Let me get the embarrassing part out of the way first.
I am not a good surfer. I am what the surf community, with remarkable creativity and no mercy, calls a kook — a beginner who paddles too eagerly, catches the wrong waves, and has, on more than one occasion, been gently redirected by a stranger with sun-bleached hair and a look that said that board belongs to the beach, mate. I own this. I’m leaning into it. It’s basically in the URL.
But I’ve been doing it long enough now — knees scraped, shoulders wrecked, occasionally salt-waterboarded by a set I had no business being inside of — to have noticed something that I can’t unfeel: reading a wave and reading a system are the same discipline. The patience is identical. The timing logic is identical. The humility the ocean forces on you is identical to the humility that a market, or a network, or any complex adaptive system, eventually forces on anyone who tries to bully their way through it.
This is either a genuine insight or the kind of thing a person says after spending too long in saltwater. I’ve considered both possibilities. I’m going with genuine insight, with a caution I’ll get to near the end.
Before You Paddle, You Watch
A healthy surfer mindset prioritizes observation before action. You watch sets, currents, and other surfers before paddling. You wait for the right wave instead of chasing every ripple.
Sit with that for a second. Because that’s not surfing advice. That’s recon. That’s threat modeling. That’s the thing a good engineer does before touching a production system — not because the rules say to, but because they’ve been humbled enough times to know that the environment has context they don’t have yet.
Waves arrive in groups called sets, separated by calmer periods called lulls. Understanding this rhythm is one of the most practical wave-reading skills you can develop. The experienced surfer doesn’t just see water. You may see lumps of water and waves, but someone who’s logged the hours would be seeing the details, the curves, the gutter and rips, the rip-bowl, the changing tide, the potential bank on a cleaner swell.
That’s pattern recognition built from repetition and failure. Not from watching YouTube. Not from reading a breakdown. Over time, lots and lots of time, an individual begins to “read” between the lines, see the details, and pick up on the fine nuances that are otherwise missed. Your subconscious mind has seen these “patterns” before and knows how to react successfully, via previously learned successful and unsuccessful experiences.
Replace “waves” with “network traffic,” or “market conditions,” or “a codebase someone else wrote in 2019 and never documented,” and you have the same sentence. The mechanism is identical. The only path to reading the environment well is having been wrong about it many times, in sequence, while paying attention.
Timing Beats Force
This one is the hardest lesson in surfing, and it maps almost perfectly onto building.
The commitment phase is the most critical — and the most commonly botched. Not the paddle-out. Not the pop-up. The moment of decision. Go or don’t go. The anticipation phase is where wave reading pays off. The better you can read the ocean, the earlier you can decide whether this wave is a go or a pass. Early decisions mean more time to position and prepare.
Notice what that says about force. It doesn’t say paddle harder. It doesn’t say be stronger or more aggressive or more willing to throw yourself into things. It says: if you read correctly early, you have time. Time is the resource. Force is just what you fall back on when you’ve run out of time.
Every founder who’s tried to sprint through a market that wasn’t ready yet knows this feeling. Every security engineer who’s tried to force a control into a system that wasn’t architected for it knows this feeling. You can muscle through sometimes. But it costs you. And the ocean — like the market, like the network — doesn’t care how hard you paddled. It cares whether you were in position.
Paddling too early wastes energy; paddling too late means the wave breaks on you — the sweet spot is 4–6 paddle strokes before the wave arrives.
Not early. Not late. Ready. Positioned. That’s it. That’s the whole game.
You Don’t Control the Ocean
This should be obvious. It is somehow not obvious.
The thing that makes surfing genuinely clarifying — as opposed to just physically exhausting — is that the ocean makes the humility non-negotiable. You cannot negotiate with a six-foot set. You cannot ship a patch. You cannot schedule a meeting to explain why the conditions aren’t what you expected. Just like how a surfer adapts to the ocean’s movement instead of trying to control it, we thrive when we embrace life’s unpredictability and develop the ability to go with the flow.
This sounds like a poster. I know. Bear with me.
The version that actually matters in a professional context isn’t the zen-poster version. It’s the operational version: you can’t dominate a complex system, you can only work with it. Markets are like this. Adversaries are like this — and this is something I think about a lot in security contexts. You cannot out-force a motivated attacker any more than you can out-force a wave. You can read them better. You can position better. You can make yourself a harder target and a less interesting one. But the moment your entire defensive posture is based on the assumption that you can stop everything by sheer force of control, you’re the person paddling directly into the break with no idea what they’re doing.
Waiting for the right wave instead of chasing every ripple — this patience trains the nervous system to stay calm under uncertainty, which is the foundation of flow.
Calm under uncertainty. That’s the job description for building anything that matters under real conditions.
The Wipeouts Are the Education
Here is the uncomfortable one.
In business, failure is rarely an option, but in surfing, failure is not just an option but a requirement. Even the best surfers wipe out every time they enter the water.
Every time. Not most days. Every time. The question isn’t whether you’re going to fall — it’s whether you learn something from the fall before the next set arrives.
The ocean is a powerful teacher. Each wipeout, each missed wave, is an opportunity to learn. Instead of seeing mistakes as failures, view them as valuable lessons.
I’ve had wipeouts that were purely physical — bad position, bad timing, the wave did exactly what waves do, and I wasn’t where I needed to be. Those are the easy ones to process. The harder ones are the ego wipeouts: when you went for a wave you knew was wrong because you hadn’t caught anything in twenty minutes and your patience had expired. That’s not an ocean problem. That’s a judgment problem. The ocean just executed the judgment.
Wipeouts drown your fears and surface your courage. They serve as a powerful reminder of the respect we should always give to the sea, highlighting the profound connection between surfers and the ocean, founded in a mutual understanding of strength, flexibility, and unpredictability.
The equivalent in building: the product launches that didn’t land, the architectures that didn’t hold, the bets that were wrong. The ones I’ve learned the most from weren’t the spectacular disasters — they were the quiet ones where I knew I was making a compromise and made it anyway because I was tired of waiting. That pattern is worth naming and watching for.
How Surfing Resets the Head
I want to say something practical here, because this section could easily drift into “and then I found peace” territory, which is not the genre I’m writing in.
The reason surfing is useful for deep work isn’t the metaphor. It’s the mechanism. When you’re in the water, there is genuinely nothing else to think about. Attention. You are fully engaged with the present moment, not the last wave or the next one. The ocean enforces this. You cannot be half-present in a lineup. The wave does not wait while you finish a thought about your roadmap.
That enforced presence is, functionally, a very hard reset. Not a vacation — a reset. Two hours in the water and the mental stack is cleared. The problem you’ve been grinding on for three days frequently looks different when you come back to it, not because of insight gained in the water, but because of the space made by mandatory non-thinking. The brain kept working. You just got out of its way.
I’m aware this is the kind of thing that sounds indulgent. I’m also aware that the alternative — never stepping away from the problem, grinding harder, staring at the same screen until something breaks — has a well-documented failure mode. The reset is part of the method, not a break from it.
A Word of Caution About This Whole Thing
I promised I’d name the risk of overstretching this metaphor, and here it is.
There is a version of the “surfing as philosophy” framing that becomes a way of aestheticizing patience to the point of inaction. Waiting for the right wave sounds wise right up until it becomes a justification for never committing to anything. The ocean metaphor, taken too far, can rationalize drift as discernment.
Reading waves itself could be considered an art. As you progress from a beginner into an intermediate, then advanced surfer, your capacity to read and anticipate waves will slowly increase. It’s important to note that this is not a skill you simply learn overnight or master quickly. That’s true. But the way you get there is by being in the water, going for waves, falling off them, and going again. Not by sitting on the beach getting very good at watching.
The parallel holds: systems literacy is built through contact, not observation. You read markets by participating in them and being wrong. You read codebases by shipping things and dealing with what breaks. The patience is about timing, not avoidance. There’s a meaningful difference between a surfer who waits for the right wave and one who never paddles.
I try to stay on the right side of that line. I don’t always succeed. But naming the failure mode is at least a start.
Why This Isn’t a Gimmick
I’ll be direct about something: I’m aware that “tech person who surfs” has the potential to come across as a carefully constructed personal brand. It is, I promise, considerably less curated than that. I am mediocre at it. I fall off in front of people. I have opinions about board volume that I’m not qualified to have. I started too late to be good and too genuinely into it to stop.
What I can say is that the crossover in mental model — it’s all about patience, time and experience — is something I actually use. Not as a frame I put on things after the fact to make them sound profound, but as a real-time orientation when I’m working through something complex. Am I in position? Am I reading the conditions or just reacting to them? Am I trying to force this, or am I working with what the system is actually doing?
Those questions are useful. The ocean didn’t give them to me — the ocean just made them impossible to ignore.
I’m still a kook. I’m fine with that. The ocean is a patient teacher, and I’m, apparently, a patient student. Or at least a stubborn one, which produces similar outcomes.