Throughout high school and into college, I skateboarded almost daily. I was never terribly good — there’s no way I could have found a career with it — but those days rolling around, annoying my suburban neighbors, and taking trips into Boston (Copley Fountain!) once we had licenses, are among my best memories of growing up.
Skateboarding is a unique sport. The antithesis of a team sport, skateboarding is just you, the skateboard and whatever surface you find yourself rolling on at that moment.
Also, unlike every “organized” sport, there are no drills, no repetition, no practice before the big game. You practice skateboarding by skateboarding. And every skateboarder, from the 10-year old in his driveway to the professional on a private half-pipe, knows one absolute truth of the sport:
Skateboarding is 99% failure.
There are no miracle seasons. No perfect games. You learn new tricks — whether it’s your first ollie or Tony Hawk doing a 900 — by falling. By failing. Failing until at last you succeed. You land it.
And success can be fleeting. You may only land that trick once, but you landed it.
You develop your skills, trying to land that new trick consistently. Once you’ve established a set of tricks that you can land regularly, you start trying to combine them into lines. This is when skateboarding becomes truly fun — rolling around, doing one trick after the other, in what seems like an unconscious flow of movements.
Of course, even now, you’re bound to fail. Whether you push yourself too hard, or misplace your back foot just so, or maybe just zone out for a second, you’re not going to land everything. You’ll stumble off your board, land on your ass, or maybe end up doing a face plant (yes, I’ve looked like that poor guy above). There’s a good chance that all three will happen on any given day.
But the point of skateboarding — and what connects it to the best parts of football, hockey, and every other contact sport — is what comes after the fall.
You pick yourself up.
You fight through the pain.
You make adjustments, and go for it again.
The same works in marketing, and throughout life. Every day is a flux of successes and failures. Some days, the losses far outweigh the gains.
The goal — success! — is found only after we try something, test the results, make adjustments, and try again. Even after success is found, we need to keep developing, adapting. Keep picking ourselves up.
Because you’ll never stop failing, you can never stop trying.
What do you think? How have you used failure do better yourself or your business?
