You’ve probably never heard of Rodney Mullen, but he basically invented modern freestyle skateboarding. The tricks you see with kids flipping their boards with their feet – it mostly came from him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMsSLXRfwB0
But here’s the really cool bit about Rodney’s story as he tells it:
“I learned to skate in our garage. We lived in the country in Florida, it was sort of farmish, and there was no cement anywhere else. Vert skating was the kind of skating that was done in pools, where you could get airborne and be weightless. The other style, which is what I did, was called free style, which was tricks you could do on flat ground.”
How cool is that…. he literally had nowhere to skateboard. There was no concrete to ride and glide along, so he used the little square space of his garage to learn. And he did what his small space allowed. Cool little flips and tricks you can see in this video. It was what he didn’t have – space to skate – that helped him invent something entirely new. New solutions and new interpretations of skateboarding based on constraints.
While it’s easy for entrepreneurs to think that limited resources thwart possibilities, they are actually what we need to create something amazing.
