2023 Year in Review

A (Not particularily) Brief Essay

Naturally, I’m going to start my review of 2023 by sharing some memories from Janu-, no actually from 2019. Spring. My senior year of college and last semester of playing softball. Our softball team had some… unconventional cheers, to say the least. If you attended any Athenas softball games in 2019 and are *still* annoyed, I certainly don’t blame you, and would highly recommend skipping the next paragraph.

When our teammate wearing #7 would go to the plate, we would all yell “seven seven seven…” over and over for her entire at bat. When we needed to pump up the energy, everyone in the dugout would start chanting a guacamole recipe that we had written on the team whiteboard: “Slice the avo, slice slice the avo. Toss the pit, toss toss the pit…”

When one of our teammates held off from swinging at a ball, we would impersonate radio announcers, pretend to hold a microphone, and trade off saying things like, “That was an amazing eye, a beautiful eye, a cartesian eye, a discerning eye…” attempting to hit adjectives from the entire alphabet.

We would also take team polls. I’d yell things like “Is chocolate a vegetable, clap once for yes, clap twice for no. One! Two! Three!” Inevitably, there’d be one clap in unison from the rest of the team and I’d laugh.

In the spirit of the 2019 Athena softball team, I’d like to start my 2023 year review with a few polls.

Polls

Do you yell “skkkkkrrrrrt” every time you drive your car around a corner going a little too fast? Clap once for yes, clap twice for no. *Clap*
Have you avoided getting totally sucked into the pickleball craze? Clap once for yes, clap twice for no. *Clap clap*
Do you enjoy learning new sports and specialized skills? Clap once for yes, clap twice for no. *Clap*
It’s always easy to stay motivated while learning a new skill or sport? *Clap clap*
It’s way more motivating to accomplish tasks when you subsequently get to check them off a list. *Clap*
Even when the list is just an arbitrary piece of paper that you ripped out of the back of your softball journal and no one else is ever going to look at it to hold you accountable unless someone rummages through your recycling looking for credit card info and is disappointed to find nothing but crumpled to do lists for your mundane tasks, in which only one item out of ten is ever even checked off. *Clap*

A few years ago, I started reading sports psych books as I worked to improve at skiing and also just out of curiosity. While I might not lift or sprint nearly as much as I did in 2019, my mental game is so much stronger and my ability to pick up new skills has dramatically improved. Sometimes I wish I could go back and play another few seasons of collegiate softball armed with my new knowledge and mindset to see how much more I could progress. And also, I’d love to go back and take more polls, make more guacamole, and yell other ridiculous things at my wonderful teammates to show them my support.

On Progression: What I Learned About Learning

This year, I focused on progression, process, learning, and trying to enjoy some aspects of being a beginner. I learned how to snowboard, how to mountain bike, and ran a marathon (writing “how to run” didn’t really convey the right point, even though the repetition sounded nice). I played in my first disc golf tournament, took a pottery class, and moved into a house with a couple dogs (I used to be somewhat scared of dogs, so this was new). All this to say, I spent a lot of my free time learning new skills, and in the process, learned some new skills to aid in learning new skills.

I got really stoked on the concept of progression a couple years ago when I started working to progress my skiing, which was already at a pretty high level. I wanted to learn how to jump off of cliffs, do tricks in the air, be comfortable going fast in narrow chutes – generally branding myself as a freeride skier. You can read all about it in the piece I wrote back in 2020.

This year was different, though. With mountain biking and snowboarding, I was at square one. In skiing, I had so many skills I could fall back on. If I messed up a take off for a jump, I could usually ride out the landing. If I got frustrated learning a trick, I could go rip around any terrain on the mountain just to have fun.

But when I got started this year, I didn’t have those fall backs. When the terrain felt scary, I had to walk or slide down, because I was already on the easiest runs. If I slipped, I usually fell. I hadn’t yet built up the skill set to recover or relax my body or mind during a run. So while I had already learned some mental skills for progressing, this year was a big jump for me.

To get started on each sport, I had to let go of some ego and learn to strive to just be “better” rather than to be the “best.” I think the most important skill I figured out this year was how to watch and honor my own progression and process, regardless of external inputs. I found it easier than before to remind myself that, “I’m a beginner, of course I’m not going to _[insert skill here]_ perfectly on my first try.” I learned to really appreciate much smaller steps. All of these small steps accumulate. And when I’m a beginner at something, the little steps tend to accumulate quickly if I can stay focused, stay stoked, and stay positive.

I realized that if my goal is to just be “good” at some new sport/hobby/task, then I’m going to have a hard time getting better. I found that committing to the process, setting achievable and specific goals, and being excited about the small steps is essential to fuel my progression.

A Short Detour: Books (Part 1)

I cannot move on to discuss my progression and how I stayed motivated without first pausing to talk about scaffolding and coaching.

A couple years ago, I read *Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise* by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, and it totally revolutionized how I think about learning new skills, the idea of innate ability, and the importance of good coaching to quick progression. And then this year, I saw a lot of the same concepts repeated in Adam Grant’s book *Hidden Potential* (more on that later), and also in my own learning experience.

Often, when I describe Peak to people, I give the following one sentence summary: “It’s a book that refutes Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory by arguing that not just practice time counts, but rather the quality of practice that’s important for learning.” There’s so much more to the book than that, so here’s the bonus summary:

If you want to learn a skill quickly or become expert, hire an excellent coach who can teach you the skills and the most effective and efficient way to learn them (scaffolding)
Ensure your practice is intentional, directed, focused, and purposeful
(There are some really cool studies in this book, one in particular about adults around age 50 who all needed reading glasses due to physical deterioration of their eyes. Through directed practice, they were able to retrain their brains to understand what their eyes were seeing and correct the blurry information coming into their eyes to a signal their brains could read clearly. By the end of the study none of the participants needed reading glasses. (!!!!) But, I digress.)

Based on what I learned reading Peak, I decided that if I wanted to get good a biking quickly, I needed to find some coaching and a lot time to ride. I ended up taking two bike clinics – one about two months after I started riding, and the second, two months after that. I also was lucky to have some friends to follow down trails and learn skills from.

My first goals were simply to learn how to go around banked turns and gain trust in my bike to stay on the trail. For the first month or so, I’d have to walk steep or dusty corners on blue trails. In the first clinic, I learned body position fundamentals and the basics of jumping. I felt incredibly awkward in the new body position, but I persisted – working on the fundamentals over and over, just like we used to throw and catch every single day at softball practice. By the time I got to the second clinic, I was working on small gap jumps, medium table jumps, generally keeping up with the group, and not even thinking about corners and features I used to walk.

In the snowboarding world, I didn’t have as much of a need for coaching, partially because I was in less of a hurry to get better, but mostly because skiing gave me a good sense of the steps I needed to take to incrementally improve. First, I needed to learn how to turn on relatively flat, easy, smooth terrain. Then, I needed to able to place my turns in that type of terrain. Then, I went into more challenging, steep terrain and went through the same process: How to turn, where to turn, link the turns.

…

The other book that has been super influential in my ability to learn athletic skills is The Inner Game of Tennis (IGOT) by W. Timothy Gallwey. Putting the tennis specifics aside, this book provides a roadmap for learning specialized, complex, physical skills.

It starts by reminding the reader of how humans learn to walk. We spend a lot of time watching other humans walk (observing professionals). We crawl (develop basic skills). Eventually we try to do what the upright humans are doing (emulation). We fall, and in the process learn something that didn’t quite work for us (adjustment). We get up and try again. We keep trying until we find something that works for our individual bodies.
No one tells an infant what angle to point their knees, or how to rotate their weight over their foot, or any of the other physical minutiae that go into walking. We all learn through trial and error, often bolstered by lots of encouragement. And in the end, we all end up with a slightly different gait – a slightly different solution to the same problem.

IGOT suggests using this trial and error method of learning as an alternative to having someone attempt to explain the exact mechanics of a complex physical motion. This method allows your brain and body to figure out what works best for you without having to awkwardly and robotically shoehorn your movements into someone else’s mechanics. I employed this tactic in learning the basics of turning my snowboard. Rather than listening to a description of how to do it, I watched, I slid around a bunch on just my heel edge or toe edge, I tried turning, I fell, I kept falling, I fell some more, and eventually got the hang of it, figuring out how to move my body to produce the intended result.

The second super useful takeaway from IGOT is about how we use our directed attention to make adjustments without thinking about the adjustment itself. The tennis example is this: consider a player who keeps hitting balls into the net, because their racket is angled slightly downward at contact. IGOT would recommend that the player simply focus on observing the angle of their racket at contact, rather than forcing a correction that may cause them to overthink or have a more jerky, mechanical swing.

I find this directed attention tactic to be super useful for skills that require full body movements, because it allows me to break down the motion in my head, while still executing it at full speed. This is effective, because I can then make corrections throughout the whole movement at once, instead of breaking it into pieces in slow motion and then trying to stitch it back together. This tactic has worked to help me improve at pickleball, disc golf, and darts, along with snowboarding and mountain biking.

The most complex movement I’ve come across so far in biking is jumping. Just jumping the bike while rolling slowly down a road requires coordinated motion between arms, legs, and feet, compressing both the fork and suspension, then lifting with the pedals, to get both wheels off the ground. Approaching a real jump adds in the factors of speed, timing, and handling the jump radius. Timing has proven to be a tricky element for me, and I’ve been stuck on figuring out timing since I gotten comfortable with the compression.

The idea of timing is that the rider should unload the fork first (as the front wheel leaves the lip of the jump) and the rear suspension second (as the rear wheel leaves the lip) to maximize pop off the jump. Because everything else (body position, compression, speed) needs to go right for the timing to even be relevant, it’s not as much of a skill I can break down and work on alone. Instead, I can use the tactic of focusing my attention on when each wheel leaves the lip to better understand how I’m currently doing the motion and allow my brain to make subconscious adjustments to my body position to eventually get the right outcome.

It sounds pretty straight forward when I write it down in one sentence. But getting better is hard, and it’s particularly hard to maintain the effort and stoke when I’m not seeing results. I’ve been stuck trying to figure out the timing element for much longer than other skills. I’m still trying to learn how to focus my attention on my wheels leaving the jump or how to pinpoint what that feels like. My level on this skill has plateaued, but with some practice on a pump track and more time on jumps, my brain will eventually be able to separate pieces of the movement and I’ll be able to make adjustments.

On Plateaus

Let’s say we’re a beginner set of water molecules. Like all beginner sets of water molecules, we start out as an ice cube wanting to one day become super energetic water vapor. Because, you know, that’s what some ice cubes strive for.

Our expert H20 coach has put together a training plan to take us from ice cube to water vapor. But, our coach has also warned us that it’s going to take a lot of work. We get off to a solid start (LOL). We see our temperature rising as we put energy toward our goal. Then, somewhere around 0 Celsius, we stop seeing temperature progress upward, despite consistently adding energy. We’ve hit a plateau.

We continue adding energy and see some small progress toward our goal as more liquid water appears. Eventually, we start seeing rapid progress toward water vapor as temperature starts to increase again. After a lot more energy, we hit a second plateau. During these plateaus we put in a lot of energy and do not see any results in temperature change.

This is exactly how learning new skills works (clap once for yes, clap twice for no… *clap*). Sometimes you put in work and see immediate progress. More often, you put in a lot of work without visibly seeing results. But the results are there. Without that movement along the plateau, you can never get to the next phase.

It’s easy to look at a graph and see that the plateau will end and incremental progress will pick back up, but it can be super mentally challenging to keep adding energy while a skill has plateaued. There were totally days that I was super frustrated about being a beginner, frustrated about being able to envision the turn or the jump in my head and not be able to execute it with my body, and about not being able to keep up with the group. I definitely cried a few times. I went home early. And sometimes lost sight of the joy of being outside with my friends.

There were definitely days where I didn’t want to practice – didn’t want to try to link turns together on something steep or didn’t want to work on my jump timing – and just wanted to have it figured out already. But if the process wasn’t there, a lot of the fun would be missing too. There is so much stoke in overcoming the hurdles, in staying the course and finally succeeding.

On Epic Days

There are a few days from this year that really stand out in my mind as days where I really felt myself grow as an athlete. These were the days that I finally hit the inflection point after the plateau and my progress felt like it was skyrocketing. They made me feel confident not just in my new physical skills, but also in my ability to learn and trust the process. I felt more confident to trust how I felt about trying something new.

These are the epic days, the payoff days. The days where the stoke is so damn high I can’t focus on anything for the rest of the day. The shaky adrenaline high and the cheering and the overly forceful high fives.

I remember a night at Hood Meadows when I finally figured out how to link fall-line turns all the way down Two Bowl in 15” of fresh pow. My brain was screaming, “This is it! This is snowboarding!!” Out loud, I was yelling things like, “This is SO FUN!” and “We gotta do that run again!” Yeah, it would have been a great night of riding even if I spent the whole time flopping in the snow when my heel edge slid out from under me. But it was catapulted to one of the best nights, because I caught a glimpse of success, of all the learning I had accrued paying off and finally leveling up.

There are two biking days that really stand out to me for the same reason. One at Post Canyon, figuring out some new gap jumps, and one at Syncline, trying new lines and a drop down technical rock features. I was super lucky to make a friend who’s stoked on biking and rides at the same level as I finally got to. We have different strengths and different mental approaches, and thus approach new features differently.

On these two days, we tried several new jumps/rolls/drops that we felt we had the skill set to do, but had to overcome the mental block and fear. We worked through them, talking about take offs and landings, rolling in, and discussing consequences. Eventually, one of us felt prepared to try it and then would tow the other in. We took turns towing each other into different features, depending on who felt ready to try it first. It was so cool to be able to learn from each other and push each other without having a skill disparity. Truly a moment where the whole felt greater than the sum of the parts. I think this is rare, and I’m super grateful for these incredibly high stoke days.

These are the days to celebrate, to remember, and to talk about later, but not the days to expect. Inflection points are infrequent, and the grind is called a grind for a reason.

On Managing Expectations…

… As a person who wants to achieve great things, no matter what the things are.

This year, I learned a lot about setting more realistic goals and expectations and basing them more on myself than external influences. Sometimes I felt my concept of being more realistic was just lowering my expectations. But that has a bad connotation and dismisses the idea of incremental improvement.

It was hard for me at first to set a goal as simple as, “I want to link two turns,” when really what I wanted was to keep up with my friends and feel more competent. Eventually, I realized that it only did me a disservice to set my expectations too high. Why set myself up to fail on my own goals when I could set myself up to succeed at a more attainable goal? Particularly when the intermediate goal can then use as a stepping stone to achieve the next goal.

One trick I used to keep my expectations and goals realistic, was to keep the context of where I started from. I tried to remember what goals my past self would be really stoked on, because they were huge leaps from my previous skill level. This kept me focused internally instead of comparing my progression or skill set to anyone else. And it was always fun to think back on previous goals as a marker for how far I had progressed.

Once I figured out how to create some smaller goals and feel proud of reaching them, I also learned to set exceptions each day independent of any other day. I tried to not hold myself to something I was able to do yesterday or last week, because learning is hard and nonlinear and some days I didn’t have lunch or sleep well or any of the other factors that differ from day to day. I tried to embrace the concept of: you are where you are, today. (And this is supposed to be fun.)

The expectation level setting was most helpful for me in running, though certainly a tool I used in my biking and snowboarding progressions. For a long time, I thought a 10 minute mile was “slow.” Every time I went running, I would try to go “slow” and would inevitably end up feeling discouraged when I couldn’t hold the (arbitrary) 10 minute pace, or it felt pretty hard. It wasn’t until this year that I realized “slow” could mean the pace that is easy for my body and my current level of running fitness.

I found it super helpful to think about my perceived exertion and heart rate rather than time elapsed on the clock. For me, a “slow” mile clocks in around 11:15 – way off the pace I originally thought I was “supposed to” be running while I developed the baseline fitness for it. And, wow, running was actually pretty fun once I dialed back my pace to something my body could do relatively easily (and started listening to Michelle Parker’s podcast).

Sometimes, I would lose that perspective and get frustrated at myself for being “too slow.” I’d have to gently remind myself that speed wasn’t my goal and I wasn’t even training for it. I started running, because I set a goal to run a marathon without getting hurt. I had no time expectations other than I was aiming to run (without walking) the whole thing. I didn’t put in practice to get faster, so it was unrealistic to expect running speed to start showing up as a skill.

And since I don’t currently have the stoke to work on my distance running speed, I’ll be running 11:15s for the foreseeable future; or at least until a find a fully downhill run, and then maybe I’ll crank up the pace.

On Motivation

Realistic expectations were so essential for my progression, because I find it super motivating and energizing to achieve and celebrate the small steps. One skill I had to learn was how to identify the small steps to celebrate. The bigger jumps between plateaus tend to be more obvious to celebrate, but there is so much work that goes in between the big jumps, that it’s hard to maintain the energy to put in the work without getting stoked on the small stuff.

Now, I get excited when a run/trail doesn’t look as steep as it used to or feel as scary as it did the previous time. That’s not something I can post a video of or really mark as a milestone moment, but I tried to take the time to notice how my perspective changed as my skills grew, and used that perspective shift as a sign of progression to maintain motivation.

I gained perspective by sometimes detaching myself from my own process and watching my progression from the third person. I’d think about how stoked I would be to watch a friend go through that progression or how I might encourage that friend who is stuck on a plateau or setback. This tactic also helped me remember to look back at all the distance I’d traveled, instead of only forward at all the distance I wanted to go.

Outside of setting and celebrating small goals, I found a few other tricks to stay motivated through plateaus and keep putting in the work. On lower stoke days, I’d figure out how to work on my strengths rather than my weaknesses. It’s way more fun and encouraging to start from something that feels comfortable and try to progress, rather than working on a totally new skill or something that’s difficult for my mind or body. Plus, working on strengths still leads to progression. I found it to be a good way to make progress in a different direction when I felt like there was an insurmountable hurdle in front of something else I was working on.

I also learned to recognize skills that came more easily to me than other skills. Often, I would get frustrated or self critical when I felt like I wasn’t picking something up as quickly as I would like. Rather than just focusing on those things, I tried to broaden my perspective and recognize that some elements were less tricky to learn and felt more intuitive to me.

That shift allowed me to see how skills I developed in other areas of my life, say softball or skiing, actually carried over to mountain biking or snowboarding. The hard work and persistence I put in learning how to catch fly balls, or throw one hops from centerfield to home, were tools I could draw on when I was struggling on my bike.

And I found skills beyond just character building that ended up being relevant. For example, the skill of keeping my head and eyes still while the rest of my body is moving is something I developed by sprinting for popups, but generally works the same way on a bike or a snowboard. Or for a second example, the ability I developed from my softball swing to move my hips and shoulders independently was an essential tool for learning how to turn on both my snowboard and bike.

Skiing had a ton of carry over skills to both snowboarding and mountain biking. One that really stood out to me when I started biking was my ability to keep my eyes up and scan the trail and react to it while I was riding relatively quickly. I suspect my ability to do this was already developed from skiing and I got to skip that portion of the learning curve on my bike.

Lastly, I maintained motivation by sharing my small successes with friends and family who may (or may not) be interested. It is truly very low overhead for them to watch a six second video and say a few encouraging words. I’ve found the accountability and shared energy there really helps me maintain motivation.

It’s likely my friends and family never want to hear me say “ski” or “bike” ever again, but sorry guys, you’re probably the ones reading this anyway, and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon. I promise the next section of this essay won’t include either of those words.

Changing Gears… Let’s Talk Books!

Yeah, pun intended, my apologies. Welcome to Books Part 2! Over the past couple years, books have become a much larger influence in my life (see Books Part 1), and I wanted to share some recommendations!

2023 was the first time I ever kept a written list of books I read/listened to during the year. I felt so motivated to keep reading, just for the tiny reward of adding a bullet to the Notes page on my phone. As such, I read a lot! 36 books as of early December! I’ve heard one way to rack up numbers on a book list is to read children’s books. I did not employ that tactic, though I will admit I got a cool map book from the library that was 95% pictures (and had the pleasure of learning about the ratio of livestock to humans in different countries around the world!).

Thus begins the book recommendation section. Unlike what you might find in The New York Times or TIME or any other credible source, I do not get paid to review books. More notably, most reviews tend to be relevant for books published in the given year. In this case, the review concerns books that the critic (me) happened to come across and read in 2023, regardless of publishing date. If we accept the linear nature of time for a moment, we can then note that all of these books were published no later than 2023.

Fiction

*To Say Nothing of the Dog* / by Connie Willis
*The Hungry Tide* / by Amitav Ghosh
*Cutting for Stone* / by Abraham Verghese

I received Cutting for Stone as a gift from a high school english teacher (Thank you, Mrs. Brennan!) and somehow managed to avoid reading it for 8 years. I think I was intimidated by the quantity of text and number of pages. But after I read Infinite Jest last fall, anything seems possible.

It’s interesting that I finally cracked this book open the same year that Abraham Verghese published The Covenant of Water, which I also read and would recommend, though it did hurt my heart and bring out a lot of tears. His writing is unique in the way that he includes lots of details about medical procedures, places, and history. I felt like I learned a lot outside of being very engaged with the stories.

Nonfiction

Overall Nonfiction Recommendation

Stolen Focus / by Johann Hari

Such an interesting read that talks about how many factors of our world (social media, pollution, food, sleep) affect our ability to deeply focus. I particularly liked viewing problems and solutions as both individual and fully systemic. This book led to changes in my personal life – I now drink less coffee, try to put my phone down more, and focus my grocery shopping around the edges of the supermarket.

Autobiography & Memoir

This is my favorite genre. I love learning about people, where they’ve been, who they’ve become, and who/what they met along the way.

*The Best Strangers in the World* / by Ari Shapiro
*Dispatches from Pluto* / by Richard Grant
Dispatches from Pluto is a great read about Richard Grant’s move from NYC to a small town called Pluto in the Mississippi Delta. He explores questions of racism and the political divide and paints a beautiful picture of the landscape and community.

3. The Last Ride of the Pony Express / by Will Grant

4. Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube / by Blair Braverman

5. In Search of the Wild Tofurky / by Seth Tibbott

I received In Search of the Wild Tofurky as a gift from a coworker who won it in a raffle. I’ll leave you with just this one tidbit: Mr. Seth Tibbott had to argue with his cofounders to use the name ‘Tofurky.’ Can you even imagine voting against that?

Critic’s Choice

As if this entire list hasn’t been the critic’s choices…

*Hidden Potential* / by Adam Grant
This book aligns alarmingly well with the content of this essay, so this was the obvious winner for my book of the year, though not my most highly recommended, because Stolen Focus has a firm grip on the top spot. I would, however, highly recommend Adam Grant’s podcast, Rethinking. Start with the episode called Bringing Out the Good in Kids and proceed to have your mind expanded as you learn about how the questions we ask affect the way other people think, while simultaneously marveling at the way Adam Grant asks really interesting questions to spark conversation.
*2. The Tao of Pooh* / by Benjamin Hoff and sequel *The Te of Piglet* / by Benjamin Hoff
Learning about Taoism through the vehicle of the Hundred Acre Wood? I think yes.

Up next on the reading list is Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, a book about cognitive dissonance. You’ll have to come back next year to see if it cracks the top of the nonfiction list.

A Moment of Gratitude

As I wrap up, and yes – several thousand words into my “brief” essay, I agree that now feels like the time to do so, I want to make sure to clearly state my gratitude for everything that I learned and enjoyed this year.

To everyone who helped me progress, who encouraged me through frustrations, who fueled the stoke and patiently demonstrated skills, who towed me off jumps, and who gave me pointers on how to make a heel side turn. To those who waited while I rolled into a feature 3, 7, maybe 15 times, thank you for your patience.
To my parents, coaches, and friends who taught me grit, perseverance, and made me the kind of person who always strives to get better. This year did not happen in a vacuum.

To the people who got me into biking, thank you. Biking made me feel super present in my body and mind in a way that I hadn’t before. It taught me to trust my decisions on what I felt ready to try on any given day. It taught me a sense of commitment to those decisions that I haven’t experienced so acutely anywhere else. It allowed me to push myself, feel afraid, and feel proud. I’m so grateful to get to experience all of it.

And thank you to everyone who stuck with me through this not at all brief essay that was originally slated to be a love letter to biking, snowboarding, Taylor Swift, and everything else wonderful about 2023. In the way that writing usually goes, I learned so much in the process that I lost track of where I intended to go, but ended up somewhere beautiful anyway.

P.S.

I had been toying with the idea of writing a piece like this for a long time. One night at the gym, I sat on the mats and typed several paragraphs into my phone instead of climbing. A few weeks later, I wrote a chunk about biking followed later by a chunk on running. I wasn’t sure I’d share any of it, or even how I would do that in a way that might be interesting, inspiring, or useful to anyone else.

Then, a couple weeks ago, I got a totally out-of-the-blue text from my dad, who had no idea I was considering writing this piece. He said he still draws inspiration from my Shut Up and Ski essay. Reminded of my past success, here I am again, trying to spread the stoke, the passion, the love, and a couple things I’ve learned along the way.

Never underestimate the power of positive feedback. Thanks, Dad!