Lately, I’ve been surfing much more than I ever imagined I would when I first took up the sport. It is just one of the many ways I’ve found to invest and succeed during unemployment. Somehow I also seem to come up with the majority of my ideas for my blog posts while I’m surfing so I manage to kill several birds with one stone. Yesterday I was surfing for the 3rd day in a row and I started to think about something which I realized was a metaphor for life.
When it comes to catching waves, timing is almost everything. It’s taken me the better part of 6 months to learn how to read the ocean, but through visualization and practice 3-5 times a week I got the hang of it. What I started to realize yesterday about timing is that precision completely changes the ride you get on the wave. If you try to catch it too late, you’ll tumble forward and wipe out. If you catch it too early then you miss the break, and you don’t go anywhere. But when you make the adjustment, which is a difference of about 1 second, you get almost a perfect effortless ride. When you are riding the wave the one small adjustment of bending your knees makes a BIG change in your ability to balance and ensure a longer ride.
Then I started to think about personal development and other areas of life where this small adjustment idea is applicable. I took a computer science course in college and I’m absolutely horrible at computer science, but I remember that usually a syntax error in one line of code threw off the whole program. A simple change in the direction of a slash or spacing between characters would fix a program with 200 lines of code. I imagine perfecting a skill at almost anything, playing an instrument, a sport, or anything else is about small adjustments making big differences. Eventually, if you add many small adjustments and many big differences, the result is you become good at what you are doing. Life seems to very much the same way. Often if we make one small adjustment in something we’re trying to do, it can completely change the trajectory of our progress.
Tags: success, learning, change, surfing
ah5r7etb6i
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You’re so right. Sometimes one small thing — and that thing can be timing — can make a huge difference in our lives. Great post on the topic and you did a really good job of relating it to your personal experience with surfing.
Being in the software field myself… I can relate to this well…
Sometimes it takes a long… .time to find the problem.. but that small fix will definitely be a huge progress.