We have our FIRST EVER provincial champion!!!
Avethandwa just won gold at the Surfing South Africa Grommet Games in Muizenberg, Cape Town!!!
(This is in addition to the 4 silver medals and 1 bronze medal collected by The Surfer Kids at this event!)
We started The Surfer Kids in 2010, with nothing. Literally nothing. If you told me then, that it'd take this long to get here, I wouldn't have believed you.
But I don't know how to stop, so I didn't. That's the one thing I'm really good at. Not quitting ๐ And so, here we are. Almost 15 years later.
I'm not getting too excited, however. Because this is just a small step in the bigger scheme of things.
We're going to get a gold medal at South African Championships. And then, at a World Surf League Qualifying Event, and finally, at the Championship Tour level. Write it down, then come back, and check in, in another 15 years.
The next Italo Ferreira, John John Florence, or Gabriel Medina, a future world champion, could already be among the kids who attend our surfing program next week.
From where I'm sitting, looking at this, the obvious question is: "Why not? Why is anything impossible?"
And if you don't see it that way, that's because you don't understand our (very open) secret.
Our biggest challenge in accomplishing this, or any other goal, is self-belief. Getting the kids, the coaches and our entire team (including myself) to believe that the impossible is in fact possible.
The question is not how do you train a champion? The question is, how do you instill the necessary self-belief?
And the way you do that is by giving people tools with which to overcome self doubt, with which to combat hopelessness, and create for themselves the hope that a better future is possible.
Our secret weapon, first deployed in 2021 with the creation of Bitcoin Ekasi, and now bearing real fruit, and by far the most potent tool I know of, is Bitcoin.