Writing
Riding the Tech Wave: Lessons from Surfing
I surf in the cold water around the San Francisco Bay, and I work on AI systems. The two keep explaining each other to me, so I figured I should write the comparison down.
The thing about a wave is that you do not make it. It was generated by a storm somewhere far away, long before you paddled out. Your choices are limited: where to sit, when to paddle, whether to commit. You can ignore the wave, paddle too late, or panic when it lifts you — none of which changes the wave. Technology shifts feel the same to me, and the AI one more than any I have been through.
Positioning beats prediction
The instinct most people have is to wait for certainty. Wait for the tooling to settle, for the best practices to get written, for someone senior to declare the thing real. The problem is that by the time certainty arrives, the best learning window is gone. In the water, this is the surfer who watches a whole set roll through, decides the third wave was the good one, and starts paddling for the spot where it already broke.
A surfer does not really predict waves. They sit where waves tend to be catchable and attempt a lot of them. That is the mental model I keep coming back to: positioning beats prediction. I cannot tell you which model or tool wins, and I am suspicious of anyone who claims they can. What I can do is be in the water — use the tools on real work before any mandate arrives, and get enough reps that my judgment updates before the market has finished explaining what happened.
Balance, and the next wave
Positioning is not the same as chasing. Paddling for every wave leaves you exhausted and out of position for the one that matters. The same is true of tools: the goal is reps on real problems, not a tour of every launch. And once you are up and riding, the job becomes balance — enthusiasm paired with verification and taste, because the wave does not care how excited you are.
One more thing surfing teaches: conditions do not hold. Each wave moves the sand around and changes the break for the next one. Whatever you learned about this wave is partly obsolete already, which is annoying, and also the whole point. The skill that compounds is not knowledge of a particular wave. It is the habit of reading water.
The goal is not to call every break perfectly. It is to build the reflexes to catch the important waves when they show up — and to already be in the water when they do.