Do you want to snowboard? The question was simple enough. It took me some time to process how I should move forward. I had snowboarded before, but it wasn’t something I was very confident in. Five years ago I received a book to me called The Growth Mindset by Carol Dweck from coworkers at Sunset Auto Wholesale. I could only keep my attention for half the book before losing focus. However, I did watch the accompanying TED Talk so that makes me a half-baked expert. Two years ago I sat in some lessons from a leadership coordinator about leadership and failure. Not all adults are prepared to wear the white belt on the white mountain, but I am.
How I ended up living in a white mountain ski resort area in Japan is a wild story. I don’t like snow or being cold. Coupled with my hobbies of being a professional indoors man liking competitive gaming, living in rural japan made no sense. The inconsistent ping made it impossible to play the games I preferred as a result I was forced to find new hobbies. After a large mental reset, I’ve placed a large emphasis on living in the moment and seeing things with new eyes. After processing an infinite amount of variables I answered my friend’s question.
“Yes”
Thus wearing the white belt on the white mountain began.
Biases For Snowboarding
Cost to get to a White Mountain
When Dave Chapelle was a kid, his parents did just well enough to grow up around affluent white people. No matter how many times I watch that line get delivered, I still burst into laughter. My whole family laughed at that joke because that was the story of our lives for so long. The song high school never ends loops in my head as my life is pretty similar, but instead of rich white folks, I’m surrounded by crazy rich Asians. I’ve always seen snowboarding as a wealthy person’s activity.
It takes money for equipment, gas, and time to travel up and down the mountain so it wasn’t cheap. For someone who hears their parents arguing about money regularly and worried looks from their mother as she scanned her balance book after our “High class” outing at Jack in the Box, asking for three to four benjamins for a day out seems a bit much. I grew resentful about the activity as I heard kids talking about their trips, buying new equipment, or ski passes.
One girl who was out of touch with money told me season passes are only like three hundred and $375. (Sometimes I forgot I went to a school where people bought $500 dollar jeans to fit in). The way I calculated the value of large ticket items as a naive kid was in Xbox 360s. If I only got a new console every 6 or 7 years there was no way I could afford any frozen mountain sport. When people asked me what I was doing for the white season in the Pacific Northwest I’d respond with one or two original Quotes.
Rationalizations
Do you see any brown people up on that mountain? Putting yourself in a situation where you can get stranded and freeze to death seems like a white person thing
Marco 2000s-2010s
Why would I pay to travel to the top of some oversized rock with frozen water on top. Just to strap a board to my feet and go back down said oversized rock.
Marco 2000s-2010s
Cost to get to a White Belt
It took me a lot of years and a lot of fucking up to get my mental to where it is today. That mental humbling came at a price as well. Over the last four years, I’ve gone from being overconfident to hating everything to having no self-esteem and only hating myself. I used to feel like the universe was handcrafted. Now I think that I’m just an insignificant spec floating in space just like everyone else. Fourteen years ago you wouldn’t catch me doing something I’m not skilled in yet. Living like that closes you away from the world, opportunities, and learning. As long as I was afraid to fail so to that fear would also gatekeep me from any possibilities of success.
If you haven’t watched Cyberpunk: EdgeRunners do yourself a favor and binge-watch this anime like a movie. Being an EdgeRunner in the Cyberpunk Universe is straddling the line between the law, going crazy because of cyber enhancements, and life and death. To be an edge runner in real life is not a life or death affair(usually). The only thing really have to risk to be an edge runner is failure. Life’s biggest lessons come in the form of falling flat on your face, daring to look stupid in front of a class, or in my case plowing into the snow with a sportscar.
Run The Edge
In general the uninitiated will look at any fuck up, failure, or in my case my front bumper and think “what a clown, a fool, that person is bad at x,y,z”. As to driving . . .some of you are just bad drivers lol jkjk. Put to risk the big F pursuing a big goal is nothing to be ashamed about.
I’ve been chewed up and spit out and booed off stage
Eminem
In essence, it’s what you do when you take that fall that crafts you. You could beat yourself up and say, I’m not risking that again. Conversely, you can wake up to the fact that falling is part of the game. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. For some of you failing is not an option. You might be a surgeon, nurse, military guy, or extreme sports athlete. In that case failure means death. For 99% of people failure only means a little embarrassment and damage to the EGO.
The Helmet Catch
Think back to the best performance, artistic or athletic, that you’ve witnessed. It’s those moments when everything is on the line that we bring the best of us forward. Humans have a deep sense and they can recognize when people are on the edge of failure.
Most big football fans will remember this catch. Due to this being one of the biggest stages of all time. Against the undefeated Patriots, on third and five, the play looked dead when Manning narrowly escaped being sacked. Surrounded by patriot Jerseys, David Tyree went up and caught the ball with a defender fighting him the whole time. People don’t remember all the times David Tyree was just a backup. This catch was monumental because it had to happen.
It’s impossible to get here without the white belt mindset. A quick look into the life of the man behind the catch and you’ll see that he had to do some reevaluations in his life. It was only after a big fuckup on the edge of losing everything he cared about that sparked his change.
Since part of wearing that white belt on the white mountain canvas that is life is about being on the wrong side of failure we can learn from this. It’s about what you do on that flipside that creates moments like these.
Benefits of Snowboarding
So I’ve found a white belt and a white mountain I’m ready to learn. What benefits can I expect from this? Well, I’ve always thought that snowboarding looks cool I guess it comes from my skater kid phase. The second benefit is I can put my money where my mouth is and practice all this white belt growth mindset rhetoric I’ve been typing out. The marketing team needed photos of the students on the slopes and I was the only one with good enough camera skills and some snowsport ability. The last benefit was that it was some entertainment in a largely barren Japanese countryside prefecture.
I Almost Forgot My White Belt as I headed up the White Mountain
As my friend Dario and I went up the lift, we talked about our past. Notably, I had only snowboarded three times. Conversely, Dario was a licensed snowboard instructor. When we were putting on our gear, my white belt was all set as I intently listened and asked questions. The white mountain still loomed overhead as we had only ridden up the beginner lift. The second we began going downhill I’d almost left my white belt at the top of the beginner lift. I took a couple of falls before Dario Stopped next to me and gave me tips.
“Don’t Carve yet let’s just work on heading left and then stopping, after that, we’ll go right and stop”
I heard my Ego erupt inside. “I don’t need basic tips, I can do that” then again I thought that I could play football, basketball, and make it to Diamond rank on my own in gaming. My biggest growth came when I left the idea of learning on my own behind. White belt white mountain I repeated to myself in my head. Let’s focus on learning the fundamentals Marco, this guy is a snowboard instructor after all. I finished the rest of the run without falling.
White Belt In a Community
All along the white mountain were small dots making their way down. The student group I was in charge of getting photos of stood out in their yellow pennies. The instructor that followed closely behind donned a blue jacket. The complimentary colors were easy to find in the white landscape. I found a group and started snowboarding next to them. It was a challenge to snowboard to a location, stop, and then turn around to take photos. As a result, I was falling a decent amount. The camera indeed made things a little more difficult. Eventually, I did get the hang of it and could even line up shots while sliding down the mountain.
As I cruised with my white belt sliding down that white mountain I realized the importance of an adult who isn’t afraid to do things they are bad at. When my cycle of falling, laughing, and having fun had a real impact on the students I was in charge of taking photos of. Even if it was subconscious learning on the white mountain the white belt mindset had its first pupils. Students who had a solid grasp of basic snowboarding had started to experiment with jumping after seeing me try and fail to get the basics right. We also had Chris there who knew how to do basic jumps. He had done them previously, but none of the students tried until they witnessed my continual ass-plant and laugh cycle.
White belt students
Soon there was a collection of us boarding, falling, and laughing as we made our way down the mountain. I think it’s important to have an older figure in a child’s life be willing to learn new things and fail. Because a child learns by watching and imitating first and through osmosis, they learn that it’s okay to start new skills and be bad at them in the beginning. The younger the students are, the more important this is. Because at an early stage in life, unless you are a savant genius you aren’t good at much and you have little skills in your utility belt. It’s like you’re an MMO character and only 10% of your skill bar and specs are unlocked.
Loving Yourself, True Confidence, and Courage
Wearing my white belt to that white mountain on that day taught me a lot about loving myself, true confidence, and courage. It is my belief that what most people think of as confidence and courage is merely the false idea of it that our culture promotes. I thought that confidence meant practicing something until you were 100% sure you could nail it. However, the opposite is true. Nothing says confidence like someone trying something just a bit out of their reach, falling flat on their face, and picking themselves up to try again. There is a difference between confidence and recklessness however so keep that in mind.
In addition, courage isn’t not having fear, it’s acting despite of it. When your arms and legs shake taking the time to reframe fear into excitement is a skill that can be learned. Physically it is the same sensation. Adrenaline pumps, your heart rate goes up, and your body switches into high alert mode. It can take a lot of courage to admit you don’t know something or to see areas you can improve, but that is just as important as picking yourself up after a fall and trying again. Courage is required for experimentation and mixing up an approach when one way is repeatedly failing and even to ask experts for questions.
Lastly
Finally loving yourself for all the effort and progress you’ve made is an important part that I struggle with. I’ve moved to a foreign country, held multiple jobs, and survived in a culture other than my own for five years. It’s time to give myself credit for the things I’ve achieved, the things I’m trying to achieve, and the things I’ve failed to or won’t attain. It’s hard to love ourselves because we hold ideals and see ourselves as unperfect. The fact is we aren’t perfect and will never be, it’s finding comfort in that and appreciating every ounce of effort we make.
Much Love,
LaidbackMarco 💖
