Rodney Mullen: "Build on a Bedrock of Failure" Keynote - Velocity Santa Clara 2014

I think I'm done doing I seriously hurt so bad that it's a friend of mine Jamie Thomas that's a glimpse of just one session and it usually goes on for hours sometimes days note that with each impact he lands pain shoots through them obvious what's also on his mind as he's calibrating what do I do next arrange feet the set up his body changes next time you can see him limping but beyond that he's thinking where's that security guard again and did that crazy lady call the cops and if I land this I go into traffic so all the stuffs in his mind and then the Sun starts coming down you start thinking man I had to come back here but by that time you thinking it may be a five hour drive or a flight for you and your cameraman and then by the time you get there and believing this happens there's an overzealous janitor and there's no cars in the parking lot except for that one park right where you're landing and so the point is is there's no guarantee in this and no matter how talent you are not everyone skates like this I don't but your capacity to deal and cope with failure will be tested and how you deal with that makes the difference between good and great that is Tony Hawk watching him practice is more demonstrative of his physical genius and even seeing him roll away just two highlights because you see how quickly he locks in on that stuff how easy he is with it all that ramp is huge to begin with and he stacks a seven foot ladder on top of that which is such a recipe for pain and you can see how he falls if anything he's moderately bored irritated and I know Tony well one of his gifts he's so smart so he's already leap frogging forward as to how to make the adjustment to make the trick it's often said the best skaters the best fallers and yeah that's largely true not always the case but one thing's for sure you're going to be familiar with it or else you're not going to go far what's the central attribute what's working with that it's well quick reactions that helps what are the components of that in this case there's a somatic awareness that's conjoined with this intense and nuanced feel for relative motion instead another way it's not so much responsive it's a predictive acumen that undergirds and supercharges response time and that is synchronized with movement so Tony's flying up the ramp he knows exactly where everything is and every flick is a little different but he can anticipate where it's going to be and act accordingly with incredible precision anything that fine-tune naturally falls out of tune just as easily and this is something I can certainly attest to within a day of not skating within two days feel something's a little off right in the beginning a week man you can roll your ankle in a heartbeat it's that it actually is that quickly it's another central feature what we do that's day one song he is picture of balance for me what is balance I mean we're not spending tops at projectiles we're always wobbling back and forth to some extent and so just how good at we how good are we at not falling down so there's a physical relationship to that I mean think of standing on a curb we have a natural range of recoverability something like that and then you stand on a tightrope squeezed in for sure but so there's more than physics because if you raise that tightrope 100 feet squeezes it a lot because you pad it because better sakes I'm sorry and there's that natural sense of familiarity well how well do we know our limits and so you padded some more because you really don't know where your limits are you don't have that kind of nuance to feel and then there's a reaction time of how quickly an efficiency can we response that we can recover ourselves before we fall outside of that well day one what he does naturally is he knows how to lock his body and you can see it so that he can leverage the most control over the smallest movement so he recovers most efficiently well you compound those two and you get him another form of this baby that's Carlos so notice first thing he does there's so much again view this the lens of balance is he's looking out that ledge you ollie out far it's a lower ollie and safer in a sense but you're going faster you go slower higher ollie so you gauge he hops up there whatever you do don't fall left and then he gauges this what does it feel like the incline figure that out and then look at the cement how's that going to grind I mean am I going to stick and pitch forward or a lot of whacks am I going to whip out he hops down another sense of balance is if you're around these guys at all you learn this quickly whatever you do don't think about it too much because if you do you start project images of disaster that will lock you up and get you out of sync and sends you to the hospital so he goes back he charges he stops it last minutes hearts racing because because it's deadly he goes back commits and makes it and it's amazing it's not always like that though one of the hard things about putting together this footage was what not to put in because there's so much of this failure pain injury recovery it is embedded into their notion of what it is to be a skateboarder these individuals know that feel that I don't skate like that again but I'm familiar enough with it good dozen broken bones as far as contracts you sign on the dotted line they're agreeing to pay you for what you can do but they know they're going to be paying you for when you can't skate when you're healing it's unrealistic to expect constant progress because the nature of what we're trying to do is going to do realms to break new barriers and what's concomitant with that is not knowing exactly what to do you got to swish around a little bit so by the very nature the ethos of our community I think it's more conducive to innovation and I'm clearly biased but I do believe skateboarding is unusually innovative and part of the reason is because of the way we embrace failure as a community so all these tricks have a couple things in common one is throwing this board into this awkward position that's against its design and second is to throw yourself out of ballots in order to actually make the trick and that's common for for us it's certainly for me that if you want to conjoin two motions that don't necessarily fit together naturally so like adding vectors you pull one down you jump against the grain of its natural momentum so they fit together just enough so that a flow can start to happen now conceptually how that works for me is I often start again the idea is to break new ground so so throw something foreign in the middle and then try to think backwards well how do i connect these disparate end points and go from there and for me again I'm not known for stunts I made up a bunch of stuff and that is truly my mindset now it takes more than good ideas to do good tricks which is really what this talk is about is the best I wish I could tell you the hardest part about skateboarding is dealing with the Falls it isn't getting close the hardest part about skating is getting up again and again and again and again until you actually make it if you stop one fall short of making it then none of it matters some people say is the quality you have to be born with and I don't know about that I don't think so what I do know is all my peers the guys I respect most they have this in spades it's a small community we grow up together and the way that quality the only way I know it really forges into what makes these guys is through this process of getting up again and again I guess to put it more plainly that guy at the top right is the one that was writhing on the ground he came out to the west coast following a dream similar I did he ended up homeless for a while stuck with it and he made place in skateboarding place of Honor the few people will ever achieve the guy below him is Danny Way I didn't really talk about Danny because once I start I can't stop this documentary on his life called waiting for lightning everything about is dramatic not the least of which he broke his neck not even skating and then risk paralysis in order to heal it in a way that was sketchy to begin with and ends up jumping the Great Wall of China shattering our conceptions of what we think can be done on skateboard guy the left without a doubt is the most famous and successful skateboarder there has ever been and potentially because the timing and just his gifts ever will be that picture is awesome because it captures who he is no matter how many accolades you heap on the guy he's got that look so what can I do next though I can easily quadruple this list they best embody what I would like to share from my community is the importance of failure and the power of getting up again and the dident the dynamic they form so hopefully I can pass that on to yours and go from there thank you for listening to me

Channel: O'Reilly

Views: 56,514

Keywords: Rodney Mullen (Skateboarder), rodney mullen, bedrock of failure, learning to fail, skateboarding, pop an ollie and innovate, ted talk, getting up again, art of good practice, godfather of street skating, failure, gorund up, o'reilly, oreilly, velocity 2014, velocity conference, O'Reilly Media (Publisher)

Id: RiSiY9iWrMU

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 25 2014