Buy the Scooter.

Tony Hawk's first year as a professional skateboarder, he had $640 in the bank. All of it from contest winnings. He went out and bought a Honda scooter.

Not because he wanted a scooter. His mom worked nights at a community college and her hours were not in tune with how much he wanted to skate. The scooter was a ride to the skatepark.

He took every dollar he had and bought himself more time on a ramp.

I heard that this week and thought about my dolly.

The $150 I almost didn't spend

When I started renting out washers and dryers I had close to nothing coming in. A dolly was $150. That felt like an awful lot of money for a thing that doesn't make you any money. $150 is real progress toward another set, and another set is the part that actually pays.

I bit the bullet and got the good one anyway. Straps, stair climber, all of it. Not the cheap one that turns a flight of stairs into a two man job and a bad back.

That dolly is the most used and most useful thing I own. It has moved every machine I have ever delivered. It saved me hours I am never getting back, and it started saving them the day I bought it and has not stopped since.

Same story with a decent set of channel locks. The cheap ones slip every time you try to break a washer hose loose. So you stand there in somebody's laundry closet fighting a fitting, sweating, looking like a guy who does not do this for a living. The good ones grab. Nobody standing in that doorway will ever know the difference. I know it forty times a month, a few seconds at a time.

That is the whole thing. A few seconds, forty times a month, for as long as I do this.

Two weeks ago I wrote that every time money came in from a delivery I spent it on the next unit. I wrote it like a confession. Like it was proof of how thin things were.

It was not thin. It was the scooter.

Intensity, not joy

Somebody asked Tony how he can tell which young skaters are going to make it, since he is not there with them every day.

"They can't quench their desire and they do some of the craziest stuff. They do some of the hardest things and they just have this look of intensity, not joy. It doesn't look joyous."

I have been waiting for somebody to say that out loud.

I have built 26 products. One of them makes money and it rents washing machines out of my garage. The other 25 were not fun. They were not joyous. I did them anyway, at night, after everybody went to bed, and I would do it again tonight, and my wife has watched the whole thing and is usually right about how it is going to go.

Tony never started skating for money, which is why he did not stop when the money left. And it left hard. In 1991 his income was cutting in half every month. His shoe sponsor called him every few weeks to walk him down. $1,500 a month, then $1,000, then $500, then $300, inside a single year. He was 22 with a mortgage and a kid.

So he took the odd jobs. One of them was a Hollywood shoot that needed a launch ramp. They gave him $500 for two days and $100 for the ramp. He built the ramp in his own driveway, borrowed a truck, drove it to a park in Hollywood, set it up where they wanted it, and then they asked him to do the trick himself a couple times so they could see how it framed up. He did the trick. A younger kid did it on camera. Then he drove the ramp home and paid his mortgage.

I heard that and thought about last week. I drove a stackable out to a guy's house myself. The install should have been 10 minutes. It ran with the ground not attached, which scared me, so I stayed an hour and bridged it. On my way out he offered me a newer machine with a burnt wire and I took it. I drove home with my money back, plus another broken machine to fix.

That is the same afternoon, 35 years apart. Nobody puts it in the highlight reel.

He would not sell the future

Right before the first Tony Hawk game shipped, Activision called and offered to buy out his royalties going forward. Half a million dollars, right now, and he never sees another dime from the game.

"At that time in my life, someone saying a half a million dollars sounded like a half a gazillion dollars. Like I had never heard anyone speak those words unless they're talking about some fantastical person that we will never meet."

He had just bought a house he could barely afford. He said no. He let it ride.

Four games later, four of them sitting in the top 10 at the same time, he had lunch with his guy at Activision and the guy slid a check across the table for $4.5 million.

There is a second one in that same deal that I like even more. Before Activision, he had done big campaigns for brands that made skateboarding look stupid, because the people writing the campaigns did not skate and did not care. So he told himself the next big contract was getting a clause: he gets final approval on what goes out. He was a skater in 1998 asking a game publisher for creative veto. Nobody had that leverage. He asked anyway, and they gave it to him, because they were throwing everything at the wall and figured they might as well trust him.

Michael Jordan did the same shape of thing with Nike in 1984. He took a cut of every shoe instead of a bigger flat check. It is still paying him.

Both of those are the scooter. Do not cash out the thing that compounds.

Where I sold it

I have done the opposite, and recently enough that I do not get to be smug about any of this.

Several years ago I helped somebody build a podcast from nothing. Audio editing, the whole build, start to finish. Over time the ask got bigger. At one point it included training my replacement.

I told him that if this was going to be the job, I needed a much larger amount per episode.

I took it personally. That is the honest part. I was not negotiating, I was reacting. And that was the end of it. I never heard from him again.

I do not think my number was wrong. I think I asked for the buyout. I had a thing that was compounding, a skill getting sharper on somebody else's project, a relationship, a reference, a body of work with my hands on it, and I traded all of it for a rate. Tony had that same sentence in front of him with $4 million riding on it and he said no. Mine was worth a few hundred bucks a month and I said give me more.

I got the number I asked for exactly zero times, and I lost the compounding too.

Put on the suit

Tony's dad was a Navy pilot in World War II and a child of the Depression. His wife raised four kids on a Navy salary while he was gone. When Tony's older sister sang in high school, his dad was her roadie. Hauled her gear. When Tony was 17 and careless with money, his dad cosigned a house for him because Tony was not old enough to sign it himself.

Tony does the same thing now, in his own direction. His daughter is into theater, and he is not.

"I don't want to go to Broadway shows, you know what I mean? Like, that wasn't something that was like my first choice going to New York. But I want to experience it with her and I want to understand it."

She is at USC studying theater.

My 9 year old is into ballet. Ballroom too. Not the recital and the medals, the playing of it. The whole world of it.

I have no natural interest in ballet.

So we do lessons at home, and I put on a full suit, and I am the official Black Swan.

You do not hand your kids your obsession. You hand them permission to have their own one, and then you show up in the costume that particular obsession requires.

Buy the dolly. Refuse the buyout. Put on the suit.

Earlier in this thread:

Sources:

Tony Hawk on My First Million: Tony Hawk inspiring us for 72 minutes straight