1. Sometimes you need to change strategy.

Take your boots off and surf barefoot. Use a different board. Drive to a different beach. Throw focus groups out of the window and do a literature review. The best projects are flexible. 

2. Things can and will go wrong – so get used to setbacks

I was 14 when I learned to surf, and I hated it. I was a competitive rider and used to horses and resented being dragged to the beach to look bad doing an activity I wasn’t interested in.

I didn’t take to it naturally. I was (and still am) tall and lanky and awkward. I had a poorly fitting wetsuit, and suffered from the sort of permanent exhaustion we all suffer with at 14. After haphazardly catching a few waves, I would sit on the shoreline exhausted, cold and miserable, too tired to go back in and too dejected to watch my brother and sister weaving along the line-up. I am now 22, and surf daily, if not weekly. My most recent setback was falling off my board straight onto a rock – slashing my foot open, panicking my mother, and leaving me limping for two weeks.

 Setbacks are literally inherent in surfing – because you get to the end of the wave, and then you fall off and have to walk or swim back through. Even if the surfing you’re doing isn’t difficult, the paddle back out is. If you’re not wearing a good, warm wetsuit, you’re too cold, and if you’re in a swimsuit your chances of getting burned are high even with sun cream.

Setbacks have also been inherent within my Laidlaw project, for various reasons. Surfing has taught me the value of them. You can’t sit on the shoreline and watch other people when things go wrong – bandage your foot back up and get stuck in. 

3. Get your support systems in place

You can’t surf in a bad wetsuit, or on a leaking board. If you were swept out in a rip current, you would yell for help. Email your supervisors, and your programme managers. Try and figure things out as much as you can, but don’t try and do things on your own.

4. Make use of the time waiting…

There’s a reason why so many surfers love skateboarding, art, hiking, artisan coffee. When there are no waves, you just have to wait it out. While I was impatiently waiting for my ethics to be approved, I became a better surfer, better musician, better artist. I got (some of) my preparatory degree reading done. I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator. Time waiting is not necessarily wasted. 

5. …but make sure you prepare

Years of doing outside sports (and a recent panic over an errant mole on my arm) have made me Captain Suncream. I am never too far away from my sunglasses. Sunburn is not fun. But has been (to put it bluntly) hot in Cornwall recently. Very hot. Too hot for a wetsuit. And the one time it was extremely hot and I chose to surf with my shoulders exposed and forgot to wear suncream, I got burned. Some things are common sense and you should prepare for them as best you can. In terms of the project: get the dull admin in as soon as possible or it will come back to bite you.

6.And finally - remember the diet coke and chips theory.

While I was thinking up ideas for this post, I went surfing (obviously. It helps me think). It was hot, and I was tired, and that morning was probably the worst morning of surfing I had ever had. Nothing seemed to work, I was falling off all the time and I left the water at midday, exhausted and irritable.

That is, until I remembered I had forgotten to have breakfast. I had left the house at 7am on two cups of coffee, driven the whole hour to the beach and completely forgotten to eat anything at all. I decided to treat myself to lunch on the beach, and resolved to go back in after an hour to try and figure out what was wrong – maybe some niche technical foot placement quirk or something that I needed to figure out. My lunch, as it happens, was diet coke and chips with ketchup (the Cracking Crab in Polzeath do huge chip portions), and I sat on the beach and did nothing for a little while. I watched the people sitting next to me play ping pong, and put on my three hundredth layer of sun cream. I didn’t even read my book. 

That afternoon I think I surfed better than I ever have – something just clicked. I didn’t know what it was, and still don’t, but my best guess is Diet Coke and Chips Theory. The idea that you need to rest, eat, look after yourself to be better is something I’ve put into my project and has equipped me to make difficult decisions when things have gone wrong.