My First Post

My First Blog post… 

First off, I think I need to give a bit of context as to why I launched this website and my goals for doing so. I’ve been wanting to do this for about a year now, but am just now getting to it. NO excuses. But, I’m happy with the fact that I challenged myself to learn and build this website instead of paying someone else to do it for me… 

My brother Parker (pictured above) and I grew up with a shared dream of becoming professional surfers from a young age. My parents always stressed the importance of us getting along, so we have always been really close but we have definitely always been competitive. In our younger years we pushed each other rally hard which sometimes led to us pissed off at each other (this is worthy of multiple posts in and of itself). When I was around 16 and Parker 14, we were pretty well on our way to making our shared childhood dream a reality. Oddly ahead of our time, we decided to create a blog. We struggled for days with the name and settled on YoungWiseTails.com. Tails because I misspelled Tales. We realized that “tails” could be slyly interpreted as “girls” and as two teenagers blossoming into the world, it’s safe to say we had a slight obsession with chasing “tail.”

For several years we crated content for YWT (before “content creation” was even a thing). Safe to say we had a load of fun doing so. We hired our good friend Ryan Perry to document all of our madness and help us create video content. From doing yoga and partying with REEF girls on the North shore, to scoring perfect waves and launching fire works at each other in Indonesia, the three of us were attached at the hip. We produced a lot of shorter content but we also produced a few longer form films that documented some amazing trips. “Highline” followed us on a trip to South Africa with Taylor Knox and Tanner Gudauskas and was probably our best film. We absolutely scored surf at Jefferies Bay and my surfing in that film really launched me into the next step of my surf career.  

Shortly after we released “Highline,” my focus turned to qualifying for the World Championship Tour. With mixed success on the qualifying series, I realized it was going to take 100 percent commitment if I were to reach my goal of being on the CT. This meant sacrificing some things that I enjoyed, one of which was participating in longer freesurf trips to work on film projects. At a similar time, Parker decided to stop competing and focus on free surfing and traveling with his sponsor ROARK. With our surfing paths going separate ways, youngwisetails fell by the wayside.

We attempted to do a “VLOG,” I HATED calling it that, but we found it hard to continuously release content that was engaging. When we were together and scoring waves, it was fun and easy, but the flat weeks at home were harder to make exciting. Unless you’re JOB doing radical jackass  type stunts on a surfboard or Kai Lenny riding a space ship on a huge wave and doing 540’s at jaws, it seemed hard to garner the views that made a surf “VLOG” worthwhile. 

So, content wise what do I do? I post on Instagram. I post the same stuff on my Facebook. And my twitter. It’s cool, but it’s mostly unfulfilling. Heart felt meaningful posts seem to usually get buried while a stupid video of me doing an idiotic dance in my hotel room will get 100000 views. Bottom line is, whatever that algorithm machine likes, seems to create a very surface level world. Certainly, Social media has its perks. To have the potential to reach  a following of 240000 people with one post is awesome, but I wanted to create something where I could share deeper layers and talk to people in a longer form. Okay, enough rambling…

The purpose of this website will hopefully be multi faceted. For now, my goal is to build an audience who is interested in having a deeper insight into my life experiences and journeys and the lessons that I have learned and continue to learn from them. I feel super fortunate to do something that I love for a living and to me that is one of the most fulfilling and important parts of life. Hopefully overtime this website becomes a place of real talk, shared experiences, and inspiration for people to find the things that they are passionate about and that bring them fulfillment.