90% of Surfing

I was in Cornwall a couple of weeks ago. One morning, sitting on a bench high up a cliff overlooking Fistral Beach in Newquay, I watched a group of surfers at 7:30am and saw something I’d never noticed before.

Whenever I’ve pictured surfing, it’s the Instagram reel version: someone carving a perfect wave like an absolute champion.

But that morning, watching for real, I saw that surfing is mostly waiting. Floating. Bobbing up and down on the board. Reading the water.

Ninety percent of the time, nothing was happening at all.

Then a wave would come. For a minute, sometimes less, it was pure exhilaration.

Then they crashed back into the ocean and started waiting again.

We all have a version of this. Something we’d sit in the water for hours to get 60 seconds of.

For a lot of the leaders I coach, it may look like this:

• a deal that’s been eight months in the making
• a launch that keeps slipping
• a promotion decision sitting on someone else’s desk
• investor conversations yet to gather momentum

Life gets put on hold until the wave finally arrives. Every notification gets checked. Every meal happens with one eye on the phone.

The wait itself becomes something to survive rather than something to live through.

Here’s what I noticed on that cliff that changed how I think about my own waiting:

The surfers weren’t suffering through the ninety percent. They were talking, laughing, watching the horizon together, enjoying being out there. The wait wasn’t the price they paid for the wave. It was already good.

That’s the actual difference between a wait that breaks you and one that doesn’t. Not how long it lasts, and not even whether the wave comes.

It’s whether you’ve decided the ninety percent has to be miserable in order to earn the ten. It doesn’t.

There will be pain in most worthwhile waits. But suffering is a choice, and it’s usually the choice to withhold your life until the outcome arrives.

So, two things make any wait sustainable:

1. the moment you’re working toward has to be worth it
2. the waiting itself has to be something you can actually enjoy, not just endure

Where in your life have you decided the waiting has to hurt?

And what would it look like to make that 90% good on its own terms, regardless of when or whether the wave comes in?

​
Jaineel

p.s here’s how I can support you on next steps:

• 🧠 Get Out of Your Own Head — 90 minutes. One 1:1 session. A bespoke report. Walk away with a concrete plan you can act on immediately. No ongoing commitment. Limited to 8 sessions per month.
• 📓 Journal with Jaineel 7 Day Experience for Free — 7 days, 10 minutes a day. One prompt.
• 🧘 Download my free guided meditation — 20 minutes to calibrate your energy and shift your state. Remember: you don’t attract what you want, you attract who you are.
• 📞 Let’s talk — if you’re ready to do this work 1:1 or in a group setting, book a call with me.

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