Balance and alignment on a piece of wood

"How can skateboarders make their art look so easy?" I asked myself when I practiced my ollies for a thousandth time while my hope to be a skateboarder finally melted at the end of a year of trying hard and getting nothing. My first skateboard went to my neighborhood nuns' charity and I forgot all about it. Well, not really.

Walking around during lunch breaks got really boring. Yeah, I could listen to stories in german in the meantime, more on that later, but walking became mechanically dull. "Should I come back to skateboarding?" I wondered, "It could be a not so serious activity for lunchtime" Few days later I got a new skateboard knowing that I was rusty thus learning to ride it again would take a long time.

I rode around for a while before diving into tricks because I watched some skateboarding basics videos on youtube advicing that. Later on, when I felt more comfortable with my skateboard, I decided to try easy tricks first. However, I didn't spend much time on them as the ollie (jumping with your skateboard by the way) was in the back of my head. I guess I wanted to avenge my failure learning it from the past and I didn't want to postpone it anymore.

Once again I failed, but I didn't want to give up. I was confident I would conquer the ollie even though I would spend a lot of time. That same confidence let me pull through coding and other activities so I didn't see a valid reason to think it wouldn't help me with skateboarding. However, I also knew that just confidence wouldn't be enough to solve the problem but understanding why I was failing and failing again. Two lessons here: Be confident you can do it and be inquisitive to enquire why you can't do it.

Currently my success ratio doing the ollie is getting higher. Turns out that skateboard tricks are puzzles you solve by controlling your balance and aligning your body correctly. It doesn't something hard to do but it actually is.