Learning to surf is a long term goal. It takes time. It can be a challenging road. Fraught with difficulty and frustration but spotted with moments of pure, blissful joy.

The reason for this is that surfing is heavily centred around psychological punishment and reward. Do something right, you get rewarded with a dopamine hit, do something wrong and fall and you can suffer frustration and impatience.

The ability to delay gratification is key for success in surfing. It means putting in the time to practice the mundane repetitions needed to learn a set of skills. The same is true for all sports. This is also true of many other ares of one’s life. Welcome to the grind.  The ability to sustain the hard yards needed to achieve something worthwhile without giving up and putting off the discomfort of disappointment/boredom or the lack of an immediately good outcome.

So with this in mind, knowing that the path to success in anything lies behind a lot of failure, disappointment and psychological punishment, what do we do to move forward?

The answer lies in acceptance. Acceptance of the hard work involved in anything worthwhile. In the rolling up of the sleeves in honour of the long term pay off. Also it helps to reframe the failure. If failure is seen as a necessary outcome and is expected, its easier to accept. After an initial phase of resistance the mind learns to recognise the pay off. It makes the association between the grind and the subsequent results that this can bring. Think of it as developing a sort of mental fitness. In the case of surfing this means learning to enjoy the wipe outs.

Mental fitness is commonly overlooked in terms of its importance compared to say physical fitness. Imagine your brain as a muscle. When you first start to exercise it aches and there is pain. There is zero recognition of a long term pay off at first so everything seems hard and pointless. But after some time there is a recognition of progress. This is the beginning of an association in the brain. A very beneficial one.

Long term benefits are a sustained, deeper kind of satisfaction. These are the achievements you look back on and take pride in.

So what’s ultimately beneficial in most life situations is a willingness to fail and to put in the hard yards and build a pattern of reinforcement. A neural pathway that identifies the positive association between hard work and long term benefit. Exercising this part of the mind spills over to other areas of life.

After a while, this positive association results in an enjoyment in the work needed to be done. Once hard work becomes enjoyable you can bet that your surfing and your life will start to take shape.