On Surfing

XXXIV

2024.02.18

I can surf now… kind of. I’m not great, but I can swim out with a board and sometimes stand up on it as I ride a wave back to shore. 

I can also spin out and get thrashed around by waves, but I don’t really mind that part.

Disclaimer: I am not a surfer. I don’t know “surfer jargon,” although I quickly started increasing the frequency with which I said “rad,” “sah dude,” and “totally, bro,” among other stereotypical surfer phrases. 

Into the Fire

As mentioned last week, myself and a couple of the guys I’m staying with in Costa Rica wanted to learn how to surf. While we entertained the idea of lessons, we thought there was a much better way to learn: rent boards and see what happened. 

This is really an extension of the last post on risk. Learning anything new is full of risks, but a useful frame for me is mitigating them to as low of level as you can and then accepting an impossibly high quantity of failure. 

Dry Run

We were staying in Playas Hermosa, near Jacó. The waves there can get quite intense, certainly not beginner friendly.

We seriously considered surfing there, but we first spent a couple days getting reps in body surfing to get a feel for what the waves could be like. And boy oh boy, they could get wicked, even at the first break and without a board.

The conditions were bad enough to deter us from seriously considering surfing at that beach. One of our band of brothers did go out with a board and almost immediately came back in. 

Going out there would have been seriously dangerous, perhaps even fatally dangerous. We like taking risk, but this would’ve been stupid. So, we rewrote the parameters of the experience by relocating to a much safer beach.

Enter Jacó

About a 15 minute drive from Playas Hermosa lies Jacó, a bustling little town full of vice but surprisingly removed from danger. Like most of Costa Rica outside of the major cities, if there is any criminal element beyond the drug dealers wandering the beach, you’d have to go looking for it. 

More important for our case, not only was this where we rented the surf boards from, but the surfing here was much more tame and reasonable. While some of the waves would get a little larger, we had rented a couple of longer boards and largely focused on riding the smaller waves near the first break. 

I only had two full sessions out there, probably three hours of surfing total. Before the first one, another guy who had went out the day before me explained to me how to stand up. We spent maybe 10 minutes practicing a get up drill on the sand. I wasn’t sure if I would need it that day, but I ended up trying it out real time.

By the end of the first session, I had stood up a couple of times, once for about three seconds. The first time I stood up, I don’t think I actually believed it. While I had successfully caught a wave without trying to stand up a few times by then, and then had fallen a number of times after giving the stand up a go, this time, my feet actually landed properly on the board below me, and I got up for about three seconds. 

The first win was critical, because after that, I knew I could do it.

During the second session, I stood up for as long as seven seconds, perhaps longer on another go. When I thought I would fall off the board, I started moving with it and staying up. The feeling was electric.

That second time, I stood up maybe a dozen times total. I have no idea what my success rate for getting on my feet was, but it wasn’t very high. That didn’t matter, though, because I just kept going–I was almost indifferent to the cost of failure.

Rapid Iteration

I’ve said in the past that I have the easiest time learning when I can get rapid iterations in quite quickly and repeatedly with some sort of feedback loop. Jiu Jitsu, coding, acting, writing, and sales are all pretty good for that, in the sense that you can rapidly get reps in with what you’re doing and get immediate feedback. Surfing is similar on this axis: you can try something and then try it again, slightly differently. 

These are, in all honesty, my favorite kinds of risks to take, as they can be incredibly low cost.

If you break down a program enough into functions, you can rapidly try out different ways to write it, and if it doesn’t work, you write it again. If you are surfing, you can try going under a wave of a particular size and form, and if that doesn’t work, the next time you see one like that, maybe you try going over it. The worst that can happen is a little wipe out. 

I will take that kind of risk all day. It’s pretty bounded, and if there is a worst case scenario, like you going under and the board hitting you in the head, there are a lot of ways to mitigate that being a problem, including starting in relatively calm waters, keeping a leash on your board, increasing lung capacity, staying calm if you’re underwater, being a competent swimmer, and making sure there are other surfers near by. And, well, not surfing at Playas Hermosa.

If you can get over the hurdle of any “fake cost,” like the discomfort of the board on your stomach or the water in your eyes, the human on your chest in the case of bjj, the people watching you while you’re acting, the annoyance of rewriting mediocre code, or the general fear of rejection of all sorts as an entrepreneur, you’re seriously unstoppable. 

The amount of times I fell down when trying to get up on the board, or, even worse, got flipped backwards when trying to swim out to a break, was nauseatingly high. 

I seriously don’t care, though. I almost love it, because I know every failure brought me closer to standing up.

What Would Jesus Do

A very useful Christian refrain is to ask, “What would Jesus do?” I’m quite a fan of the underlying heuristic this implies–when in doubt, take guidance from someone who is more wise or experienced than you on the relevant axis. 

In entrepreneurship, I just copy some mix of Peter Thiel, Alex Hormozi, and Alex Karp, with quite a few other people mixed in there at smaller proportions. 

The great thing about surfing is that, at least in Costa Rica, there’s almost always, without fail, a surfer dude who looks like Jesus: slim, tan, and with long hair. So, I could keep the Christian heuristic as is with no mutations. If I found myself behind a fella who looked like Jesus, I would just ask myself, “What would Jesus do?” I would copy whatever tactics he was using to get out to the break, or watch what kind of waves he took, how long he rode them, etc.

There is an obvious limitation of this: Jesus would always be in a much different part of his surfing journey than I am, so, sometimes, it would make sense for me to take waves that weren’t good enough for him, just so I could get reps in.

Still, you can learn a lot from watching other people, especially when they’re better than you.  

Leveraging a Frame

One last important piece, here: back to Munger’s framework of, well, a lattice work of frameworks. The important subset of that concept, though, is that you can apply some of the same frameworks to multiple fields.

On one physical level, many skills I developed in something like jiu jitsu were directly helpful in surfing: a good sense of balance, ability to stay calm under physical discomfort, and a quick reaction time were all useful for surfing. Those things have become increasingly ingrained in my mind and body to the point of being intuitive. 

On a more meta level, my take on the risk being low enough and the feedback loop being short enough to allow for rapid iteration is a framework that I applied to many of the activities above: acting, programming, writing, selling, and just entrepreneurship in general. 

Each successful use of the framework makes the next one easier. If a framework has transcendental value, the more reps you get with it, the better.

And what even is a framework? My working definition is a system for thinking about the world. An interesting qualifier, though, is that it often requires discipline and clarity of thought to apply a framework from one area to another and actually act on it. As is the case with most strategies, the harder one is to implement, the more alpha, or abnormal return, there is to using it.

Lowering risk and being willing to iterate while ignoring the topical cost of discomfort is hard to do. The more places you can do it, though, the easier it becomes. It transcends many fields, and if it doesn’t in an obvious way, you can always try to change parameters to make it work. This frame would not have worked at Hermosa, but it did at Jacó. 

And there you have it–how I learned to shred the gnar in less time than it will take me to get from Costa Rica back to Michigan. 

Lose, lose, lose, until you win.

Live Deeply,