What Job Hunters Can Learn From Surfers

The below story is up on WSJ. Check it out.

By Steve Walters
WSJ

It’s February 2001, and 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning. I’m at the beach listening to crashing waves, and watching surfers. The weather is cool, and the sky is blue. It looks to be a great day. Just three months prior, former Internet darling Pets.com shut its doors with less than two years as a public company. This was one of the final casualties of the dot-com bubble.

Many hoped that the year 2000 was just a market correction. As co-founder of a venture-capital-backed Internet company with two months of cash remaining, I knew better. Times had changed, and my dream was crashing along with the market.

So, I find myself watching surfers, wondering what happened and thinking about what next. I listened and learned from parents, college and talking heads, but they did not prepare me for this. I set specific goals. I got an engineering degree. I built a solid consulting career. I started a promising venture with a 50-page business plan, and worked even harder. Wasn’t that the formula? I had believed success to be a straight line from Point A to Point B. I studied this formula from those who were supposed to know. I understood the inputs and therefore, the outcome should have been the same every time. It had always worked before, but not this time.

I don’t surf, but have always appreciated watching people who are good at what they do, such as Laird Hamilton, who rides 50-foot giant waves. Yet, surfing didn’t make a lot of sense to me. You get up at 6 a.m., drive miles to the beach and then spend much of your time sitting or falling in cold water.

I notice one surfer catch a small wave that takes him half way to shore before he falls off. He looks disappointed, but paddles back out again. There is always another wave.

In school, I didn’t fall down very often since your grades were generally proportional to your level of effort. But there are no A’s, B’s or C’s in the real world. I found that hard work and desire are minimum requirements without any guarantees of results, and success is some combination of your happiness and the size of your bank account. These fluctuate day-to-day depending on various circumstances, some of which you can control, most of which you can’t. As an engineer, not knowing the outcomes of my efforts was difficult to grasp, which probably explained why I didn’t fully appreciate the ebb and flow of surfing.