Today’s Skateboarders, tomorrow’s Entrepreneurs.

We currently live in a society where most people work 9 to 5’s, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon. While some people are gifted business minded individuals, the majority of people will spend their lives in a rather common fashion, waking up early, going to work, going on 30 minute lunch breaks, and coming home just to sleep some and do it again the next day.

For the longest time, people have been telling their kids that in order to beat this cycle and escape the rat race of life, that College in some form or another is completely necessary. But with rising costs in education, and other factors, more and more people are deciding that life on the big campus won’t be any part of their future.

So with so many people deciding against a post high school education, where are the new leaders coming from?

To many a strict parents horror, from Skater’s.

Today’s skateboarding youth are being taught through a different method than previous generations. Lessons are being learned in a street alley with stairs, a local skate park, or after school with friends. They are being taught through the complexities of skateboarding, fundamentals that will one day make them excellent businessmen and women.

What exactly are they learning?

“Skating teaches you that hard work pays,” said a local skater when asked that same question. “It teaches you that, yea, you may fail at first, but if your out all day, and you fail a trick a thousand times, and land it once, its all worth it.”

As more and more skill is gathered, Skaters start realizing potential, and while most people stay in the immediate comfort zone of potential, skate boarders are taught to push those limits. “Landing a double kick flip isn’t enough. You can do that, so the next thing to do is do it over a set of stairs.”

These skaters are becoming the new trail blazers among youth and business men.

They are sizing up business ventures like they would a ledge they wanted to nose blunt slide on. They are looking at previously untouched area’s in media and entrepreneurship, and thinking, “Why not?”.

There are many notable examples of this too. People like, Rob Dyrdek, of MTV fame for the shows “Rob & Big” and “Fantasy Factory”, Terry Kennedy, Stevie Williams, Paul Rodriguez, all in some way have a hand in a venture other than just getting paid to skate. Even people who don’t skate professionally, such as Benny Gold, artist and founder of the “Benny Gold” line of clothing, and newcomer Levi Maestro, of “Maestro Knows” video documentary fame, all have a fresh and unique view of business because of a background in skating, and this trend shows no signs of stopping or slowing in the least.

When asking a local skater around the age of 8, why he would attempt to kick flip down a rather sizable set of stairs compared to his small stature, he said simply and with a fierceness rarely seen in a youth his age, “Because I can.”

That’s the future folks, you heard it here first.

Image courtesy of Yuliseperi