This is part three of my series of blog posts from Costa Rica. If you read parts one and two, you already know that I’m down here studying Spanish in an immersion program. If you didn’t read parts one and two, I’m down here studying Spanish in an immersion program.
I fully expected my posts to be about the experience of being a student again, and what that means to you as you pursue your Rich and Happy adventures. As it turns out, today’s post has nothing to do with studying Spanish.
It has to do with surfing. See, when I’m not in class, I have a lot of time on my hands. And since the school is literally right on the beach, and since the waves are great, and since I’ve always wanted to surf, I decided to try surfing.
Wouldn’t you know it, within my experience was a great microcosmic example of many parts of the Rich and Happy formula.
For starters, this is not the first time I’ve tried to surf. A number of years ago when I was backpacking around the world I was staying at a place in South Africa that is known for surfing. Being an athlete, and a pretty adventurous guy, I went out and rented a board for a couple of hours.
After all, the people out there doing it made it look so easy. After about thirty minutes of getting beaten to a pulp with the waves, I promptly returned the board and took two ibuprofen.
To say that my efforts were disastrous would be a major understatement. I’m lucky I didn’t kill myself.
A few other surfing endeavors over the years were not as painful, either in their results, or impact on my body, but they too were far from successful.
So this time I decided to put the Rich and Happy formula into play. The first thing I did was ask around for WHO of my classmates had been out surfing. Then I asked them what they did. There was a common thread to their answers.
They had almost all been out surfing. None of them knew how to surf before arriving in Costa Rica. They had all taken LESSONS from one of the local surf schools. Every single one of them could get up on the board and ride waves, and they had been able to do that during and ever since their first lesson.
Sounded good to me. So instead of suffering from Mad How disease, as I had clearly done in my other surfing attempts, this time I imitated my Who’s, and went to one of the surf schools for a lesson.
The lesson was one hour and it cost $25 dollars. Within the first ten minutes of instruction I learned two very important things I had been doing wrong. That was before we even got off the sand and into the water.
Within another ten minutes, this time in the water, I had learned three more important things, including how to make sure I didn’t get killed when big waves were breaking in front of me, behind me, and on top of me if I got thrown off the board.
And then, on my very first attempt to catch a wave, stand up, and ride it, I promptly got chucked off the board and thrown into the surf. And unlike with all the other attempts, it didn’t bother me in the least, because I now knew what to do when that happened.
On my next attempt I was up on the board, and from that point on I was consistently catching and riding the waves. And I have to say, if you have never surfed before, it is AWESOME.
So here are the big takeaways.
#1. Rich and Happy moments are a lot easier to come by when you get the help you need instead of always trying to figure everything out on your own.
If you have a Rich and Happy dream or interest, ask someone who has done, seen, or experienced it. No need to be the martyr who did it all on their own. That is a slow, slow path filled with lots of pain. Find a WHO.
#2. Don’t be cheap when it comes to your training.
I think part of the reason I never took lessons in the past is because I thought $25-$50 was sort of a waste for a lesson or two. I kept thinking I should be able to figure it out on my own. The truth is totally different. What I remembered through this experience was that I wasn’t paying for an hour lesson.
I was paying to learn the way to surf, which I could then use FOREVER. In the past I had been making the classic mistake of looking at the immediate cost of the lesson, and not the lifetime value of the information or skills I would learn because of the lesson.
Thanks to my training, I now know how to surf, and how to not get killed while I’m surfing. I probably logged ten more hours of surfing just the week I took my lesson. Extrapolate that over my life, and that was a seriously cheap lesson for learning the way to do something that will log me lots of Rich and Happy minutes.
#3. Sometimes knowing what to do in the face of adversity is every bit as important as knowing what to do to enjoy an experience.
Our fears can be very effective barriers to keeping us from being Rich and Happy. However, once you understand that fear, and the way to avoid what you are fearful of, the barrier goes away.
In surfing there is a fantastically intoxicating, and mildly terrorizing moment when you are facing forward, paddling to catch the wave coming behind you, and you feel the wave start to pick you up and throw you forward.
If you keep paddling, you catch just the right momentum and you can jump up on the board and away you go. A great ride.
If the fear gets you though, inevitably, you stop one or two paddles short, and the wave slides right underneath you. You missed it, and now you’re out of position to get all the other waves in the series.
Your fear not only costs you a great ride, you end up having to work hard to get out past the break again.
For me, the fear of not knowing what to do if I got thrown off the board was always a huge barrier to having the confidence to allow the wave to start driving me forward. After my lesson though, the fear went away. I had learned what to do if things went wrong, and it was EASY and IT WORKED.
I know, because in addition to catching a lot of waves, there were more than a few that gave me a big heave into the ocean.
So there you have it. After almost twenty years of research into the Rich and Happy formula I finally was smart enough to apply parts of it to learning to surf. And because it worked, I can now log lots of Rich and Happy minutes on surfboards all over the planet as I travel around.
As they say here in Costa Rica. Pura Vida.
John
