Epic win!
For some, snowboarding is just that fun thing they do a few times a year. For me, snowboarding changed my life. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if not for snowboarding and it’s impacted my life in major ways.
If I were to list all the ways snowboarding has affected my life, this blog would be much longer. I’ve decided to limit it to 1 thing. This 1 thing has changed my life and completely shifted the direction my life would have gone.
How snowboarding changed me
I’m not exactly what you’d call a ‘conventional’ thinking person. I’ve always thought a little differently, but I never applied it to big changes in my life until snowboarding.
A little back story…
In primary school I was holding cinema sessions playing movies on our home TV and charging my parents a dollar to come watch the movie with me. In high school I bought 10 ice creams on ‘Ice cream thursday’ in order to sell the extra 9 to kids who had forgotten their money, in exchange I got twice as much money the next day.
In late high school, I devised a way to get out of doing any maths homework by asking a series of other maths questions when it was my turn to give my homework answers. However, despite my shenanigans, I was considered ‘bright’ in high school and told by many that I should go to Uni, graduate, and get some sort of high paying job.
I thought that was what I had to do. Up until that point, I always looked for the best way to do something, even if it wasn’t what everyone else was doing. However, I slowly stopped thinking differently. I buckled down and got the grades I needed to get into the Uni I wanted. This was what people like me were supposed to do right?
Finding happiness…
Long story short, Uni was just more of doing what everyone else said I had to do. I learnt meaningless stats and it was a glimpse at how boring and uninteresting my life would be. I tried different subjects, but none were interesting, however I was going to tough it out because this is what everyone said I should be doing, so I had to do this or risk failing at life.
Then I found snowboarding. It made me happier than I’d ever been and it made everything feel ‘right’ for me… and everything changed…
It seems like just yesterday that I was standing in my room at university and telling my housemates that I was dropping out to go snowboarding. I decided that for once, I was going to do exactly what made me happy and keep doing it until I was old and wrinkly.
Fast forward 5 years and I’ve gained insane amounts of confidence as a result of my crazy life adventure. 5 years of snowboarding all over the world has taught me that even when things don’t work out exactly as planned (and they rarely do), following your dreams usually has a habit of making things work out in the end, even if it’s not what everyone else thinks.
Finding my confidence…
All the crashes, failures, successes and overcoming all the little hiccups along my snowboard journey have given me insane amounts of confidence to face other challenges.
My crazy snowboard life has taught me that it’s okay to follow your dreams and it’s okay to go against what everyone else thinks. If I never started my snowboard trip 5 years ago, I wouldn’t have gained to confidence to be running my own company today and I’d probably be in some crappy desk job, too scared to make real changes in my life.
Did you know that less than 5% of people will follow up on a good idea for a company and only about 0.5% will have a successful company? I knew the stats when I started Snomie, but it didn’t matter to me. It’s kind of like knowing that I can’t fail.
I learnt that I only end up happier, even if I ‘fail’. Snowboarding taught me that there isn’t any failure or wrong choice when you’re doing the things that make you happiest and chasing your dreams.
You’re happy. That’s what matters the most.
That’s just one of the many reasons I love snowboarding, but for me, it’s the most important reason.
– Jed