This year is going to be harder than last year.

Deer densities are down. And to be clear, that’s a good thing. That has always been the plan.

Our mission is to help balance Axis deer populations and if we are doing our job well, harvesting should get harder over time, not easier.

I just didn’t fully appreciate how hard it would get.

When deer densities are high, opportunities are abundant and sometimes even accidental. You can take a less-than-perfect route, forget a piece of equipment, make a little too much noise, and still create enough harvest opportunity in a night to reach our mission goals. The system is forgiving.

As densities drop in the areas we help to manage, that margin for error disappears.

To create and execute on enough opportunities, we now have to be better. Every route matters. Every position matters. Every decision matters. One small breakdown is enough for the opportunity to never exist at all.

Functionally, this means more excellence to achieve the same result. And I believe the speed at which a team learns to excel is largely determined by one thing.

Focus.

The ability to focus amplifies learning and shortens the time it takes to improve.

Lots of teams talk about focus, but very few ever define it. And almost no one trains it.

So we did.

We defined focus as presence plus action.

Presence without action is awareness. Action without presence is sloppiness. Real focus requires both, every time.

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So over the holiday break, I tried to come up with the most difficult focus challenge I could imagine.

At our first team meeting of the year, I had everyone pass around a sealed box. I didn’t explain anything at first. I just talked about finding one of the hardest problems I could think of that would require extreme focus from everyone.

After everyone had their turn shaking the box, I handed it to our visiting mission partner and Holo ʻAi guest, Jon Bier, CEO and Founder of Jack Taylor PR. I asked him to take a look and tell me what he thought.

He cracked the lid, peeked inside, closed it a little too quickly, and then froze. He stared straight ahead for an uncomfortably long amount of time. A look of genuine concern spread across his face. He shook his head and passed the box back to me without saying a word.

Things were tense.

I asked if they were ready to see what was inside. Then I dumped a pile of socks out of the box and onto the floor. There were audible gasps and several explicit comments. Why would socks create such a dramatic response?

Because they know me, they know us. And they knew that whatever came next, whatever explanation justified a pile of socks, was going to be hard. But we are used to hard things around here.

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Maybe it’s because I can never find a matching pair in my own house. Maybe it’s because sometimes I truly believe the dryer eats them. Two go in, one comes out.

Either way, solving socks felt almost impossible. Those are my favorite kinds of problems.

At our team meeting, each team member received four identical pairs. That’s 320 identical socks in one small place.

They are required to wear them every night as part of their uniform. For every sock lost over the next 60 days, it costs five dollars per sock, paid by the whole team.

One missing sock costs the team one hundred dollars.

(Kuʻu, my wife and our Co-founder, is requiring me to mention that she was adamantly opposed to this exercise. She called it pure evil AND impossible. It's probably because she does most [all] of the laundry in our house.)

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To win the challenge is simple. Be present with your socks. Take action to make sure you don’t lose one.

We’re 12 days in. Everyone still has their socks. There have only been a few scares, but we’re winning.

And if we can bring that level of focus to the literal least valuable item in our operation, what else can we improve this year?

What other metaphorical sock can we decide matters?

The answer is anything.

Good luck out there,