Frustrated and Disillusioned? It's Normal

Let’s face it; we have all been there. We get frustrated because we are stuck and can’t figure out a sign and are about ready to bury the metal detector and head for the air conditioning. It happens to everybody, even the best of the professional treasure hunters experience it. They just don’t admit it as much as we do.

Now, what do you do about it? The first thing is to take a deep breath and relax. There’s no reason to have a stroke about it. The second thing is to remember you are dealing with interpretations of symbols and clues that are 100 years old or more. This should bring everything back into perspective a little. To paraphrase an old Zen saying, “to find what you are looking for you must stop looking for it”. In a way this is partially correct.

Once you’re finished with the Zen stuff the next thing to do is take a break from the site (hence the Zen phrase). If you have another site you are working on then go spend some time on it and ignore the one where you are stuck. If you don’t have another site then do some research and find another site. Something else to do is dig out an old treasure map or find one on the internet or in a book and try to decipher the symbols on the map. Basically, you are still treasure hunting but you are letting you mind get away from what it was stuck on. After a week or two or even a month or two go back to the site where you were stuck and see what happens. Remember, if that treasure has been there for 100 or even 400 years, it’s probably still going to be there in a couple of months.

I have found that working on another site gives my mind a change of things to think about which changes the way I think. I routinely switch back and forth between outlaw sites and Spanish sites. These two types of sites for the most part work differently than each other so my mind has to switch gears and think differently at each type of site. When I go back to the old site and switch gears again I usually get a fresh or different perspective on what I was looking at before and for the most part I am able to figure out what I was stuck on and move on along the trail.

If you have another treasure hunter you know and trust you could run some things by them or even ask a question on one of the forums. You don’t have to be specific about where you are looking when you post on a forum and you are probably going to get more “answers” than you know what to do with. However, out of all of those answers you may just get some information that fits your site and helps you out.

“It’s not what you look at, but what you see”