Life before Wolf Creek Angler

The other day my 12-year-old son asked if he could interview me for a homework assignment. The interview consisted of half a dozen questions pertaining to a major goal I had as a teen and how I modified my life to meet that goal. Pondering his questions, I felt like a bit of a loser because I really couldn’t think of any big goals I had at that stage of my life. My goals at that time were fairly short-sighted and I guess had more to do with what I knew I didn’t want to do rather than what I wanted to spend my life doing. He was tactful enough to coach me through the interview and we were able to come up with some acceptable answers but it got me thinking about how we, as a society,  tend to put a lot of emphasis on having big career goals.  Not to say that this is a bad thing,  I just think there are a lot of young people who choose their career paths based on financial gain in an effort to secure the trappings of success as defined by our consumer culture. Once again, I am fully engaged in our consumer culture and I have nothing bad to say about wanting to get lots of stuff but I have also reached a point in my life where the stuff doesn’t mean as much as it once did and I think there are many who arrive at this same place but are trapped by the lifestyle they have chosen and long for something simpler.

So back to goals. I chose to pursue a degree (not a career) in journalism because writing came fairly easily to me and I thought it might be kind of cool to be a reporter. It was never really a goal though, just something I thought would be kinda sorta ok to do for a living. With that kind of passion it will come as no surprise that my career in journalism went nowhere. In fact the one goal I had which I referenced above was to not work in the family business which happened to be an iron foundry.  Guess where I ended up?

Twenty some years later I found what it means to have a goal and I did what I could to accomplish that goal and here I am – living in Montana, co-owning/operating a fly shop, guiding on the Missouri River, pursuing an outfitting business and as tired and as cliché as it sounds….living the dream, my dream and feeling incredibly blessed to have such an opportunity. It is not lost on me that many may not ever be in a position to realize a dream or pursue a goal such as this, I get it. That being said, we all make choices in life and the choices we make play a huge role in determining where we will end up.

I spent 20 some years on the treadmill and finally set a goal after my dream was revealed to me in the form of an email my wife forwarded to me while I was out on the water one summer night. For some reason she had been poking around looking at ranch properties for sale in Montana and the last listing she found on the particular website she was looking at happened to be for a fly shop. I opened that email the next day at work and it all became clear to me – finally I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was on the phone with the listing agent that afternoon and shortly thereafter we were on a plane to Bozeman to see if we couldn’t buy ourselves a fly shop. It didn’t happen with that particular shop, but it set in motion  the course which eventually led to us leave life as we had known it in Michigan to come to Montana and make a new life for ourselves. We arrived here with a goal and a willingness to do whatever we had to do to accomplish that goal and lo and behold, things happened just as they were supposed to (by no design of our own) and here we are.

That’s my .02 concerning goals.

See you in the shop and on the water.   ~Jason O.