Tech startups should hire skateboarders
Dedication, iteration and risk taking
Rodney Mullen had a fascinating TED talk about skateboarding and how it can translate into tech entitled “pop and ollie and innovate”. As an innovator in skateboarding, he has seen it all. He’s lived the ups and downs of being a successful professional athlete and has a few startups under his belt.
Me? I’m a 38 year old active skateboarder. I’ve been a part of the sport for over 2 decades and have learned countless valuable lessons from my travels, injuries and interactions while on my board. I’ve met my best friends through skateboarding and gotten great jobs through my skateboarding connections.
I’ve been a front end developer for almost 15 years and have enjoyed every step of the process. I’m a wrap bootstrap author and created a flat bootstrap varient called Flatstrap that is somewhat popular ( 900+ stars ).
The people you meet in skateboarding are, what I refer to as, “unique and individual” and each of them gets into skateboarding for a different reason. Whether it’s because their older sibling has a board and they want to be like them, they don’t like team sports, want a creative outlet or love the feeling of the wind in your hair.
Though we all started for different reasons there is one trait in all of these people, self motivation. The natural instinct to do it yourself and not let anyone stand in your way until you accomplish your goals. It’s an insane drive that is hard to find.
The process
From the first moment you step on a board it’s all up to you. You might have a friend help you understand the physics behind how the board works, but after that no one is going to hold your hand. It’s all up to you. You make the decision to be a self starter and do it. Or you quit because you are lazy and lack discipline to master the skills it takes to move to the next level.
Once you can stand properly the first thing that you want to learn is how to ollie, or jump up into the air on your board without the use of hands. There are some very important lessons to learn by performing your first ollie.
Adapting
You will need to have a little bit of balance. If it doesn’t come to you right away you can learn ways to cope with being less graceful. These include bending your knees more so you can have a lower center of mass.
Your beautiful piece of code doesn’t work? Time to adapt and find a new solution.
Confidence
By this point you will have to be fully committed to doing an ollie or you run a higher risk of injury. It’s time to get in the right mind frame and gain confidence.
Without confidence you will never write your own code. You need to have self worth and believe in your abilities in order to write beautiful code sets.
Technique
Without the proper technique you will end up on your butt with a bruised ego. If you want to do the most basic trick on a skateboard you need to study the technique from numerous sources and learn how it’s done.
Much like web development, you must educate yourself in order to perform certain tasks. Whether it’s through schooling, code snippets or online tutorials you must be constantly learning if you want to stay competitive.
Performing
After studying countless hours of youtube how-to videos it’s time to put it to the test. It’s time to perform your first ollie. Usually on the first time you will fail. But you can’t give up, you have to push through the pain and frustration to achieve your goal.
There are countless hours of my life that I can never get back because I couldn’t wrap my head around a piece of code that I was working on. But over time, trials and some mental anguish I’ve overcome the obstacles.
Get motivated
This drive and mentality translates very easily into the web development work flow. When I sit down in the morning and look at Sublime I get motivated to create something out of nothing. It’s an absolutely blank canvas that is begging me to create. The only person that can start writing my code is me.
The mind set of skateboarders is a bit different than a lot of people that I’ve met in my life. For instance when you walk down the sidewalk you probably don’t notice the set of stairs or how the curb to the road is a certain pitch. Skateboarders notice everything about their surroundings and we are constantly imagining our next daring feats.
Side note: If you want to torture a skateboarder take them to Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York or Barcelona without a skateboard.
Without failure we would never learn
I‘ve fallen down thousands of times, broken bones, have bled pints of blood and have been knocked out cold while trying to do tricks.
Skateboarders are failing constantly. When they fail they don’t find excuses, they find out why they failed and fix the problem. We learn from our mistakes and adapt so we don’t make similar ones because they can be very costly.
After an hour of amazing gung-ho coding you write a line of code that breaks the build and you have to find a fix. In this case you have no other responsibility but to trouble shoot and find the problem. Then you write another few lines and it breaks again. You have to pull yourself up and write another fix.
Elon Musk (not a skateboarder) stated about a close call to failure in 2008, “Both SpaceX and Tesla were in a tough spot” “What kind of person has a nervous breakdown, I came damn close honestly.” Failure happens to everyone, the only thing you can do is keep moving forward.
Being an optimist and playing by your own rules while keeping a level head and learning how to cope with revisions is what I’ve learned from skateboarding.
If you want to connect, hit me up on Twitter @littlesparkvt
