB Mauney and co-founder Randy Quartieri. Bucktown is a mecca built for bull riders, by bull riders.

Old school cowboy culture in the face of the modern world.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

Two years into writing The Field Review, I’m still getting used to the fact that I send this newsletter out every week to a bunch of complete strangers on the internet.

I sit in my house and write about things that matter to me. Some weeks it’s light. I write about golf, taxidermy, and Christmas lights. Other weeks it’s a little more personal. Anxiety. Fatherhood. Identity. The balancing act of trying to spin every plate at once without dropping the ones that actually matter.

Then I hit publish and it goes out to a bunch people I don’t know.

Most weeks I don’t think twice about it. I click the button and move on with my life. Other weeks I remember there are real people on the other end of that publish button. When you write online, you hand readers enough context to either understand you or misunderstand you completely.

Photos are easier and less risky to share. A pretty sunset. A long road. A moment in time. Nobody argues with a beautiful sky.

But words are different. Words invite judgment, and if there’s anything the internet loves, it’s judgment. I find that people rarely take issue with my writing itself, but they do take vehement issue with the five words I’ve started including at the bottom of every issue. These five words seem to light an unforeseen fuse on a weekly basis.

Live Well. Tell No One.

That line attracts more attention than I ever expected, usually with some version of “gotcha” attached. People call it ironic. Hypocritical. Clout chasing. A walking contradiction. Someone once reposted it with a violent twist that forced me to report it. Last week a TFR subscriber reposted it and called it “ridiculous slop packaged in something that seems appealing.” I must admit it was an odd take for someone who has “always seeking Him” in their bio.

I can handle disagreement. I understand taste and preference probably more than most. Someone reading these five words and deciding it’s corny is totally fair in my book. After all, I’m not building a church here.

Yet, after years of being on social media and now years of writing online, I still can’t wrap my head around the hobby of internet hating. Spending your time tearing down a stranger’s idea because it makes you feel sharper than you are, then acting like you contributed something to the world.

That’s spectator behavior in my book. Shouting from the cheap seats with no skin in the game.

The funniest part is that most of the criticism comes from misunderstanding what those five words represent or where they came from. People read “Live Well. Tell No One.” as a claim, like I’m declaring myself the poster boy for a well-lived life while broadcasting it weekly. Yeah, that would piss me off too.

But if you’ve been a reader of The Field Review, you know that’s never been my intent.

Most of my days aren’t well-lived. But despite that fact, I’m still trying to build something better. I’m just in the middle of that process. I don’t know how many times I’ve written about not being anti-internet. I’m not logging off. If I was, you wouldn’t be reading this.

Those five words are a personal standard. A direction. A reminder to keep going, even when no one is watching.

I wrote them down in that order for the first time last June after revisiting Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. This has always been one of my favorite short stories, and one of the cleanest examples of quiet dignity I’ve ever read. The old man doesn’t have an audience. He doesn’t have a brand. He has the sea, the work, and his own internal sense of identity.

My favorite line from the book is, “Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.”

That is the genesis of “Live Well. Tell No One.”

A process of becoming. Of private effort. Quiet pride. The strength of knowing what you’ve done even when nobody else does.

I read something recently from one of my favorite strategic thinkers, , about how we now live in the era of contracts. The invisible agreements that hold all of our personal and professional relationships together. This made me think about contract I offer to you through The Field Review.

Concept Bureau

Not the AI Era. The Contract Era.

Welcome! If you found this article, or my recent posts Second Order Thinking For Brand Strategists or What I shared at Parsons about my work and futurism, I invite you to become a free subscriber to get more of my articles on the intersection of strategy and culture…

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4 months ago · 100 likes · 14 comments · Jasmine Bina

The contract I offer isn’t that I have life figured out.

My contract is that I’ll keep trying. I’ll keep writing about my attempt to live well without turning it into a performance. I’ll keep coming back to the same themes because the themes that I live my life against don’t change when internet preference does. I’ll be honest about what I’m working on, but I’ll keep most of the real work off the page.

That contract matters to me more than the reactions do. The reactions will always be there. Some people are wired to heckle. Some people think criticism counts as intelligence. Some people need an enemy because it’s easier than building anything themselves.

I don’t have time for that. And if I ever become the type of person who needs to tear someone else down on the internet to feel upright, I’ll know I’m not living well at all.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Vox on America’s Fishing Paradox

I’ve always had mixed opinions on Vox as a media outlet. Like all of us, sometimes they put out good ideas and sometimes I feel like they just muddy the waters on topics they don’t do their research on. I recently watched this video on what they label, “America’s Fishing Paradox” where they talk about fish restocking in waterways across the United States. While they get some stuff right such as declining participation and license sales, I feel like they do muddy the waters when they start to talk about stocked vs native species. Worth a watch to form your own opinions.

Bear Grease Ep. 451: Shot in the Back - The Jason Dean Story

Yeah, I’m aware that The Field Review is just becoming a funnel for you to go listen to more Bear Grease/ Clay Newcomb content but it’s not my fault they’ve been putting out some super interesting stuff.

In this episode of the podcast, followed by a separate, more informal “render” conversation with Jason Dean himself, the team recounts the story of how Dean survived getting shot in the back by a .270 WIN hunting cartridge during deer season in 1990. It’s a miraculous story of survival, family, and ultimately, gun safety.

Worth a listen.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

Thank you for indulging me through two straight weeks of wild turkey talk. As much as I’d like to stay on the turkey topic for another lap, my season is over and it’s time to get back to “regular” Field Review programming.

Over the last few months, I’ve been playing around with an evolving list I’ve been calling “Rules for Living Well.” Even calling them rules is probably too rigid for what I've been braindumping into a Google Doc. They’re closer to guidelines. Simple standards. Reminders I’m trying to live myself, not ideas I’m trying to sell.

I’ve hinted at a few of them in some recent issues, most notably in Ask For Nothing in Return.

That was Rule #16, here’s another.

Rule #13: Know who to follow when your phone is off.

Phones are extremely useful. They’re one of the greatest tools we’ve ever developed. But they are undoubtedly a constant source of input. They have the ability to fill every gap in mental time and space. Every spare minute. Every quiet moment where your mind might otherwise get back to it’s fundamental form.

In my corner of the internet, I feel like everyone talks about noise and signal now. It’s become its own genre of social tech commentary, which is funny because at a certain point, all of these conversations about signal become noise too. Another layer. Another take. Another thread about how overwhelmed we all are.

But the underlying problem remains the same.

Most of our days are saturated. We are bogged down with good things and bad things, generally just too many things. Too many opinions. Too many updates. Too many suggestions dressed up as urgent notices. It’s a wild world when we can go from checking the weather to absorbing someone’s worldview in about seven seconds without even trying.

Our phones give us more that just information. They give us direction. What to look at next, what to care about next, what to buy next, what to be outraged by next. It’s a steady stream of signal candidates, and if you don’t have your own filter, it all starts to feel equally important.

That’s when you get pulled around.

So the question isn’t how to eliminate noise, because that’s not realistic. The question is what’s guiding you when the phone goes quiet.

Who do you follow when your phone is off?

Some people follow faith. Scripture. Prayer. A pastor. A liturgy. A community. A belief system that has endured many greater challenges than the iPhone.

Some people follow reason. Science. Evidence. A discipline of thinking based in logical thinking and indisputable datapoints.

Some people follow a craft. The discipline of doing something well. Cooking, writing, woodworking, building, art, training. The work becomes a compass because it demands patience, humility, and repetition. It brings you back to what’s real.

Some people follow place. The land, the seasons, the weather. Direction structured by daylight and temperature rather than notifications. Hunting and fishing can serve as that guiding role for many people.

Some people follow family. Inherited direction. Standards of demeanor, values, and tradition that run in your blood.

Some people follow a mentor. A coach. A boss. A friend. Someone who lives in such a way that you trust their judgment when yours gets cloudy.

And finally, some people follow themselves. Listening to the signals of heart, gut and instinct.

For most of us, it’s a blend. The mix changes with the season you’re in, your age, your responsibilities, and whatever you’re trying to hold together at the time. Some years you might lean harder on faith. Some years you get deeper into your craft. Some years you just need one steady reference point that isn’t coming from a screen.

For me, I’ve noticed I’m at my best when I have a few real reference points outside of the internet. A small handful of people I trust and respect. A few standards I believe in (aka “Rules for Living Well”), and few pursuits that keep me humble and honest.

I know my phone isn’t evil. It’s just noisy. It’s always offering the next thing to care about, the next thing to react to, the next thing to compare yourself against. I know if I let it run my day, it gladly will.

Living well requires a filter. Doesn’t have to be a perfect one, but there needs to be one. Something that you can fall back on when the world gets loud. Something you trust when the algorithm is trying to steer you.

If your screen goes dark and you feel lost, that’s a problem.

The solution is knowing who to follow when your phone is off.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Southeast Alaska Boat-Based Bears

This episode of 12 in ’26 follows Clay and Bear Newcomb hunting black bears along the coast of southeast Alaska. I’m already a big Clay Newcomb guy, but this one had more going on than just another Alaska hunt film. It had that father-son layer, plus the tension between modern efficiency and older, more traditional ways of doing things. Same hunt, two different expressions of it.

Dan Rapaport and Alan Shipnuck on where LIV goes next

If you haven’t been following pro golf closely, the last five years have completely scrambled the game. PGA Tour versus LIV, legacy versus new money, tradition versus disruption. And now that the Saudi money is no longer guaranteed beyond 2026, the story gets even more interesting.

Dan Rapaport brought golf insider Alan Shipnuck onto this week’s episode of Dan on Golf to talk through the current state of LIV Golf and what comes next.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

There’s a video that went around the internet last year that I think about more than I probably should.

It’s known as “the spool of wire phenomenon”, I’ll link the original video in The Margin below.

It’s a simple video of a man sitting quietly, staring at a nearly finished spool of wire he tells his wife he has owned for forty years, thinking about how much time and life has passed since he first bought it.

I don’t have a spool of wire. But I do have an old box of turkey shells.

I shoot Federal Premium Heavyweight TSS. 12-gauge, 3 inch.

It was originally a box of five shells I bought in the spring of 2021. I certainly overpaid, but the man behind the gun counter told me these are what he shot and that was the only sales pitch I needed. In 2021 I didn’t know anything about hunting, much less turkey hunting. The only shotgun shells I had ever used were game loads for sporting clays.

On the morning of my first turkey hunt, I remember cracking open my grandfather’s Over-Under Browning and sliding two of those shells into the top and bottom barrels. I tucked a third into the top pocket of my brand new Walmart turkey vest just in case.

I had no idea I was starting down a path that would permanently change the direction of my life.

Five shells left.

I started to feel the ritual of turkey hunting in those first three weeks of that first season. Drive out well before first light. Sit in the dark. Watch my more experienced hunting companions try things that didn’t work while I sat there providing absolutely no help or insight. I was a passenger. Sit when told to sit, listen when told to listen, move when told to move. I ended each of those hunts by reopening that box and putting the shells back in one at a time.

Three weekends in a row. Three weekends of cracking the Browning open on the walk back to the truck, dropping the unfired shells into my palm, and sliding them back into the cardboard box they came from.

On the second to last week of the season I finally connected on a Jake. I drove home that morning with the first tangible evidence that I might actually belong out here.

That winter I got engaged to my high school sweetheart, and life moved on.

Four shells left.

The following spring I started a new job at a creative agency with roots in the outdoor industry. It was only fitting that as I neared the end of my onboarding period, we went on a company turkey camp. I packed up my Walmart gear, stopped by my grandfather’s house to pick up the old Browning, and headed out to meet my new coworkers at the hunting cabin.

The next morning I loaded two shells the same way I had the year before and put a third in my vest pocket out of habit.

I learned more about turkey hunting on that trip than in any season before it. How to roost birds the night before. How to work a slate call. And most importantly, when not to call. Bad weather and temperamental birds only let our group of six take home two birds by the time I needed to head home. I put the shells back in the box and made peace with it on the drive.

I was getting used to that. What I was also getting, without fully realizing it, was patience. More comfortable sitting in uncertainty. More willing to let the morning be whatever it was going to be.

The turkey woods were teaching me things I didn’t know I was learning.

That fall we bought our house. I carried my hunting gear into my own garage for the first time. A place to put things down and know they’d be there. The turkey vest went on a hook. The box went on a shelf. Both of them waiting for the next season.

That winter I decided I needed my own shotgun. I made the rookie mistake of going cheap first, purchasing a budget Remington semi-auto they don’t even make anymore. It was a lemon. I quickly traded whatever value it had left on a 12ga Beretta A400 Xtreme Plus before the 2023 season opener. We were going on our second annual company turkey camp, and before I could trust it in the field I drove out to the shotgun range with one of those precious TSS shells to make sure we understood each other.

A perfect match.

Three shells left.

That second turkey camp was a good one. I brought my cousin with me, and while we didn’t take home a bird, we got damn close. That was the trip that the two of us really started to figure out how to turkey hunt. When to move. When to call. When to avoid giving up the high ground to birds that know their home better than you do. We also found ourselves huddling together under a single rain poncho on the top of a ridge in an intense lightning storm, a story of sheer stupidity we’ll remain lucky to tell for the rest of our days.

We packed up camp at the end of the weekend, I put the shells back in the box. I went out two additional times after that, but was never able to strike up a bird.

The summer after that season I got married.

2024 was a year of change that arrived before I was ready for it. I had left the agency for something more stable, and by the time turkey season arrived the preparation I usually gave it simply hadn't happened. I took my dad who doesn’t hunt out with me on one morning, and to my utter surprise I was actually able to find us a bird. We were cutting the distance when a single shot rang out ahead of us. Someone beat us to him.

That was the pinnacle of the ‘24 season.

There is a particular feeling that comes with returning shells to a box you were hoping to empty. It is not quite shame but it rhymes with it.

It had officially been three years since my first and only bird, and I had used just as many shells patterning my Beretta as I had on actual turkeys. I put the shells back in the box unsure whether they'd ever find a different ending.

Same box. Same cardboard, just getting a little more worn at the corners and seams now.

That winter, my wife and I found out that we would be welcoming a baby boy the following summer. Our lives were growing.

As the 2025 season opener approached I had already lowered my expectations. Work was demanding. The baby was coming. Turkey season felt like something happening in the background of a much louder life.

By a stroke of last minute luck, I got the green light to hunt a property owned by my wife’s family the night before opening day. A place I had only ever looked at on OnX and dreamed about hunting. I had never set foot on the property before we unlocked that gate in the darkness of the 2025 opening day.

That property single-handedly turned my turkey nightmares into sweet turkey dreams I will forever cherish. That morning I called in an angry Tom in by myself for the first time, with no one else making decisions on where to go and what to do but myself. When it was over, I sat there feeling for the first time the full distance between the kid who had cracked open that Browning in search of turkeys for the very first time and the soon-to-be father now sitting against that tree staring at a quietly laying Tom.

That August, our son was born. In his nursery hung a single feather from the turkey his dad shot while waiting for him to arrive.

There are things that happen to you that divide your life into a before and an after, when you know in the moment that you are standing exactly on that line. Having a child is definitely one of those moments. Calling in your first wild turkey is another.

Two shells left.

Two weeks ago I reached for that old cardboard box and noticed for the first time that I was now down to just two TSS shells. I put the two I had left into my Beretta, and tucked a standard 3 inch load in behind them just in case, the same way I used to carry that spare shell in my vest pocket when I was new to this game years ago.

Just after sunrise on the opening day of the 2026 season I helped my wife’s cousin put his first bird on the ground. A Jake, just like my first bird. Watching him in that moment I instantly recognized the look on his face as the same one I had worn in 2021. Helping to create that experience for someone else felt like something I had spent five years earning the right to do, bringing me just as much joy as I felt when I experienced it myself.

Less than an hour later I used my fourth shell on a Tom who made the mistake of admiring his own reflection in my truck door. Somehow, this morning outpaced last year as the new “best turkey hunt of my life.” Two birds down before 8AM on opening day.

I drove home with one shell and more than I deserved from a single morning.

One shell left.

There is one Federal Premium Heavyweight TSS shell sitting in a faded cardboard box in my office right now.

I’ll probably have to buy a new box before next season. This one has done just about everything it was ever going to do.

But I’m not quite ready to let it go yet. Because from the outside, I understand that five years have passed. I know this because I have the receipts. A wife. A house. A son who won’t stop growing. A Beretta that has since replaced the borrowed Browning as my hunting companion of choice. Three turkey fans now hang on our walls that I know my wife loves to look at.

From the inside though, I still feel like the same guy who cracked that break action barrel open for the first time and put those two shells in. Still a little unsure. Still hoping I’m doing it right. Still carrying a spare shell in my pocket just in case.

This faded old box has been with me for all of it.

For the empty seasons and the full ones. Witnessing the person I was when I bought it and every version of myself that has developed since. It sat in the back of my truck without complaint through the mornings I drove home empty and the ones I didn’t. It never judged me for putting the shells back even when I was judging myself. It was just there, waiting patiently, every April when I came back to try again.

This last shell will go when it goes. And when it does I’ll buy a new box and start the whole thing over. But it won’t be the same box. And I won’t be the same person.

There’s only one shell left, but there’s a lot of life yet to go.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Small Axe Farm: “The Super Homestead”

The film follows Small Axe Farm, a one-acre off-grid market farm on a steep hillside in rural Vermont. They built it by hand, grow more than 40 crops, run it without tractors or fuel-powered equipment, and still claim to generate more than $13,000 a week during the growing season.

I find stories like this particularly interesting because I’m seeing a similar groundswell across a lot of industries right now. Of people moving back toward older, slower, more tangible ways of life. Building. Gardening. Analog habits. Creating real things with strong hands and a more intentional mind.

Don’t be surprised if you see me start my own suburban garden this year.

@mr.nonsense_officialshe will never understand. #husband #wire #wife #wifey #thoughts #deep #nostalgia #nostalgic

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The Spool of Wire Phenomenon

This is the video I started off talking about up top. Just a guy thinking about how much life has passed when referencing it against an inanimate object like a spool of wire.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

By the time you read this, I will have already been in the woods.

On this day of writing, it is Wednesday, April 22nd. Three days before I find out how it goes. But I know exactly where I’ll be when the darkness starts to lift on Saturday morning. Sitting up against a tree, waiting on a sound I cannot manufacture or guarantee or will into existence.

On Saturday, I’ll be waiting for a gobble.

There are easier things and easier ways to hunt. I know because I do them too.

In my own experience, whitetail hunting for all the obsession it demands, has always been a game of hours. You pick a tree, you sit in it, and the deer either walk by you or they do not. Here in the heart of the midwest, your property whether it be public or private does most of the work. I have found that one of the hardest parts about whitetail hunting is finding time in your schedule to be there.

Turkey hunting by contrast is a personal conversation.

You call, and you wait. You call again, and you listen. If (not when) a gobble comes back to you out of the dark timber, it doesn’t feel like hunting. It feels like you’ve just entered into the most exciting game you’ll ever play. Your morning becomes a hardline negotiation between yourself and a bird who has every reason not to trust you. You actively enter into conversation with a wild animal, trying to convince him that what he’s hearing is real, that it’s worth his time, and that he should come find you.

When it works, it feels like you’ve pulled off something you had no business pulling off. When it doesn’t, well, that might be why God gave us tomorrow.

In 1782, the Continental Congress adopted the Bald Eagle as the centerpiece of the nation’s Great Seal. While it’s a commonly accepted myth that Benjamin Franklin openly lobbied against it, he did write in a letter that the “Bald Eagle is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly” and that the wild turkey is “a much more respectable bird, [and] besides, though a little vain & silly, a bird of courage.”

If you’ve spent any meaningful time around turkeys, he had a good point.

The Bald Eagle is everything America wants to be. Majestic. Singular. Unbothered. An apex predator soaring above its domain with supreme confidence.

The wild turkey is everything America actually is. Beautiful in its own strange and colorful way. Loud and completely unashamed about it. Often so incredibly dumb it circles back around to being incredibly brilliant. Tougher than it looks and wilier than it has any right to be.

I mean all of that as a compliment to both the bird and the country.

It’s a bird that is already etched into the history of our nation, but the wild turkey is a creature that will also be forever etched into my own soul.

As many of you already know, I did not grow up hunting or fishing. When I began this journey as an adult, I started by accompanying a family friend on a spring turkey hunt. That was the day I heard my first wild gobble.

A few weeks later I put my hands on one of those birds. My first turkey was a jake in the spring of 2021. Aside from a backyard sparrow I shot with my Red Ryder as a young boy, it was the first living thing I had ever intentionally taken the life of.

I was carrying my grandfather's Browning over-under. One shot at thirty-some yards. No choke. Thankfully, a clean drop. I was not prepared for the flop. As I was still fully logging this experience in my brain, he started to bounce up and down in a flagrant whirlwind of wing and spur. Not knowing that this was normal is now one of the many lessons I have passed along to others I’ve brought into the community of turkey hunting.

I will never forget that individual bird for as long as I live. His fan has found a forever home in my office, a reminder of a morning that means more to me than I will ever be able to properly explain.

Last spring I took my first opening day Tom.

The first bird I ever called in completely by myself, start to finish. No one else on the calls. No one else making the decisions. Just me and a turkey having a conversation in the dark until he made the mistake of believing me.

I sat there with my hands shaking and my pulse pounding, waiting for a few moments not quite ready to move. Thankful for the bird. Thankful for the opportunity. Thankful for another day of life on planet Earth.

Colonel Tom Kelly captured the turkey hunting experience better than anyone ever has in his culturally foundational book, Tenth Legion. I read this book every spring before opening day, and will include the final passage below to wet your whistle until your own copy arrives.

Turkey hunting has a way of making you completely present in a way that’s hard to replicate anywhere else. There’s no room for the noise of the week before or the week ahead. There’s just the tree at your back and the woods in front of you and whatever happens next.

That’s what I’ll be looking for again on Saturday. Not just for a bird, but for the whole experience. The darkness, the wait, the first sound of a distant gobble cutting through the gray morning light, hopefully followed by a back and forth conversation.

I don’t yet know how Saturday went. All I know is that I’ll be there waiting for a chance to see it one more time.

Live Well. Tell No One.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

I encourage you to consider supporting The National Wild Turkey Federation. For just $35/ year, membership supports NWTF’s mission to ensure robust wild turkey populations, forest and waterway improvement projects and preserving the soul of the American hunting lifestyle.

NWTF Membership

SPOILER: We saw it one more time. Twice actually.

Today is Sunday, and and I can now confirm that yesterday was the single-greatest turkey hunt of my life. Doubling up on opening day helping my cousin to get his first ever bird before calling in a second bird for myself.

More to come. A morning I will talk about for the rest of my days.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

The Colonel & The Fox | A Mossy Oak Documentary

Mossy Oak’s The Colonel & The Fox may now be two years old, but it still feels bigger than most new hunting films. It centers on Fox Haas (Rest In Peace) and Col. Tom Kelly, but the real subject is legacy. The men who helped carry turkey hunting forward, the conservation story that brought the wild turkey back from the edge, and the responsibility left to the people coming after them.

Chêne Presents: The King

Chêne’s The King revolves around one bird, the Eastern wild turkey. “The woodsmen that Eastern Wild Turkeys create can be stacked against woodsmen of any other shape, form or fashion.”

50 Years of Truth: A Primos Hunting Documentary

Calling is not an optional side skill in turkey hunting. It is the cornerstone of the practice. Primos’ 50 Years of Truth celebrates the brand’s 50-year call-making and turkey media legacy, tracing it back to Will Primos and the early decision to show hunting as it really unfolds in the field.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

I’ve been keeping the train on the tracks lately. But it’s moving at such a clip that I haven’t had much time to look out the window.

You know the routine because you probably have one too. I wake up when I hear the kid get up. We eat, play, and we hand him off to grandma daycare. Then I stare at a screen until my head hurts having conversations that often have no purpose. We then collect the kiddo back from grandma. Bath. Bedtime. Scroll through something I don’t care about. We half-watch something we care about even less. Go to sleep. Repeat.

The train doesn’t derail. The train is never late. But somewhere between the morning handoff and the evening scroll, the days have started merging into one unrecognizable, unmemorable blur.

On my WFH days it’s somehow worse.

I could walk outside. I am literally steps away from my front door. And yet, evening arrives and I realize I haven’t felt the sun since I took the first diaper of the day to the trash earlier that morning. The noise of the freight train can fill every available space if you let it. And lately, I’ve been letting it.

I’ve been thinking about why that is. And I think the honest answer is that I stopped looking out the window to notice what’s been passing me by while my mind has been focused on keeping the train on the tracks.

Last Friday we loaded up the car and pointed it south.

My wife played softball at Elon University in North Carolina and last weekend was alumni weekend for the team. We headed out for a six-ish hour drive from central Ohio with a seven month old in the backseat. No option to scroll. No second screen. No half-watching anything other than Interstate 77.

Somewhere in West Virginia, the sun started going down between the mountains. The sky turned pink, then orange, then a color in between that doesn’t really have a name. It lasted maybe ten minutes. The kid was asleep. My wife was watching it too. Beyond commenting on it’s obvious prettiness, we continued South watching the color leave the sky eventually turning to black.

That moment found me, because for the first time in a while I had nowhere else to be and nothing else to look at.

I know that stretch of 77 well.

I drove it for the first time many years ago, leaving Ohio State after my last class on a Friday, heading down to see my high-school girlfriend at her school of choice in North Carolina. Most of those drives happened mostly in the dark. I’d crank Black Sabbath to stay sharp because the Prince of Darkness (RIP) never lets you get too comfortable. Ozzy kept my ears honest, and my eyes on the road.

I always stopped at a random Kroger I stumbled into once out of fuel necessity in Marmet, West Virginia. Just south of Charleston, right before the mountains get serious. I’d fill my tank and load up on the worst junk food imaginable. Trying to give myself diabetes was part of the ritual as a college kid driving solo to see my long-distance girlfriend.

When Pilot Mountain would finally appear on the horizon I knew I was close. Many hours alone in the dark started to pay off.

We drove that same road last Friday. Same mountains. Same exits.

But that college girl in North Carolina is now my wife in the seat next to me, and we have a son in the back who fell asleep somewhere around Beckley.

The mountains don’t know the difference. The sunset doesn’t either. The road is just the road.

But I noticed something on that drive that I hadn’t felt in a while. Not nostalgia exactly, though that was there too. More like a reminder that I am still capable of paying attention. That the window has still been there even though I haven’t been looking through it. A reminder that the moments still happen whether you notice them or not.

It’s so easy to get lost keeping the train on the tracks, and even I forget that the train isn’t the story. The story comes from the things you notice along the way. The memories made. The moments remembered.

The noise and routine will always be there. The scroll, the screen, the schedule that holds everything else together. None of that is going away. But neither is the window.

All you have to do is remember to look out every once in a while to admire the view.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Part of Us: A Marsupial Gear Film

This short film from Marsupial Gear follows the Pyburn family back to a California ranch that started as an invitation and has since turned into a multigenerational turkey hunting tradition.

Turkey season opens here in Ohio in six days, so this one hit at the right time. There’s a specific kind of anticipation to spring turkey season that’s hard to explain unless you’ve felt it, and boy am I feeling it.

Huckberry’s Brand Refresh

In another life, I’d love to be a designer.

As a brand marketer, I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m better suited to being a partner and advocate for good designers than pretending I should be one myself. Still, I love knowing the behind the scenes nitty gritty details of brand identity design.

I’ve been following Huckberry for years, even more closely as a subscriber to ’s . In case you missed it, HB just rolled out a very clean brand refresh and if you’re at all interested in identity design, their breakdown is worth your time.

Photographer No. 24

This short documentary follows baseball HOF legend Ken Griffey Jr. as a credentialed photographer working the 2025 Masters Tournament. That storyline alone is enough to make it worth a watch. It’s a behind the ropes look at one of the most accomplished athletes of all time, now working behind the lens at one of the most closed-off events in sports.

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Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

I am a sucker for symbolism.

I like things that stand for other things. On my desk you’ll find a collection of junk that means absolutely nothing to anyone but me. Coins. Rocks. Bottle caps with good quotes. Basically just a bunch of pocket treasures that probably look like trash to anybody else.

But mixed in with all of it is a small brass compass from 1924us that made its way all the way from Tasmania to my little village in Ohio a few years back.

The compass itself as an object is cool. But what it represents matters more to me.

As a mid-rank Boy Scout on my way to earning Eagle, I had to cross the orienteering merit badge off my list to get there. During one of my summers at Buckskin Scout Reservation in the back hills of West Virginia, each of us had to prove we could navigate a course around the 600+ acre camp using only a map and compass. No phones. No real line of sight. Just paper and magnetic pull.

I’ve started a few side hustles over the years. Everything from t-shirt printing to small business consulting. Any time I need a quick brand identity, I’ve used a compass as a logo more than once.

I’ve always liked what a compass represents.

They provide direction without giving you the whole answer. A compass provides a heading, but stops short of delivering a guarantee. Just enough information to help you get moving without removing the requirement to think for yourself.

The compass has existed in some form for thousands of years. They helped get people across uncharted oceans, cut through wilderness, and find their way through the world when there wasn’t much else to go on.

In 2026, direction by itself feels pretty outdated.

We don’t just have access to maps. We have access to the answer before we even needed to ask the question. We have LLMs, AI-powered search engines, summaries, explainers, frameworks, prompts, and instant responses for just about anything we can think to ask.

Why spend time figuring out just a heading out when you can type a few words and get the full completed route back in a few seconds?

For curious people like myself, AI is the rabbit hole that never ends.

I have always had too many questions, which means I always find another trail to follow. One answer leads to five more questions. Five more questions lead to ten more tabs open in my brain.

If you’ve ever watched the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, you might remember Captain Jack Sparrow’s compass. It doesn’t point north. It points toward whatever the holder wants most in the world.

There’s a scene where Jack looks down and the compass is endlessly spinning, offering no direction at all.

This the best example I can think of to represent my brain on AI.

Endless answers. Endless options. Endless inputs. Endless things to know, chase, optimize, compare, and consider. Enough information to make you feel informed with enough noise to keep you from taking any step in any direction.

Good or bad, this is exactly why I haven’t been able to fully lean into this new era of technology. The more information I have at my fingertips, the easier it becomes to keep searching instead of choosing. To keep refining instead of committing. To keep asking questions without ever actually moving.

A compass does not offer to solve the rest of your journey. It does not remove uncertainty. It does not walk the path for you. It simply gives you a heading and asks for you to take the next step.

Modern technology does the exact opposite. It offers so much information, so much completion, so much artificial certainty, that it becomes easy to mistake knowing for living.

I wish living well meant knowing all the answers. It’d make the whole “figuring it out” process a lot easier. I think in order to truly live well, you have to know your direction. To have a general idea of where you’re headed, or if you’re not headed in the right direction, to know where you want to go instead.

After all, headings change. If you get off track, your heading to get back won’t be the same one you took to get lost. And sometimes, you just need a heading for today. Forget about the five-year or ten-year journey.

What direction do you need to go in, TODAY?

Modern technology can give you answers. It can give you plans, summaries, shortcuts, and second drafts. But it cannot give you the gut feeling you get when you know you’re on the right path.

At some point, you have to be the one to choose a heading. To determine just enough direction to make it through today and put yourself in a good spot for the journey tomorrow.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

Donnie Vincent’s The Way Back

I get pretty tired of the standard hunting film formula:

“I’m a hunter > there’s a thing I want to hunt > let’s go hunt it”

Donnie Vincent’s The Way Back has actual layers to it. The film follows Donnie back to the Alaskan wilderness that helped shape him. He talks about what brought him to Alaska in the first place, the memories tied to it, the chilhood dreams, and the way life looks different now than it did then. The stories about his father and the time they spent together in Alaska got me thinking pretty hard about my own place as a son, and now as a father to a son of my own.

The average new hire is 42 years old

According to a Washington Post report, the average age of workers starting new jobs in 2025 was 42 years old, up from 40.5 in 2022 and 40 in 2016.

I feel like I keep getting beat over the head with statistics about how upside down the American job market is.

I’m not saying you can’t switch jobs at 42. Of course you can. More power to you. What I am saying is that older generations have spent years complaining that younger workers have no loyalty or are lazier, meanwhile 30,000 Oracle employees just found out that their positions were eliminated via email as the company ramps up investment in AI infrastructure.

Wild times.

Flatland Cavalry - Landslide (Live from The Tetons)

Nothing here but a good song in a beautiful place.

Is baseball making a cultural comeback?

The Athletic took a swing at answering the question of who really owns the No. 2 spot in American sports behind the NFL: the MLB or the NBA?

A lot of the numbers suggest the NBA has the cultural edge, or at least a louder one. But using myself as a barometer, baseball feels like it’s creeping back into relevance in a way I haven’t felt in years. My grandfather pre-determined my sporting team allegiances, so I am, by default, a Cleveland Indians fan. However, I’ve spent the majority of my life not caring much about watching or listening to a game. But between last season’s postseason run and a strong start this year, I’ve consumed more baseball in the last six months than I have in the last twenty years.

Baseball could be the move.

The Man You Walk With

Ted Scott has been on the bag for four Masters wins, two with Bubba Watson and two with Scottie Scheffler. He is undoubtedly one of the best caddies in the history of golf, but even so, he’s much more interested in being a good man than a successful one on the course.

The Man You Walk With from Golf.com follows Ted through his home state of Louisiana shifting the focus away from trophies and toward the parts of his life he cares about more… faith, family and community.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

I can remember a few different food chart designs in my lifetime.

First it was the classic pyramid. Bread, pasta, and carbs on the bottom. Fats, oils, and sweets on the top as things to eat sparingly. Then we got the plate diagram. Now we’re back to a pyramid again, just upside down.

No matter what shape the government gives it, the basic principle has always stayed the same. You are what you eat.

If you live on garbage, it will catch up with you eventually.

Anthropologically speaking, our bodies were not built to run on processed poison, even if it tastes good. We’ve always had some version of a framework for what to eat and what to avoid.

Unfortunately, our mouths aren’t the only entry point for garbage intake.

Unless you’re a junk-food Joey Chestnut, your eyes, ears, and brain will come into contact with far more garbage than your stomach ever will.

Good or bad, you are what you consume.

There’s no standardized pyramid for mental consumption. No official chart telling you how much outrage, gossip, envy, distraction, propaganda, slop, or stimulation you should allow into your system before it starts changing you.

And make no mistakes, just like that diet of pizza and ice cream, your mental consumption will change you.

If you watch cable news every night, there’s a good chance you become a little angrier, a little more suspicious, a little more addicted to conflict. If you spend enough time watching the influencer circus, you may start to feel like your own life is underperforming. Internet entrepreneurs will convince you a normal 9-to-5 is some kind of spiritual failure. Van lifers make ordinary stability look like a death sentence. Some podcasters expand your thinking. Others actively make you dumber.

There are inputs and outputs. Your brain is what sits in between.

Whatever you feed it will shape your perspective, your behavior, your attention, and your standards whether you admit it or not.

What you consume does not just affect what you know. It affects what you admire. What you envy. What you normalize. What you laugh at. What you start excusing. What kind of life begins to look desirable. What kind of person you become over time.

And right now, most people are overfed.

We are not just scrolling anymore. We are doomscrolling. Bingeing. Refreshing. Reacting. Absorbing more opinions, headlines, clips, and algorithmic sludge in a day than most people could have imagined twenty years ago.

We have access to more information than any generation before us, and somehow that has not made us calmer, wiser, sharper, or harder to manipulate. That in itself probably tells you something about the state of the human condition.

I’m not saying we need to log off completely. That’s not realistic, and most people who preach total abstinence are full of shit and are probably trying to sell you some sort of digital product anyway. But I do think it’s worth asking… what makes up your mental diet?

Because like food, balance matters.

Some of it is going to come from screens. Fine. That’s reality. But it probably shouldn’t all come from screens. You should have some analog inputs too. Books. Journals. Magazines. Long things that require attention and don’t have to fight for it via push notifications.

You should probably consume some inputs that come from actual humans, too. Family. Conversation. Friendship. Faith. Mentorship. Time with people whose face you can see and whose voice does not change based on clicks or ad budget.

Know who to follow when your phone is off.

And while I’m on a roll telling you how to live, you should also probably make some room for a little silence. Not every empty space needs to be filled. Not every dull moment needs a screen jammed into it. You should be able to hear your own thoughts once in a while without any background noise.

I don’t like giving unsolicited advice, but I’m pretty confident that if every thought in your life is being mediated through a glowing rectangle filled with digital pixels, that’s a problem you should try to fix.

If you eat garbage long enough, your body will eventually shut down on you. And if you mentally consume garbage long enough, your mind will too.

Your attention is part of your life. Your taste is part of your life. Your inner world is part of your life. To live well is to know what you’re letting in, and what you’re not.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

TOP SPORTSMAN with Captain Dick Fisher

A short film written and directed by Oliver Sutro, TOP SPORTSMAN follows fictional Captain Dick Fisher on his quest for meaning and tarpon in the Florida Keys. Trying to explain it will ruin it for you, so you’ll just have to watch it.

It’s an instant YouTube classic in my book. Funny, weird, and reminiscent of the low-budget but high-impact internet filmmaking that made YouTube “YouTube” back in the day.

SITKA Presents: Feathers To Fins

As part of the continued campaign rollout behind SITKA Gear’s new fishing line, Feathers To Fins sends animal calling expert Beau Brooks and filmmaker-angler Max Erickson to Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula.

Step 1: Track, find and shoot one of the world’ most selective birds, the ocellated turkey.

Step 2: Use those turkey feathers to tie a custom fly and see whether it can fool one of the world’s most selective fish, the permit.

Two obsessive disciplines, one strange bridge between them. Worth a watch.

Jury finds Meta and YouTube negligent in landmark social media safety case

In case you missed it, an L.A. jury found both Meta and Google liable in a case over Instagram and YouTube’s role in a young woman’s social media addiction and mental health harms. Reports say the jury awarded $6 million total, assigning 70% of fault to Meta and 30% to YouTube, and the case is being treated as a bellwether for thousands of similar lawsuits.

Social media may have started as entertainment, but somewhere along the line addiction became part of the product whether these companies like that language or not. The more we talk about living well, the harder it is to ignore the systems built to keep people distracted, dependent, and half-conscious.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment

A Weekly Column On Living Well

Whether you love or hate Taylor Sheridan shows, the man knows how to a write a monologue.

To be fair, well-written words on life, meaning and the world become even more powerful when delivered by generational actors.

Costner. Stallone. Elliott. Ford. Miren. Thornton.

And now, Kurt Russell is taking his turn in the Sheridan-verse in The Madison.

I’m writing the issue you’re reading now minutes after finishing the first episode.

There are many things to like about the pilot, but one scene in particular caught my attention. A scene where Kurt’s character puts words to something most of us already know but spend a lot of time trying not to think about.

Astonishing where the time goes. I wonder, what do I have, maybe ten, 15 years before I’m too old to do anything more than just remember?

I took Stacy and the kids to this resort in the Caribbean. Rooms are ten grand a night. Villas are thirty. Now... if you quantify making it by the things you can afford, then this place is making it, yeah? We’re sitting there on the beach and watching all these couples walk by. We’re the youngest there by, like, two decades. I mean, everyone’s in their seventies and eighties. Barely waddle across the sand. All covered up in their big hats and their long-sleeved shirts.

They’d made it. But their bodies are too old to enjoy it.

Flew halfway around the world, and they were too old and crippled. Swim the water, run in the sand, make love, none of it.

They finally made it. They were all too old to create a single memory. And they knew it. It was on every one of their faces. Saw them at the restaurant. Same thing. Not a smile among them. ‘Cause they knew.

They worked their whole lives for that moment. The moment had already passed them by.

There’s quite a bit of truth to this sentiment.

Only a fool will deny that there are windows for certain activities in each of our lifetimes. There are things a younger body can do that an older one simply can’t. Windows of adventure, effort, discomfort, and risk do not stay open forever.

This reminds me of a passing moment a few years back in the security line at the Reykjavík airport. I was in the process of returning home from a trip to Iceland when an older man in line behind me struck up a conversation as we weaved in between the security line ropes. He asked where we had been, what we’d seen, what we had gotten into. I asked him the same.

Before we went our separate ways, he told me he was glad to see young people traveling while they still could. He said it was his first trip to Iceland, and coming to a place like this made him realize he had arrived too late for some of the things he would have wanted to do when he was younger and more able.

Many years have passed since then, but I still think about that conversation from time to time. I agree that age closes some doors. But I believe that hesitation closes even more.

I only know this because I have hesitated on many things in my own life, pushing them into a catch all bucket called “next season.”

Every year I tell myself I’m going to start putting in for western hunts. I still have yet to enter a single draw. Every year I say I’m going to start working toward a turkey grand slam. My walls still hold only Eastern fans. There are golf courses I want to play. New states and countries I want to visit. More I want to see, do and accomplish before age or reasons unknown prevent me from getting the full experience.

And yet, year after year, a mix of schedules, responsibilities, logistics, and my own perceived lack of autonomy keeps me from them. These pursuits stay in the category of “things I mean to get to later” when I have more time. More money. More freedom.

Some of these grounding reasons are simply the reality of my current season of life. I have a growing family and an expanding job with real responsibilities to both which results in a life that is not built for nomadic freedom. I don’t wish for anything different, this path is the one I know I’m meant to be on. I would not change it for any other and am actively trying to take advantage of the joys that come from these moments before they’re gone.

But there are still plenty of things I want to do. For me. As an individual.

If we’re being honest, a lot of my hesitation to pursue my personal passions is due to an overwhelming sense of guilt. Guilt for wanting something that is very one-sided. Guilt for feeling pulled toward projects and activities that don’t serve anyone else in any obvious way. Guilt for wanting a few days in the woods or on the water or on the course when I know exactly who I’d be leaving at home.

This is what makes navigating seasons of life so challenging.

The limits are real, but so is the temptation to hide behind them. It is easy to call something “bad timing” when what you really mean is that it feels inconvenient, indulgent, or hard to justify to anyone but you.

I regularly find myself in this mental trap. Reconciling with the idea that seasons can be restrictive without being empty. Dealing with regret that comes from treating imperfect seasons like entirely unusable ones.

I think about the scene from The Madison. Those old souls waited too long for that moment on the beach. But does that mean that they missed out on all of the moments in prior seasons of life? I don’t know.

Circumstances change. Some windows require patience. Some doors close with age. Plenty of others will open. I don’t think the lesson is that youth is the best season, or that life starts running out the minute your knees get bad.

I think the lesson is that every season has something it can offer, and living well requires recognizing what is available to you now instead of waiting around for some other chapter to begin.

If this is a season for building, then build.

If this is a season for young kids, then be with your kids.

If this is a season where adventure has to be shorter, cheaper, closer, and less grand than the version in your head, then let it be smaller and go.

If this is a season for laying roots, stop treating rootedness like punishment.

If this is a season with less freedom but more depth, then recognize depth as a gift instead of complaining about lack of freedom.

Regret does not come from watching a season end or a window close. It comes from the realization that you might have had more room than you thought, more permission than you admitted, and sat around waiting for the next season instead of living well in the one you’re in now.

Live Well. Tell No One.

THE MARGIN

A Few Things That Grabbed My Attention This Week

34 Small Ways to Maximize Your Life

’s latest post over on LIVE A LITTLE makes a strong case for taking ordinary pleasures more seriously. Leave the phone away at concerts, listening to albums straight through, become a regular somewhere, and use all your vacation days, even if you’re not going anywhere.

A good reminder that a well-lived life can usually be found buried under small habits that make you more present, less optimized, and slightly harder to reach.

LIVE A LITTLE

34 Small Ways to Maximize Your Life

LIVE A LITTLE is a style and lifestyle journal for the adventurous man—written from the pen of a full-time menswear copywriter…

Read more

5 months ago · 71 likes · 5 comments · John Thompson

AI is coming whether you’re ready or not

This article from Forbes represents a solid take on the AI conversation worth paying attention to. I find myself getting pretty tired with the “AI will replace everyone” panic, as well as with the “humans and art will always win out” optimism. Like most things, I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. Regardless of whether you live off the grid or take a driverless car to work in the morning, our shared world is already shifting under our feet due to artificial intelligence.

Shun it all you want, but it will still reach you all the same.

The deeper issue is not simply employment but meaning. A society in which vast numbers of people struggle to find work that is steady, economically viable, socially valued, and personally fulfilling will face pressures far beyond the labor market.

Read More HERE

America 250 buckets at Home Depot

I’m a big fan of a good bucket. Saw these beauties at Home Depot yesterday in celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. Check ‘em out.

The case for being bad at your hobbies

Pulling this idea from ’s Weekly Review this week. Jake linked an article from InsideHook highlighting the fact that your hobbies don’t need to go anywhere. They don’t need to be logged or measured to “count.” This is a useful confirmation for anyone who has accidentally turned a passing interest into a side quest for self-improvement.

Some things should stay mediocre, private, and pointless. That’s part of their value.

STANDARDS

Concepts & Vibes For Your Consideration

The Field Review is a weekly newsletter exploring the art of living well.

Every Sunday at 10AM EST, I share ideas, insights, and conversations that help break through the noise, offering a real look at how we can all keep moving forward.

Venture Onward,

Jack

Leave a comment