Kelly Slater Interview

I just read this in Water Magazine, it’s an interview with surf pro Kelly Slater. I copy and pasted a few questions that were interesting to me, maybe you will take something from this also… Click here to read the full interview. KELLY SLATER INTERVIEW

Did you ever feel like you lost out on the chance to go to college, have those experiences?

Yeah, early on I thought about that. I thought about it at the time. But what comes around, goes around. My girlfriend now is going to college. I’m experiencing it through her.

The thing about school is you don’t come out any more intelligent than you went in. You’re the same person. I just got introduced to different stuff that I might otherwise not have been introduced to.

Most of the things people learn in college, they’re not so passionate about. It’s not because they wake up in the morning thinking about it, go to sleep thinking about it; it’s because they have to get this piece of paper, pay off the loans they’ve spent years building up. It’s not necessarily about the love you have for something; it’s about the need. The “having to do something.”

Yeah, most people don’t love school like we love surfing. But even for me, being vaguely involved in the surf industry, I’ll go through days where all I talk about is surfing. Every conversation. And when you finally meet someone who isn’t a surfer, and you get to talk about something else, it’s a relief. You’re so happy not to have to talk about surfing anymore.

Do you know how often I want to tell people to f–k off ’cause they want to talk about surfing? [Laughs.] I’ll meet someone and maybe they don’t surf, maybe they sort of do, and all of a sudden they start asking me, “Oh, what was it like…” about competitions, my life, surfing… You have no idea how boring that is for me. You have no idea how uninteresting that sounds to me.

Which is the irony, of course, ’cause that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the last hour.