Note to readers:
When I ended my athletic career at 19, I was left with a big void to fill. Growing up, I’d always been an active person. When I wasn’t training or competing, hobbies (read: obsessions) like skiing and snowboarding occupied most of my existence.
Around the same, I had also drifted away from some of those other obsessions. I felt empty – but I always knew my physicality would play a major role in my life. So I went on a bit of a quest, eventually finding my way back to skiing, and more recently, discovering my latest obsession: surfing.
This is (part of) the story of how that happened, along with surprisingly deep lessons I’ve been able to pick up in the process of learning how to surf.
Life is funny. We spend much of it searching for the things that will make us happy and fulfilled. Then, when we find one such thing, it’s usually like discovering a part of us that was there all along…
I was 28 years old when I first tried surfing. Compared to skiing (my other main obsession), which I’ve been doing since my legs were so short my butt barely cleared the ground, learning to surf has been a vastly different experience.
My background — which we’ll get into later — enabled me to effectively analyze and deconstruct this complex activity and learn fast (I was catching 6+ foot waves in Costa Rica within two weeks of self-study).
More profoundly, though, I couldn’t help but consider surfing from a philosophical perspective (I do have the same personality type as Thoreau, Confucious, and Plato, after all).
As I progress in this beautiful sport, I increasingly find that surfing is in many ways the perfect metaphor for life. There are deep truths hidden in the pursuit of catching waves that can help us better understand how life really works, and how to live it well.
Life Comes In Waves
Sir Richard Branson, the legendary entrepreneur, has a well-known saying: “Opportunities are like busses — there is always another one coming.”
The more I think about surfing (and life), the more accurate this analogy seems instead: opportunities are like waves.
There is always another wave coming. But unlike buses, waves are unique in shape and size, and they don’t arrive on a regular schedule or at an exact location. Some days there are no waves coming in at all.
This is exactly how life works — it comes at you in waves.
Your job is to catch the right ones.
If you catch the wrong wave, it might be an OK ride. But now you are stuck on that wave, which means you might not be in the right place at the right time to catch the wave of your life.
Indeed, when the right wave comes rolling in, you want to be ready. The bigger the wave, the more skill, courage, and determination you’ll need to catch it.
If you’re not ready, it will either pass you by or make you crash violently.
That’s OK though, as long as you analyze what happened, get back on the board, paddle out, and try again.
Take a Breath
“Panic was the first step, everybody said, to drowning.”
– William Finnegan, Barbarian Days (from his early years surfing in 1960’s Hawaii).
Sometimes when you’re out in the water, a big set of waves comes in at the worst possible time, and you get caught in between.
Anyone who’s tried surfing knows this feeling all too well; you get held down by one wave, then right when you get back to the surface, the next wave lands on your head and here you go again…
When this happens, the last thing you want to do is try to fight the waves.
They will beat you.
The right approach is to accept the situation you’re in, take a deep deep breath, and wait for the right opportunity to break out.
When the moment arrives, you must seize it immediately and give everything you have to get the hell out of there and back to the lineup where you can catch your breath and regroup.
The same goes for any tough situation in life. Denial, acting prematurely, or flailing around in panic will do nothing but waste your energy, leaving you in an even worse position.
Instead, take a breath. Accept the situation you are in. Stay calm and focus on the basics: eat well, exercise, and get enough sun and fresh air.
Wait…
As Ryan Holiday writes: “don’t just do something, stand there!”
When the right opportunity presents itself, put all your energy behind it, and break out.
Spend Time in The Water
Before you can catch any wave — in life or in the water — you first need to acquire the necessary skillset.
You start with the basics; how to lie on the board, how to paddle, how to “duck”-dive under the waves so you can paddle out without getting washed back in.
The better you learn the basics, the faster you will progress later on. Quality is what matters, but quantity is usually a part of the path to quality.
A lot of us today want to skip over this reality. We are so focused on the idea of getting the wave that we forget the process required to get there. We want the wave before we are ready — before we have earned the ride.
Instead of humbly immersing ourselves in the process, we often engage in what I call posturing: doing everything around the activity but not the activity itself.
I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone. When I get obsessed with something, I often go into full nerd mode on the “stuff” associated with that thing. After I found surfing, for example, I immediately started watching surf videos, comparing different surfboards, wetsuits, etc.
A younger me might have stopped there, never actually getting around to the real work of learning how to surf well.
But this time, I also knew what many people keep missing: to get good at surfing, the only thing that would truly matter is time in the water.
By that I mean the time I spend on my surfboard, in the water, engaged in the perpetual loop of challenging my upper limits, analyzing the results, looking for improvements, and implementing my conclusions.
Sure, I could focus on getting fitter or buying a better surfboard. But all such things account for only the tiniest sliver in the Pareto distribution.
Time in the water is all that really matters.
Let Your People Go Surfing
Spending time in the water doesn’t end with the activity itself. If you truly want to get good at something, it’s equally important to consider the people who are in the water with you.
When I first tried surfing, I was fortunate to be in Costa Rica. I could watch all the pro surfers there and imitate them. That put my learning on hyperspeed.
I’ve never liked the notion of “you are the sum of the five people you associate most with”. But there is a stinging amount of truth to it. As
wrote: we first shape our environment, and then it shapes us — often more than any other factor.Personally, this has been the biggest weakness so far in my life and career — I’m a bit of a lone wolf.
But even if you go at something alone, there are many ways — especially now with online communities coming back in fashion — to immerse yourself with people who are weird in the same way as you.
That can make all the difference. Do not wait.
Talent vs. Process
I went to Costa Rica with the two co-founders of my company. One of them was a complete beginner, just like me.
I learned quickly — after surfing every day for a week and a half, I was able to make it out to the lineup (i.e. the “wave-catching”-zone) and navigate some pretty serious waves. By the end of our five-week trip, I felt like I had been surfing for years.
For my co-founder, it was a different story. He never managed to paddle out to the lineup during the entire trip. Instead, he was stuck inside the “whitewater” getting pounded by the waves. As the trip progressed, he got more and more discouraged and spent less and less time in the water.
Part of the reason I was able to learn fast was the total immersion of our existence in Costa Rica. Life there was simple. We literally came to surf and work. And apart from a few weekend adventures, that’s all we did. We’d wake up, work for a few hours, surf, work again, and then sometimes go for a second surf in the late afternoon.
I think this is rare for most people trying to learn something new in today’s world. Life is complicated, and there are so many distractions.
But still, this doesn’t explain why my co-founder and I had such different trajectories.
Most people would assume I had more talent for surfing. And maybe that’s true. But it’s also entirely the wrong way to look at it. Yes, talent is real. Obviously. But it’s vastly overrated and misunderstood.
Here are some things that actually were true about our situation:
I was a multi-sport elite athlete growing up. Having spent a much bigger portion of my life doing diverse physical activities allowed me to develop more kinetic intelligence.
As a kid, I watched countless hours of surfing videos. This meant I already had the surfing movement patterns programmed in my brain (I really wanted to watch snowboarding, but this was OG television, so I often got surfing instead).
I was obsessively process-focused. I broke down every part of surfing and made a plan for learning each part. My co-founder went at it unconsciously, with no process and no plan.
I reached an early inflection point. I was able to paddle out to the lineup. This gave me access to unbroken waves so I could start practicing surfing for real. My co-founder was stuck in the whitewater and never got access to that opportunity.
Finally, I was much more motivated than him. I knew in my heart I wanted to learn surfing. The gravity of the earth pulled me towards this activity.
The last point is by far the most significant. Some call it intuition. Others call it obsession. Whatever it is that leads you to the thing you’re supposed to be doing in that exact time and place — that’s what I had with surfing.
When you’re motivated like that, you pay attention to details at a whole other level. You have more stamina. You throw yourself wholeheartedly into the activity with an intensity that other people can’t begin to know, much less sustain.
Conclusion: what we mistake as talent is often just a combination of process and the gift of motivation. Indeed, the biggest talent you can have is being truly motivated to do something.
Embrace Discomfort
One thing I love about surfing is how serious it is. As in — if you surf a big wave and make a mistake — you could die.
This “rawness” of surfing really pushes you. When you’re in a cozy gym, for example, it’s easy to skip that last set or rep. But when hundreds of tons of cold water is barreling towards you, it doesn’t matter how tired you are. You just keep paddling.
And herein lies another lesson: if you want to catch a bigger wave in your life, you’re always going to be uncomfortable — discomfort is baked into the experience of growth.
Most people know this. But still, most of us are afraid of discomfort. And why wouldn’t we be? Cold, hunger, fear — these were the evolutionary conditions that enabled us to survive and thrive. So we learned to treasure the rare moments of comfort.
Now, that dynamic has been turned on its head. But the essence of reality is still the same: on the other side of discomfort lies opportunity and growth.
It sounds cliche. But if you can embrace discomfort — almost make it your friend — you will have a leg up on 99% of people, even some who are more successful than you, simply because they have let themselves get comfortable.
Always Be The Student
In Costa Rica, there was a strange phenomenon: every single day, most people — locals and tourists alike — dropped what they were doing to go to the beach and watch the sunset.
It’s a peculiar tradition. But it also makes total sense. There was something special about the sunsets there. Even on cloudy days, the sun always seemed to come peeking out in the final hours, reassuring everyone there that yes, this was paradise.
I’ll never forget that first sunset on the beach in Costa Rica, watching silhouettes of surfers catching the last waves of the day.
As I was standing there, two paths were available to me. I could either marvel at the beauty, appreciate being there, and study the more experienced surfers — so I could understand what I needed to do to one day become like them. Or I could focus on how scary those powerful waves are. How I’d never be able to be as good as those other surfers. How they were just lucky to have grown up surfing or have some unique talent that I don’t have.
The latter represents a fixed mindset. The former represents a growth mindset.
Take the former approach to everything in life — always be the student.
Achieving Mastery
Once you master surfing, the game changes. You’re no longer just holding on to each wave for dear life, trying not to fall. Instead, you have room to express yourself. You take “unnecessary” risks for no other reason than to create beauty. You paint your lines on the wave.
You also have optionality. You can choose to play around on smaller waves. Or you can seek out huge waves that push you toward your limit. When you catch a wave, you can stay on it for as long as it goes. Or you can choose to kick out early to look for a different option or share the wave with someone else.
Indeed, mastery in any aspect of life is defined by the transcendence of any rules or limitations. It’s pure self-expression.
To be a master, you must always stay the student.