Mushrooms!
We’re in the midst of mushroom hunting season here in mid-Missouri, which means that the crazy guy with the knife wearing the Capital Camp hat (May 21!) walking slowly through the woods out by the river at six in the morning is me. Mushroom hunting wasn’t anything I’d done before we moved to mid-Missouri, but I picked it up as a hobby as part of the whole “if we were going to move to Missouri, we were going to move to Missouri” thing. Plus, one of our neighbors was pretty sure I could never find as many as he does and, well, I do still have a bit of a competitive streak in me.
Anyway, Holly, after stumbling across a cryptic post on my X nee Twitter page, asked me about hunting mushrooms the other day and how I did it. Suffice it to say that there isn’t a lot you can learn from others about hunting mushrooms. That’s because people are secretive about their spots and techniques since the season is short, supply is limited, and the little guys are both valuable and delicious. My aforementioned neighbor, for example, after challenging me, had no interest in showing me the ropes (and I don’t blame him).
So five years ago I googled the basics and then spent a lot of hours walking slowly through the woods near my house finding very few (14 to be exact…I have a spreadsheet).
Fast-forward to today and I found many more than that in my first hour of hunting this season. Why? Because now I know where to look!
See, morels have a tendency to spring up in the same areas as they have in the past. Not always, of course, but your probability of finding one is much higher if you are looking in a place where you found one before than if you’re looking in a place where you haven’t. And every year I’ve looked, I’ve found at least one new place to look, which means that five years into the hobby I now have more than a few “spots” (shoutout compounding).
Because every time I go out, I don’t just go to the spots I know will yield. Instead, I also set aside at least 30 minutes (depending on how much time I have) to look in spots I’ve never looked in before, in spots I’ve looked in before because they seem like they should be promising from a moisture/soil/sun/leaf cover perspective, but that haven’t previously yielded anything, and in spots where I may have once seen a crazy person slowly walking through the woods in April. The reason being “just in case” and also because I always want to be adding to my spots in case one of my spots goes away (which happened a few years ago when a particularly good one flooded over).
And when I explained this, someone who was listening in (I can’t remember who) said, “Aha! 20% time!”
If you don’t recall, 20% Time is Google’s (perhaps apocryphal) policy that full-time Googlers spend 20% of their day doing something that isn’t proven, but is instead high potential. To apply this to small business, I previously recommended to “Keep a list of everything your business might do to grow…but force rank them based on potential and only tackle one or two at a time” and to “watch competitors…like a hawk and be shameless about trying things they are doing that might be working.”
All of this is to say that I was subconsciously treating my hobby like it was one of our businesses, and when I realized that, I realized I might be a little sick.
-Tim
