Kids who grew up obsessed with skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, or any board sport end up making some of the most naturally wired entrepreneurs out there. Not because they took a business class or read the right books. Because the sport itself beat it into them.

Let me explain.

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First, some context on where this is coming from

From age 11 to 17, every single decision I made was filtered through one question: does this get me closer to being a pro snowboarder?

I competed. I got sponsors. I convinced my high school to let me take every Friday off to snowboard and travel for competitions. That last one wasn’t handed to me. I scheduled a meeting with my principal, sat him down with my parents, and made my case. I pointed out that football players, wrestlers, and basketball players all got accommodations for their sport and I deserved the same. I committed to keeping my GPA up and turning in assignments online before that was even a normal thing. And it worked.

I was 16 years old negotiating a deal that adults twice my age would have been too nervous to try for.

I didn’t think of it as entrepreneurship at the time. I just wanted to snowboard. But looking back, every instinct I was developing on the mountain was also quietly building the toolkit I’d use to run companies later.

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The Names You Already Know

This isn’t just a personal hunch. Look at who came out of board sport culture and ended up building serious business empires.

Rob Dyrdek picked up a skateboard at 11, turned pro at 16, and has since built a $100 million empire that includes a venture studio, Street League Skateboarding, multiple TV shows, and a media company that sold for $300 million. He’s talked openly about how going straight to the person who makes the deal, a habit he picked up in the skate world, became a lifelong business trait.

Tony Hawk turned pro at 14. By the time he was a senior in high school he was making more than his teachers, bought his parents a house, and went on to build a $140 million net worth that includes Birdhouse Skateboards, a video game franchise that generated over a billion dollars in revenue, and a portfolio of smart investments. Not bad for a kid who just wanted to skate.

Nick Woodman was a frustrated surfer who couldn’t capture quality footage in the water. So he taped a camera to his hand, eventually turned that frustration into GoPro, and became a billionaire. The whole company started because he was too obsessed with surfing to accept that the problem didn’t have a solution.

Richard Woolcott broke his neck surfing at 19, came back, and went on to found Volcom, one of the most recognized action sports brands in the world.

See a pattern?

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Why Board Sports Specifically Wire You This Way

It’s not random. There are specific things the sport teaches you that translate almost directly into what it takes to run a business.

You never learned how to follow the rules.

Board sports have no rulebook you’re expected to obey. No coach calling plays. No team structure telling you when to show up and what to do. You just went out and figured it out. That same wiring makes the idea of working a 9-5, in the same location, answering to a hierarchy, feel like a slow soul-crushing tragedy. And that’s actually a gift. The best entrepreneurs aren’t people who learned how to work within systems. They’re people who genuinely couldn’t.

You got comfortable with risk before you understood what risk was.

When you’re a kid launching yourself off something you’ve never hit before, you’re not running a risk analysis. You’re just doing it. That comfort with uncertainty, with the gap between where you are and where you want to land, is exactly what separates the people who start companies from the people who spend their careers thinking about it.

You know how to take a beating and get back up.

Board sports teach you that falling is not the end of the session. It’s just part of the session. I personally averaged about 1.5 surgeries a year for nearly a decade. I’m half metal at this point. You develop a relationship with pain and failure that most people never build because they never put themselves in enough physical danger to find out how resilient they actually are. In business, that shows up as the ability to lose a client, blow a launch, or make a bad hire and not spiral. You just get back up.

Obsession is your baseline.

Anyone who’s ever been deep into a board sport knows what obsession feels like. You think about it constantly. You wake up thinking about the trick you’re going to try. You fall asleep replaying what went wrong. You cancel plans, skip things, reorganize your life around it. That’s also exactly what building a business requires. The people who treat entrepreneurship like a job rarely build anything remarkable. You have to live in it.

You were always a self starter.

Skateboarding didn’t have a coach pushing you to practice more. Snowboarding didn’t have a team that picked up your slack so you could still win. You either put the work in or you didn’t progress. Period. That self-directed drive is the same engine that keeps a founder moving when there’s no boss, no structure, and no one making sure things get done.

You already know how to travel broke and figure it out.

I slept in my car over 300 times during those years. Summers at Mt. Hood, winters wherever the snow was, all on a shoestring budget, talking to strangers, building relationships, learning how to get by with less than most people would consider acceptable. That is incredible preparation for the early days of running a business. And it builds a kind of resourcefulness that’s almost impossible to teach in any other way.

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The Creativity Thing

This one doesn’t need much explanation. Watch any skate video or surfing clip and tell me those people aren’t creative. Every trick, every line, every approach is an expression of finding a new way to do something everyone thought they understood. That same thinking is what produces good products, good pitches, and good solutions to problems that other people have just accepted as unsolvable.

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So What’s the Point?

If you grew up on a board and you’re now building a business, I’d bet that more of your entrepreneurial instincts came from that chapter of your life than you’ve ever given it credit for.

And if you’re thinking about whether entrepreneurship is for you, I’d ask: were you ever the kid who couldn’t be talked out of something? Who figured out workarounds instead of accepting limitations? Who got back up more times than people thought was reasonable?

Because that’s the job. And some of us got a pretty early start on training for it.

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*Alex Booth is the co-founder of Rich & Remote and the owner of GetCSM and Huckleberry Consulting. He lives and works remotely from Playa del Carmen, Mexico.*