Wild Success: 7 Key Lessons Business Leaders Can Learn from Extreme Adventurers

It’s October 2016. Mark Mathews is about to surf a terrifying wave on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, and he’s not feeling right. Mark is one of the best big wave surfers in the world and is feeling the pressure to perform. He’s only been back surfing for a month now after a nine-month-long recovery from a serious shoulder injury he suffered on the infamous Jaws wave in Maui, and he knows he’s pushing his recovery in order to be back. “I was nervous about getting hurt again,” he says, “I had never surfed this wave before.”¹

The wave he’s preparing to surf is called a slab wave. Until recent years, it was the type of wave considered unrideable by the surf community—a beast simply too fast to surf. A slab wave occurs when a fast-moving ...