Riding High

Suppose your life were a vast ocean, complete with unfathomable depths and giant crashing waves. Would you swim, splash and surf in delight – or drown?

If you’re surfing legend and business wizard Laird Hamilton, you’d embrace the fear, savor the risk, climb onto your surfboard and ride those towering walls of water with elation and wild abandon.

That’s the message of Hamilton’s new book, “Liferider: Heart, Body, Soul and Life Beyond the Ocean,” a virtual road map for dealing with challenges by not merely surviving but thriving.

In surfing, Hamilton has done it all – ridden the biggest waves, survived against desperate odds, innovated new styles of surfing and gear, and arguably become the greatest surfer of all time. A particular highlight of his distinguished 49-year career was conquering the heaviest wave ever ridden successfully, Tahiti’s Teahupo’o break, in 2000.

When not in the water, he has founded five successful businesses, married professional volleyball star and model Gabrielle Reece, raised three children, advocated for the environment, starred in films and TV shows, and even done his fair share of modeling.

Now, at 55, he feels it’s time to pass on the secrets of his success. His first book, “Force of Nature: Mind, Body, Soul and, of Course, Surfing,” published in 2008, focuses on his theories about physical training and development. But this new book deals more with his worldview, philosophy and spirituality – his recipe for a better way to live. 

He wrote it, he says, “to help share with people. The information has been helpful for me, and I feel it could be helpful for other people. It’s giving.”

Or, as the book says, the aim is to help readers “better manage the turbulence of life – the biggest wave we’ll ever ride – by reaching back into the brilliant creature we are, instead of always reaching up to the being we aspire to be.”

The keystone of Hamilton’s philosophy is movement of every sort – physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual – beyond reliance on technology, which, he writes, has “become another barrier between ourselves and the brilliant creatures we are.”

He believes that, over thousands of years, man has developed the necessary abilities and techniques to cope with the modern world. We still have those tools, he insists. All we have to do is tap into them by stressing the body until those primitive abilities reassert themselves. 

For example, in one of Hamilton’s businesses, Extreme Performance Training (XPT), students endure freezing ice baths, blistering-hot sweat baths and pool exercises with weights to awaken ancient survival instincts and responses.

“Liferider” draws upon five pillars “to take you on a journey from the science to the psyche of Laird, via the sea,” according to the book: Death and Fear, Heart, Body, Soul, and Everything is Connected.

“You are an organism – you are in competition with death,” Hamilton writes. 

Death, he says, is something that should be feared but also accepted – a reality he often faces while surfing.

“How we experience and process the fundaments of death and fear is critical to how we successfully navigate life,” he writes. 

Fear of death needs to be alive within us to keep us in touch with how we developed into the beings we are, he says: “Harnessed correctly, fear is an incredibly powerful emotion that people are lacking a real relationship with in modern society. Not only does it keep our perspective correct, but it also has all kinds of great physical effects on the system.”

The book is interspersed with sections about what Hamilton calls “Barefoot Business,” or advice on how to create and sustain successful business ventures. “Heart,” which he defines as clarity of purpose beyond profit and loss, is key.

“Everything is an authentic reflection of my philosophy – my lifestyle,” he notes of his businesses.

Money alone is not a sufficient reason to pursue a venture, he believes: “I wanted to do businesses that either make people healthier or make them have fun, which results in them being happier.”

Hamilton is a maverick innovator, ignoring the purists of surfing and embracing paddleboarding, hydrofoil boards and tow-in surfing before anyone else in the surfing world. 

His businesses sell “hardware,” or surfing equipment; beach apparel; Laird Superfood; and XPT. He farms to grow ingredients for his food products and is co-founder of the GolfBoard, a stand-up, four-wheel surfboard for riding on land. His latest venture is a partnership between Laird Superfood and Bunn-O-Matic to create the Crescendo Machine, a vegan, gluten-free and non-GMO hot beverage maker.

In short, he’s all over the place in business, wide open to innovation and new ideas.

“That’s normal for me,” he says. “When things plateau, I lose interest. I need to be inspired.”

He was certainly inspired when he met Reece in 1995, and they married in 1997. Now, they commute between homes in Malibu and Hawaii and have two children together, Reece Viola, 15, and Brody Jo, 11, as well as Hamilton’s daughter from a previous marriage, Izabella, 23. Reece also writes about Hamilton and his outlook on life in the new book.

In the “Body” section, Hamilton writes, “continued stressing of the system is where we really excel,” suggesting techniques like walking barefoot or taking a cold rinse after a warm shower to awaken your senses. The “Soul” section deals mostly with conscious breathing and remaining curious.

In “Everything is Connected,” Hamilton writes: “Our connection to nature and its ability to heal and help us always goes back to which environment we spent the longest period of time in … It’s back to the fact that we spent over 100,000 generations in nature.”

Much of his philosophical makeup derives from his early immersion in the mysticism and culture of Hawaii, where he grew up. He was born in San Francisco but moved to the islands as an infant. Then, as a child living in Oahu, he caught the surfing bug after meeting 1960s surfer William Stuart Hamilton, who later became his adoptive father when he married Hamilton’s mother, Joann.

So, given his island roots, it’s no surprise that the word “ohana” pops up frequently in his book. The Hawaiian term means “family” but can extend to include the world and all of its creatures.

He advises isolation in nature and less reliance on technology: “We are losing ourselves in machines, literally. We need to get our face out of those screens for 10 seconds and look up and around us to see what the hell’s going on.”

Look to your relatives, especially the older ones, because “as humans, we need that kind of connectivity,” he says.

No matter his schedule, the man who has set every imaginable surfing record always finds his way back to the water, he says. 

“I love surfing. Surfing’s like breathing, eating and sleeping to me. It’s part of my soul. It’s part of who I am and the way I continue my relationship with the ocean.”

Hamilton hopes that readers use “Liferider” as an instructional manual for surfing one’s way through life by tapping into their innermost selves.

“You could say we’ve regressed, not progressed … because we’ve numbed all of these abilities or just switched them off,” he says. “We need to spend more time reaching back into those more primitive capabilities, exploring. That’s revelation right there. That’s transformative.”

Yet, Hamilton insists he’s no New Age guru, looking for followers or apostles.

“Really, I’m no better than anyone,” he says. “I’m just trying to survive being alive on earth and sharing more as a peer than as some sort of guru.”

He laughs: “I’m definitely too human for that.”  O