Cameron Olthuis

They do, it’s true. It’s one of the reasons I got into the industry when I started Factive. The other reason being it’s been a passion all my life. Long have I felt that action sports companies don’t get the Internet, especially the big media corpos that try to play here. Instead of going into all the reasons why - not to mention I’ve had the post in my unfinished drafts for a year - I’ll just link you to this great post I just came across, When Action Sports Sites Go Wrong.

Maybe it should be the other way around (what business can teach you about surfing), since I learned to entrepreneur before I learned to surf. Either way, I came across a couple of blog posts this morning about surfing lessons for entrepreneurs and felt as both an entrepreneur and surfer, I should also blog about this subject. Here are 5 things about entrepreneurship that I learned from surfing (or vice-versa).

1) Patience - It takes a long time to learn to surf, it’s hard and one should not expect to be ripping waves their first day out. Same with building a business. It’s an exercise in patience. If you think you’ll be successful overnight, you’re sadly mistaken my friend. You will fall a lot at first but the more you do it the better you will get.

2) Thinking fast - No two waves are exactly alike. Every way breaks differently and when you’re riding a wave you always need to be making split second decisions. This is a skill that’s required in business too. You can’t predict exactly how the wave of your business will break so be ready to make decisions and adapt on the fly.

3) Positioning - This is pretty much what the other two articles I referenced above talk about. With surfing, you’re relying on so many elements to come together to make a surfable wave. When then do, you need to be positioned correctly to catch that wave. The same thing with business. Lots of waves will come your way, be in position and be ready to ride the good waves.

4) Wave selection - Being in the right position to catch a wave is one thing. Catching the right wave is another thing. As a surfer, you learn to read the shape of the waves as they’re coming in. If you pick the wrong wave it might close out on you and there will be no where to go. Like I mentioned in the point above, pick the good waves to ride. In business you need to learn to recognize and pick the right waves that you can ride to success. Get on the wrong wave and you might put your business in a position that it has no where to go.

5) Competition - There are a lot of surfers competing for the same waves as you, just like there are a lot of entrepreneurs competing in the same marketplace as you. If you don’t get aggressive while surfing and take waves, there are a hundred other surfers in the lineup who will paddle right around you and do so. In business, if you don’t jump on the opportunities presented to you, there are a hundred other people waiting who will. I love surfing next to the candy-ass surfers who aren’t aggressive, that way I can take all the waves I want. I also love competing in marketplaces where candy-ass entrepreneurs don’t leverage the opportunities that come their way, that way I can and I will.

If you’re a surfer, I’d love to hear some of things surfing has taught you about business.

I am reading a great post about not selling out on your blog that I found through a post on Shoe’s blog. It’s something that I feel compelled to write about because it’s something I’ve struggled with ever since starting this blog 3 years ago. For the longest time, since people started reading this blog, I felt that I needed to please my readers and write things I thought they would be interested in. I have a mix of readers who are professional colleagues as well as personal friends and family. Who can I possibly please both audiences? I tried once, and it burned me out really fast.

Then one day, a light went off in my head and I thought… You know what, I don’t want my main focus to be building traffic, or increasing RSS readers, or any of that. Screw that stuff. This blog has my name on it and I just want to keep it real and write about things I want to write about and as often as I want to write about them. Sometimes that means I’m writing about stuff that relates to my career and sometimes that means I write about surfing, or taking a vacation, or whatever.

I honestly don’t care if this blog ever makes a cent, that’s not my intention with it. I don’t care if people read it or not. If you do want to read it, that’s great. I am stoked on that. But just be warned that I’m going to write what I want to write about - and they might not be exactly what you want to read about.

My traffic and RSS subscribers stopped increasing on this site a long time ago. And that’s just perfectly cool with me. I have enough other sites that I work my ass off on to increase traffic. This is my personal outlet and that’s they way it will always be.

I am asking you this question, seriously. So feel free to leave your answer in the comments. I’m convinced after dominating the ASP World Tour this year that Kelly Slater is the greatest athlete ever. He won a record breaking 9th World Title this year and just finished winning a record breaking 6th Pipeline Masters. I’m pretty sure he already held the record in both of those as well.

Is he a greater athlete than Tiger Woods? Michael Jordan? Lance Armstrong? I think so. There is no other athlete that has dominated his respective sport the way Kelly has.

My buddy Mat from Dream Systems Media did an awesome little Q&A with me on Social Media. He asked some really great questions, like this one…

What would be your best tips for someone brand new to social media? (how to grow in the communities etc.)

The best tip I can give anyone brand new to social media is to actually use social media. Before you jump in the pool you need to learn how to swim. Take some time to understand how certain social media sites work the way they do. Watch and learn from others marketing campaigns. Get to know how the social media crowd works, how they think, and what interests them. Expect a fair amount of trial and error before you hit a home run.

Check it out.

Common sense tip that’s always been a great motivator for me to make sure I increase traffic every single day: Hustle every new day until I beat out the metrics from the day before.

Whatever goals you’ve set for yourself, you need to wake up the next morning ready to do the hustle until you beat whatever benchmark you hit yesterday. If your goal is sales; you need to wake up tomorrow and work your ass off until you get at least one more sale than you did today. If you don’t do better than the day before, you’re business is going in the wrong direction. If your goal is traffic, wake up tomorrow with the mindset of getting just one more unique than you did today.

Everyday I wake up ready to beat yesterday’s traffic(or sales, leads, etc), whatever it takes. I like to make it a game and get in the competitive mind frame of beating myself every single day. It keeps it fun too. I like to make sure I do the necessary tasks asap that day. That way it gives me the advantage of having more time to reach my goals that day.

Whether I got 1 more page view that day or 1000- as long as I’m trending up and to the right I’m trending in the right direction.