Today is good life.
Project riff is called the Surfer's Guide to Entrepreneurship.
So I spent a good amount of time on some vacations looking out over the ocean from vacation houses.
A couple years back, we actually rented a house down in the outer banks in the Carolinas, North Carolina.
And I remember just literally looking out and reconnecting with the water and the sun and the sand.
But I never really expected a set of pretty much killer livelihood and business and entrepreneurial marketing lessons to be revealed by just watching surfers catching early morning waves.
And I've done a bit of surfing, but not a lot.
I'm an absolute and utter heck when it comes to surfing.
But as I watched, it became really clear that surfing is this astonishing metaphor for entrepreneurship.
And these sort of eight quick principles kind of channel through me that I thought I'd share with you.
So number one is go where the waves are.
So if you love to surf, but you live by the bay, you don't just walk out and ask for waves on demand.
You've got to actually go where the waves are, and that's in the ocean, not the bay.
And in fact, many surfers travel the world just to find the best waves.
The same thing applies when you're trying to start a business or even a career.
You don't just decide you like building surfboards, then open up a surf shop in downtown Chicago and expect people to start swarming it.
You go to the waves, the places where your customers already congregate and share experiences and look for solutions.
Not too long ago, this meant relocating to the coast.
But interestingly actually with the Internet, you can now literally find places that your customers are hanging out online and go to those places and build relationships and serve their needs in the communities they already participate in.
So it's really given you the ability to go to the waves without ever leaving your backyard.