How’s that for business class? Photo: Sparkes
Go to any university, and you’ll find researchers spending oodles of time trying to solve the mystery of why some entrepreneurs do better than others, searching for that secret recipe of skills and qualities that will create the next Bill Gates. Business schools charge big bucks to mold you into a future Forbes 500 candidate, using case studies of successful entrepreneurs and CEOs as a way to teach you how to be a success. The professors write books about the top five qualities you need to become a top notch entrepreneur. They compare and contrast business icons in order to distill their similarities into vague statements such as “the desire to be an expert” and “a forward looking approach.”
So what is my point? Well, I am here to tell you that their approach has very little value in the real world and that spending your life savings (or indebting yourself) on business schools is a really poor investment. You want to increase your chances of becoming a successful entrepreneur? Go surfing. You see, it turns out that there is no magic combination of skills that gets you in to the billionaires’ club. If you look at the difference between those who failed and those who succeeded, only one trait matters: a tolerance for a high risk environment. The rest is pretty much down to luck and circumstances.
I have probably just alienated my Columbia Business School alumni, but I’ll take the risk (pun intended). When it comes to handling risk, I learned very little from the Nobel Prize winning economists and best-selling authors at Columbia. Instead, surfing has given me the ability to deal with decision making in an ever-changing, unstoppable, unpredictable, high stakes environment. Surfing gave me an understanding of the importance of staying calm and rational in the face of chaos, of quick decisions, of commitment and consequences in a way that no academic environment could ever provide.
The unwavering commitment needed to catch big waves taught me how to keep pushing when it comes to catching a break with my entrepreneurial venture Calavera. I have learned (the hard way) that when the outside set rolls in, the faster my decision to act happens, the better my chances of survival. Just like when the external environment for Calavera changes, the quicker I move, the better off I am. When that outside set hits, surfing has taught me that calm and collected is what gets me through the excruciating hold down.
These skills, shown to be the most relevant to entrepreneurial success, cannot be taught in a class room. So if you have a dream of one day making the cover of Forbes Magazine, save your dollars and go master the art of surfing.
