#109 – John Dudley: The beauty in archery, the love of practice, and a model system for life

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Dudley turned down a Division I football scholarship to build arrows

  A 6'5" quarterback recruit, he walked away one week into school to work in an archery shop for $4.10 an hour. Attia calls it one of the craziest decisions a college athlete could make. Dudley says he never looked back. Even in moments of rage when he broke arrows and threw his bow, his self-talk was that something had beaten him that day and wouldn't tomorrow.

• 02

  He loves archery because it's hard

  Dudley learned archery at 9 and first bowhunted at 10. When he struggled to explain why he loved it, his friend Andy Stumpf, a retired Navy SEAL, told him the answer was all over his personality: some days you're good at it and some days you aren't. The sport keeps offering a next level, which is what keeps him coming back after burning out.

• 03

  The only arrows you control are the ones still in your quiver

  An early coach asked whether anyone could pull a bad arrow back from the five ring to the shooting line. Since no one can, he told Dudley to let it go. Dudley began literally talking to the arrows in his quiver, asking which one would shoot a 12 to make up the points. Attia calls it a metaphor for life: you can't turn back time, only shape the next shot.

• 04

  Every world-class performer Attia has met loves practice

  Attia lists Lance Armstrong, who teammates say wanted more at the end of a six-hour ride; Apolo Ohno, whose appetite for training continued ten years after the Olympics; and Ayrton Senna. The common thread is loving to practise deliberately and correctly, which Attia doesn't think anyone reaches an exceptional level without. Dudley trained at all hours, sometimes because insomnia gave him a reason to get up.

• 05

  Compound and recurve bows load energy differently

  Olympic recurves get heavier through the whole draw, so a strong recurve archer holds about 50 pounds at full draw. A compound's cams make the weight peak early, around 70 pounds on Dudley's bow, and then drop off. That makes it easier to hold steady at full draw and stores more energy. His bow shoots about 292 feet per second, close to 100 mph, so an arrow takes about half a second to travel 50 yards.

• 06

  Elite accuracy over a football field's length

  At 90 meters, roughly from one goal line to the opposite one-yard line, Dudley estimates most professional archers would land about eight of ten arrows inside the 10 ring, which is roughly the diameter of a large coffee mug (about three to four inches).

• 07

  Hyperfocus and flow may be linked to attention differences

  Dudley describes ADD-like traits: he's easily distracted, yet he can lock in so completely that a song played on repeat for an hour and a half without him noticing. Near the end of his competitive career he began reading sports psychology to see whether such hyperfocus helps athletes reach flow. He offers this as a personal question, not an established finding.

• 08

  Great performers are rarely great teachers, and Dudley is both

  Attia notes how little overlap there is between the top 1% of doers and the top 1% of teachers. Dudley credits former Mr. Olympia Frank Zane, who had worked as a teacher and who coached him on presentation. The key technique is relating a skill to something the student already knows, such as Formula 1 for Attia or SEAL training for Jocko Willink. Attia believes someone could get 60–70% of a coach's benefit from Dudley's videos alone.

• 09

  Honest selling is rare and valuable

  Attia says he can buy anything Dudley recommends without wondering about kickbacks, which he considers hard for anyone to manage, since incentives work even subconsciously. Dudley, who runs the education side of a business while his wife runs the e-commerce side, says he can spot ventures run without that integrity fail quickly.

• 10

  Hunting raised the stakes of every shot

  Attia took up archery only to shoot paper, a skill where you can spend a lifetime chasing the last 20% of improvement. Once he began hunting, a miss on paper hurt more, because the same miss in the field could wound an animal and make it suffer. Dudley argues that ethical hunting means knowing exactly where your meat came from, funding conservation through tags and not relying on commercial farming.