Everything Matters

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another. - Ernest Hemingway

I was once honored with a most inspiring lecture early last semester in one of my entrepreneurship classes. We were discussing the practice of skill development over time and were told how paying attention to the details of developing skills, framing certain thinking-patterns and hardwiring your personal decision-making model can, over time, allow you to do powerful things when the opportunity presents itself.

Since we were also discussing idea generation, a few of us mentioned how we had thoughts for products that very common today many many years before their time. The reason why we weren't able to act on those ideas was due to the fact that we just didn't have the skills and knowledge to make it a reality. What my professor said next, will stay with me forever:

"Laird Hamilton, as you may know, is a professional big wave surfer. He got to be that way because his biological father left him at the age of four, which caused his mother to move them both to Hawaii. Wandering the beach at a young age, he had a chance meeting with the man who would eventually become his adoptive father, pro-surfer Bill Hamilton. In wanting to please his would-be adoptive father, he took up surfing and continued surfing nearly every waking moment of his life. To the point that he was surfing in amateur competitions before the age of ten and pro competitions in his teens - later setting his sights on big wave surfing. After a lifetime commitment to skill development within surfing he went on to conquer a wave that was never considered possible to ride.

According to Moore's Law, technology will double every seven years. Subsequently, every seven years, a sinlge product will enter the market that significant shifts the paradigm in which society operates within. Shifts it to the point that the very discourse of society through history is altered permanently because the rules about what is possible have been rewritten.


I tell you all this because some time in your life you will come across one, if you are truly gifted maybe two, paradigm-shifting ideas that have the potential to rewrite the rules and shift the historical discourse of society. Often, that wave has formed before you even know that you are on it. To ride that wave, to make that impossible idea a reality, will require you to do something that could never be taught, something that could never have known to prepare for. Whether or not you succeed a combination of a few things: which skills you decide to develop, a lifetime commitment to developing those skills and your ability to come up with the perfect answer to a problem that no one ever thought possible."


Needless to say, my mind was blown. Shortly before walking out of that class room, wondering how I was going to possibly focus on my job at work, my professor showed us this video of Laird Hamilton surfing the impossible Teahupoo to further drill the lesson into us.

Go watch the video, think about what Laird says at the end of the clip about risking his life, and then think about what skills you are developing (whether you intend to or not). Are you knowingly committing yourself to skills that will prepare you for project that may very well define you? Or are you unknowingly developing a skill set that negatively alters your life (shifting blame to circumstances/others, avoiding anything unpleasant, not doing work and then complaining about why you shouldn't be held accountable)?

Think about it. Post your thoughts below.