Skateboarding Legend Rodney Mullen in Silicon Valley
wired.com
wired.com
I'm not sure if any professional athlete has ever dominated a sport like Rodney dominated freestyle skateboarding. At the height of his dominance when he'd show up at a competition it was never a question of who would win, it was a question of who would come in 2nd place behind Rodney.
It's not just failure:
It's the combination of accepting failure (despite risk) with imagining solutions and new concepts, and meticulously applying them until you succeed.
That is what many skateboarders do, and I know that first hand. I'm now a professional coder.
You look at the a bit of land, and imagine ways you could skate it, you look at your board and imagine how you could spin it, or stand or slide on it, and you just try and try and fail and try until you succeed. It's hard to express the creativity and drive you need to have to get anywhere on a board.
Personally, I find my iterative creative mindset and my ability to accept failure help me at skateboarding, coding and lead me at one point to be a pro musician too... These skills exist in many areas. Skateboarding is just incredibly hard to attain any real level of skill at.
You have to have faith that you can do well, but you also have to acknowedge the hard facts of reality.
You have to be kind, but you also have to be firm and not a pushover.
You have to help people, but you can't be taken advantage of.
You have to get out of your comfort zone, but you have to avoid burnout.
So on and so forth.
The specific connections he makes aren't important. It is getting others to think and make connections themselves that are actually meaningful.
The author of the article does a good job of pointing out the ulterior motives for tech culture elites wanting to get him involved e.g. grasps for authenticity. I like how she also points out there may be positives to these ulterior motives like actually getting back in touch with its counter-culture roots.