The Surfer and the Entrepreneur
Two disciplines that have a lot in common.
I always enjoyed the metaphor between the surfer and the entrepreneur. Both are lonely disciplines that require patience, perseverance, and faith.
A surfer needs to be in the water to catch the waves. There is no right or wrong timing; they need to be out there to be ready to catch the best waves.
Entrepreneurs that wait to be ready to start will miss the best opportunities. The sooner an entrepreneur engages 100% of their time behind a project, the sooner they will be able to fail, learn and grab opportunities.
The surfer will train and improve each time they surf a new wave. The more wave they surf, the easier it gets to catch more giant waves. It is the aggregate of incremental advances in skill and confidence that get them to surf bigger waves.
Entrepreneurs will learn from their failures and sometime repeat them several times before knowing better what to do. The more they persevere, the more opportunities will present and bigger will be the opportunities.
Sometimes it could mean pushing beyond what almost anyone would qualify as unreasonable or against all odds. These moments require never letting go and faith. One of my favorite say is: “Victory is in the unknown” because it reminds me that it is often outside our comfort zone that we can find solutions and that a big part of it is still luck. I have never met or heard a successful and humble entrepreneur say they were not lucky.
Being out in the water or the arena of the entrepreneur’s daily life is a way to create that luck. The patient surfer will meet its best wave and the patient entrepreneur will seize the most promising opportunity.
