Competence is a great employee and a terrible god.
I learned to surf in private. I was 34, and I paid a guy in Costa Rica two hundred bucks a day to teach me on an empty beach so nobody would see me fall.
The lessons themselves were maybe forty. The privacy was the rest.
This is the trap. Once you've built a life around being good at things, you stop being able to be bad at anything. So your life quietly shrinks to a smaller and smaller list of activities where you already know what you're doing.
You don't notice it happening. You just notice, ten years in, that you haven't started anything new since your twenties.
I have a buddy who's been a pretty good golfer since he was a teenager. He's never tried tennis. Not once. He's 41. He told me last year, totally unprompted, that he can't picture himself missing a ball in front of his friends. That's the whole reason. He didn't say it like a problem. He said it like a fact about himself, the way you'd mention you don't eat shellfish.
I started laughing, and then I stopped because I realized I was the same way about almost everything.
From the inside, it looks like this. You get invited to things, and you pick the ones where you already have a position. You're the guy who knows wine, so you go to the wine thing. You're the guy who built a company, so you go to the founder thing. You're not the guy who paints, so you don't sign up for the painting class even though you've thought about it for three years.
Your interests narrow without you deciding. You become an expert in the things you were already an expert in. You read books about subjects you already know. You go deeper instead of wider because deeper protects the identity and wider risks it.
You start watching documentaries about people who do things instead of doing things. You become a fan of competence. A connoisseur of other people's lives.
You take vacations to places where you can be good at what you're already good at. You don't take the salsa class in Medellin because you'd be bad at salsa. You take the coffee tour because you know coffee.
The worst part is that this looks like maturity from the outside. People say, "Oh, he knows what he likes. He's not chasing every shiny thing. He's settled.”
What I was actually doing was hiding. I'd built a self that worked, and I was unwilling to risk it for anything that might make me look stupid for an afternoon.
I figured this out in Bali, in the most embarrassing way possible.
I'd been surfing for four years by then. Privately at first, then small beach breaks, then actual real spots. I thought I was decent. I paddled out at Uluwatu on a day that was bigger than anything I'd ever ridden, and within fifteen minutes, a sixteen-year-old kid had laughed at me. Not meanly. He was just delighted. He told his friend something in Indonesian, and his friend looked over and laughed too.
I sat on my board in the channel for an hour and didn't catch a single wave. I paddled in. I sat on the beach and felt something I hadn't felt in years.
I felt bad at something in front of other people. And the world didn't end.
Nothing happened. Nobody cared. The kid was already onto his next wave. The story I'd been protecting myself from for a decade turned out to be a story that existed only in my own head.
I went back the next day. Got laughed at again. Caught one wave.
That was the whole lesson. There wasn't a system. There wasn't a mindset shift. There was just the discovery that the thing I'd been spending enormous amounts of energy avoiding was approximately five seconds of mild discomfort followed by absolutely nothing.
I take a beginner class in something at least once a year now. Last year, it was Portuguese, which I'm still terrible at. This year, it was freediving. I almost panicked twice, and the instructor had to fish me out. There were teenagers watching.
The teenagers did not care.
You will build a thing, and it will work. And once it works, you will be tempted to spend the rest of your life only doing the things you already know you can do.
That is not a life. That is a museum of who you used to be.
Go be bad at something tomorrow.
— Best, Jose
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