The strange, life-altering habit of jumping into things, even though I know I’ll fail

HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. – Down I went again, tumbling end over end, somersaulting through another wave. The 58-degree Pacific Ocean gave me the briefest hint of a brain freeze. I coughed up salt water on my way up to put some fresh air in my lungs. My ankle felt a tiny sear from where the leash had wrapped itself around it and tugged.

It was, all in all, an apt opportunity to be pretty miserable.

I loved it.

I popped up, pulled the board back, found my good friend, Jon Mesko, and paddled out after him, only to repeat the process a dozen times over the next hour.

I’ve been called an optimist for the majority of my life. A positive thinker. My mother’s son. I don’t think people are wrong in claiming that, but I think it’s a little surface level. Misses much of the point.

Yes, I am an optimist. Yes, I have the personality to get tossed around by the Pacific Ocean while surfing and invariably pop up smiling where it might otherwise be easy to get frustrated. But I don’t think that’s so much a genetic personality trait or a learned mentality as it is my habit of simply picking and choosing activities in which it’s easy for me to smile and laugh and find the goodness in it even on the worst of days.

In other words: It’s easy for me to embrace the suck.

If you were to take a look at my life path, it would, at first blush, seem to be a winding, circuitous route, with little rhyme or reason. I believe I can say, with a certain degree of confidence, that I am the first resident of Hampstead, Maryland, to ever pursue a career in writing about beach volleyball. I can even say, with an admittedly smaller degree of confidence, that I’m one of the first people in the country to attempt such a thing, for such a thing doesn’t really exist.

Very little of my life path makes sense, other than the fact that I’ve always pursued things that didn’t make much sense. But they were things that I loved, so it didn’t much matter if it made sense or not, or if I were terrible or naturally talented at them.

As I entered high school, it didn’t make sense for me to drop soccer, a sport I had played my entire life, and one at which I was quite good, and trade it for golf, a sport I had not played my entire life, and one at which I was quite bad. But it didn’t matter to me if I were bad – I loathed soccer and loved golf, no matter what I shot.

The irony, in fact, was that the better I became, the more dissatisfied I’d become. “Expectations,” as my good friend, Ed Ratledge, says, “are the thief of joy.” That topic is another blog for another day, but the point is this: Whether I shot 100 or 85, I loved golf. And because I loved it, on both good days and bad, I was willing to put in the work to become good at it. It took me until my junior year to be half decent, and halfway through college for me to become a very good golfer.

In other words: It was easy for me to embrace the suck of beating balls on the driving range, putting and chipping for hours, playing through wind and rain and freezing cold and shanking balls into trees and ponds. This wasn’t because I was a natural optimist or positive-thinker: I just found something I enjoyed doing, regardless of the results. Hell, some days I didn’t need any results: I’d just go putt because it was meditative.

The same could be said for my writing. I wasn’t always a writer, nor was I always encouraged to become one. In fact, an English teacher once gently prodded me to pursue a different career. But I loved writing, no matter what my teachers thought, and I continued doing it. I loved it even though I knew it was a career with little financial promise. But I loved it to the point that I accepted the fact I might have to atone for that lack of finances, because if cutting back on conveniences and subscription services and living with roommates meant I had the freedom to write, then that’s what I’d do.

For the past 16 years, it’s been easy for me to embrace much of the suck that comes with writing – the criticisms, the financial instability, the unruly readers – because none of that really matters. I just love writing, and I’ll do it regardless.

Find any major component of my life – beach volleyball, writing, backpacking, reading, now surfing – and that’s what you’ll find: That even on the worst days, my job, my hobbies, my spouse, are my favorite things in the world.

There’s a strange cliché I’ve seen, in which readers are asked “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” I’ve always found this question to be wholly unproductive, a useless exercise. Instead, I just sort of flip it on its head: “What would you do even if you knew you would fail?”

That, to me, is the secret sauce. The answers to that question now dominate my life. I pursue beach volleyball as a player even though I know I’m going to lose more major tournaments than I win. In fact, to this day, I’ve lost every single one of them. But I do it anyways, because I love it, which makes the losing palatable and the journey an enjoyable little thrill-ride, hiccups and all.

When I first began writing about beach volleyball, I did so for free. Financially, it was a failure of a pursuit, which I figured it would be. I just did it anyway.

I write books even though I know they will fail in all the major metrics used to measure such things. I probably won’t make millions, become a New York Times best-seller, sign a major publishing deal. But I’ll do it anyway, because I love the process of writing a book, and the satisfaction that comes with having the final product in my hands, and seeing it in the hands of others.

Pursue any industry, and I believe that those who are the best at what they do got into their occupations because they would have done so regardless of the outcome. It isn’t difficult to identify the best teachers, doctors, chefs, entrepreneurs — you name it — because their passion for what they do is impossible to miss.

They’re able to embrace the suck, because there really is no suck. The worst days are still damn good days.

When Delaney and I wed almost two years ago, we recited the vows you’ll hear at any wedding: We promised to love each other in sickness and in health, for better or worse, etc. Though we won’t make any verbal proclamations in front of a crowd of family and friends, we’ll do the same with our children one day. We’ll love them through temper tantrums and sleepless nights, stupid decisions and uncleaned messes.

We’ll love each other, and our kids, through the inevitable failures to come.

What if we made a similar vow to our choice of occupation, hobby, social commitments? That’s been the prism I’ve unknowingly used for my life: If I don’t like something when I’m at my worst, then I tend not to do that thing. It isn’t a positive mindset; it’s a careful selection of pursuits.

So I’ll keep playing beach volleyball, even when the inevitable losses and heartbreak come. I’ll keep writing, even if there are more lucrative jobs elsewhere and readers hate me. I’ll keep obsessively loving my wife, even when we’re having a contentious debate if kale qualifies as lettuce or not.

And I’ll keep surfing, even though I know the falls will come, the water will be cold, and I’ll be terrible at it for quite a while.

Because even at its worst, surfing is amazing.

Even though I know I’ll fail, I’ll keep paddling out.