My husband is a former skateboarder.
These days he writes clean, efficient code and keeps his back mostly intact, but there’s still a skateboard in the garage and a certain reverence for the culture he grew up in. But we still watch skate videos for nostalgia – Thrasher Magazine, random YouTubes, and, hell, these days, even the Olympics.
The other night, we were watching a new video. It was intense, as usual, the kind of skating that makes you wince just watching. Trick after trick down handrails, across sketchy ledges, off rooftops. And every time the skater went for it, he’d miss. And not just miss – he’d slam. Full-body impact. Concrete to bone. Metal to shin. The kind of falls that make you suck your teeth and cover your eyes.
But he kept going. Over and over. Adjusting his speed, his foot placement, his timing. You could see his brain recalibrating every time he stood back up. And then, after what felt like the twentieth fall, he landed it. It wasn’t clean. But it was enough. And I exhaled like I’d been holding our breath the whole time and clapped my hands without even thinking about it.
What I was struck by — what I haven’t been able to stop thinking about — is that all of that made it into the final cut. The slams. The gritted teeth. The moments of frustration and recalibration. They weren’t edited out. They were the story.
And isn’t that kind of incredible?
Skateboarding, as a culture, insists on showing the failure. Not as a warning, but as part of the art. As something you have to see in order to appreciate the landing.
But in business, in leadership, in entrepreneurship — we do the opposite.
We polish. We hide. We reframe. We wait until the launch works before we share it. We wait until the hire is a win before we tell that story. We edit the wipeouts out.
And in doing so, we lose something.
We lose the opportunity to normalize the fall. We lose the resilience-building that comes from watching someone try again — not metaphorically, but viscerally. We lose the honesty that earns trust.
The people on your team, the ones you’re trying to lead or teach or grow, they don’t need your perfection. They need your process. They need to know it didn’t all work the first time. That you missed, and bled a little. And that you stood back up.
Because falling isn’t failure. Falling is friction, and friction is learning.And learning is culture.
What would change if you let the slam reel roll?