Cameron R. Hanes - Endure: How to Work Hard, Outlast, and Keep Hammering

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W eakness haunts all men. All of them.

Im not talking necessarily about physical weakness, like being too weak to lift heavy things. No, Im talking about the real weakness: weakness of spirit.

Weakness of will.

The inability to take action.

That is what eats at a man. Some will tell you they dont care, and theyll make convincing arguments that they enjoy being lazy, but if you could be alone with them, offering them a pill that would give them an indomitable spirit and a tireless will to succeed, they would all take it.

All of them.

Every last fucking one of them.

Weakness haunts us all.

The times we could have done more eat at your self-esteem. They rob you of your self-respect and diminish your belief in your potential.

Weve all had moments where we could have done more but didnt.

The true art of a full life is to minimize those moments when your inner bitch wins the battle and maximizes your ability to rise and grind.

There is an art to this.

Unfortunately, most of us dont treat our lives like a work of art.

The vast majority of us will leave this life like an unfinished canvasa dim shadow of what we could have been if we had dedicated ourselves to mastering the mind, and consistently forcing the body into action.

We will apply some effort when the motivation is there, but more often than not, we find an excuse to nap and complain, rather than to push ourselves to perform past the threshold our comfort zone.

It is a very rare person who can lie down at the end of a day with full confidence that they have done their absolute best, and an even rarer person that can do that consistently, day after day, year after year, until the days of laziness and self-pity are but a distant memory, drowned out by the years and years of action and discipline.

There is an art to this, and one of the modern masters of this art is my good friend Cameron Hanes.

To the uninitiated, a quick glance into his Instagram page would reveal a bowhunter who enjoys lifting weights and running trails. But to truly understand Cam requires a much more careful and prolonged study. He is a master at one of the art forms that gets the least amount of attentionthe art of the maximized life. In this work, layers upon layers of effort and discipline create a depth and texture to the life thats lost during a cursory examination by a person who doesnt know what theyre seeing. It is an art form, with only the people who are also out there grinding truly understanding and appreciating how amazing this consistent effort is.

Look up the hashtag #keephammering on Instagram.

As of this writing, therere more than 449,000 posts, all of them inspired by the way Cameron Hanes lives his life.

In his world there are no days off. Days you are not getting better are days wasted.

The hammering never ends, and the inner bitch never has a chance.

Many people talk this kind of talk.

In fact, pretending youre a savage is disgustingly common.

Many of these posers will post motivational quotes on social media and even give out unsolicited advice on how to chase your dreams and follow your goals, but my guess is that if you could randomly peer into their lives, you would probably catch most of these motherfuckers eating snacks and checking their posts for likes.

One of my favorite Cam Hanes quotes is Nobody cares, work harder.

Its such a perfect statement for this day and age when grown men are using beauty filters on their Instagram pictures, and everyone is pretending theyre exceptional. We live in a world today where its never been easier to be full of shit. But on the flip side, the beauty of this time is that when you come across someone whos truly, undeniably smashing life, you appreciate it like a starving man being served up a juicy elk steak.

Im going to describe some of the things he does, and the list is so preposterous that it seems like bullshit.

He regularly runs a marathon a day.

I read once that if you run a marathon it takes your body six months to fully recover. I dont know who wrote that, but someone needs to tell that silly bitch that theres a guy in Oregon with a full-time job with the department of water and power who runs multiple marathons every week. Sometimes hell get up at 3:00 a.m. and run a full marathon before work. Then hell come home from working eight hours, practice archery, lift weights, and do it all over again the next morning.

Hes run multiple 100-mile races and several over 200 miles. These require days and days of running without rest. Tune into his Instagram a few days after hes back from one of these self-imposed, soul-crushing torture sessions and youll see him with a big smile on his face running again or hitting the weights.

Now, if you told me ten years ago that there was a guy out there doing all this while holding down a full-time job and a family, I would have looked at you the way Id look at someone who tells me their best friend is Bigfoot.

Maybe I would have believed theres someone out there who can do all this, but I would have assumed theyre some science project being constantly fed performance-enhancing drugs by a team of doctors monitoring his body around the clock to make sure he doesnt drop dead from overexertion. But if you had told me that all this was being done by some smiling bowhunter with a forty-hour-a-week job, I would have told you to get the fuck outta here with that nonsense.

It doesnt seem possible, but yet its a fact. What is perhaps even more impressive is that while hes doing all these things, hes also managed to become the best bowhunter on earth.

You see, thats where this whole Cameron Hanes story gets even more unusual. His obsession with physical performance is purely to ensure that he is at his best for his real passion: bowhunting elk in the mountains.

Hunting for wild elk in the mountains with a bow is an incredibly difficult thing to be successful at. The terrain is rugged, and the elk have senses honed to a razors edge by millions of years of evolution.

It requires you to get inside of 100 yards undetected on an animal that has been avoiding mountain lions, bears, and wolves for its entire life, and then, under extreme pressure, to release a perfect arrow into the animals vitals.

Because of all these factors, success rates for archery elk hunting are quite low. The average is somewhere below 10 percent.

Even elite hunters will often come home empty-handed.