Bootstraps. Twice. - The Puehse Twins

Nic and Tristan Puehse. Twins. Shingle Springs, California. Started skateboarding aged 6 – California State Games gold and silver winners within 7 months. Skating 3 hours a day, 5 days a week. Sponsorship from Nike came the day before they reached 8. Within 2 years the sponsors totalled 14.  Blah million hits on YouTube. 8-year-olds touring the world to teach/inspire skating. Competitions where both brothers made the top 5 reached double digits. News features. Appearances. Premieres. An LL Cool J video…

 “Dreaming BIG!  Going BIG!   Being BIG!”

Bootstraps. Self-promotion. There’s quite an American narrative there. Pushing yourself forward (that’s pushing yourself forward: succeeding by your own endeavour and pushing yourself forward: pushing in front of others). Of course, worrying about the others is the others’ business; not yours. Just pushing yourself is valiant and noble enough. If you can go from a nobody to a somebody by your own efforts then you’re one of the good guys. A round of applause, cinematic standing ovations backed by euphoric orchestral scores are coming your way.

And it’s certainly cinematic. The Puehse twins had soon made TV appearances, newspaper and magazine features and, by 2010, a movie. They also looked like they were headed for the X Games.

These are 13-year-olds right here:

Nic: “We’ve been lucky to ride for some great companies like Nike 6.0, Powell, Bones, Nixon, Autobahn, Khiro, S1, 187, Gatorade and the many others. Your support was incredible.”

Tristan: “Thanks also to all the media who has covered us over the years like the New York Times, Nightline, CNN, Fuel TV, Ellen DeGeneres and Katie Couric, and, of course, YouTube.”

But what makes this story interesting is that the guys switched. They got that far through self-promotion (self-promotion: hard work and training and self-promotion: having their own media campaign) and then, on the cusp of pro skateboarder life, they quit to take up tennis. 13-year-olds.

And they didn’t simply ‘take up’ tennis: “Our ultimate goal would be to play doubles professionally and win some Grand Slams.”

“They are ranked in the top 25 in the Boys’ 16 rankings for the United States Tennis Association Southwest Section. Nationally, Tristan is ranked No. 948 and Nic is No. 1,090, but in doubles, they recently won a junior event in Flagstaff, Ariz., and have acquitted themselves well in matches against players who are several years older.”

Nic and Tristan Puehse. Twins. Scottsdale, Arizona. 17. Partial scholarships to Van Der Meer Tennis Academy. 2 million plus balls hit. Hundreds of miles run. Men in Black 3 cinema trips cancelled to add another hour of training to the 5 hours had already. Celebration chest bumps just like the ATP Doubles #1 ranked Bryan brothers (also twins) they want to be – and to better.

It’s the climb. They’d proved they could do it. They went from untested, blank canvas brains and bodies to skateboarding prodigies. So what better than to do it again?

It’s not about the thing you’re good at; it’s the ability to transform yourself into being that good at… something… then another thing. Proving yourself. You don’t have the innate talent, but you can make yourself the best, better than the innate talent, because you have the heart and mind and dedication. You will genuinely put in the work until you get there. Tactical, calculated skill… graft.

Pick a new set of heroes in a new sport and aim to equal and better them. The twins must be able to do it because they’ve done it before – they’ve proved they can achieve that unprecedented to expert development. What a kick.

It’s maybe a little like gazillionaires who buy/fund the things they couldn’t work their way up through themselves (arts and humanities donations, etc). Institutions bought (one way or another) these people are still at the top, above all the innate minds and institutional culture, they just climbed a different way, and worked damn hard to get there.

"It was kind of like skating, we just decided to try it and started taking acting lessons," explained Tristan of how they got their acting careers started.

Re-deploying their talent for learning an ability – an interesting level of meta there.

American author David Foster Wallace came to writing after previously pursuing dedicated and obsessively honed abilities in football (quarterback) and tennis. This describes him dealing with one period of feeling inadequate and dissatisfied as a writer, starting his mornings with a 10-mile run:

“You know, this kind of very American sports training – I will fix this by taking radical action.” Schwarzenegger voice: “If there’s a problem, I will train myself out of it. I will work harder.” […] “I’m this genius writer,” he remembered. “Everything I do’s gotta be ingenious, blah, blah, blah, blah.” The five-year clock was ticking again. He’d played football for five years. Then he’d played high-level tennis for five years. Now he’d been writing for five years. “What I saw was, ‘Jesus, it’s the same thing all over again.’ I’d started late, showed tremendous promise – and the minute I felt the implications of that promise, it caved in.”

David Lipsky, ‘The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace,’ Rolling Stone, October 30^th 2008, P.107

Foster Wallace clearly wasn’t falling for the Arnie remedy (he committed suicide in 2008), but he describes the process well. You just set your goals and “Charge!” Battling depression? Sure. Work that into your schedule – allocate some time for it someplace in your daily formula of novel writing, food, studies, social life, chores, love life, family time and your fitness workout. For Chrissakes, don’t sit still and think about stuff.

Something DFW said about his early fame, seeing his name and first novel in the newspaper: “I’d feel really good, really cool, for exactly 10 seconds. Probably not unlike a crack high, you know? I was living an incredibly American life: ‘Boy, if I could just achieve X, Y and Z, everything would be OK.’” (Lipsky, p.105.)

And it is American. Whatever it is you’re going to do in life, including the monumental emotional screw ups and meltdowns – there’s a process for that, a 101, a life hack. You do your time, you go through the process and you come out at the end point a success.

The Puehse’s Facebook tennis page quotes the self-help writer Robert Collier: "Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and begin to build."

Like, the whole country has blasé reactions, jargon terms and metaphors for every seemingly organic, natural and random process you will encounter along the way – it’s all long since been dissected and optimized and put into a formula to guarantee your success. If you follow my plan, you’ll do it too. That’s your LIFE. You do this, this and this, you’ll hit trouble here, here and here. But you’ll get through by doing this, this and this.

See you when you you’re making your first million. Good hunting.

[Hilton Head Monthly]: What do you hope to get out of your training at Van Der Meer?
[Nic Puehse]: My goal is to work hard and become the best possible tennis player I can.
[Tristan Puehse]: I want to get pushed as hard as I can, progress and I want them to help me get as far as I can in tennis.
HHM: How good of [sic] tennis players are you?
NP: I think I’m headed in the right direction. We’ve only been training for like 10 months [May 2012 here]. Our tennis experience is pretty short compared to the kids we’re competing against.
TP: I feel pretty good about my progression so far.

I guess it’s a sort of pep talk for the self – existential angst is kind of messy and verbose, after all. A bullet point list of goals and life’s Answers is far easier to digest and pass on to others.

Just be careful in athlete land (or academic land). There’s a lot of quiet neurosis out there in the people who can’t discuss anything other than their progress and aptitude – and who never get to meet anyone who can.