Reading the Tide: What the Sea Teaches About Timing

The tide does not negotiate. It arrives when it arrives. It leaves when it leaves. It is completely indifferent to your schedule, your ambitions, and the length of the meeting you would like to finish first.

This is, if you let it be, one of the most useful lessons the sea offers a working life. Not everything can be forced. Certain things arrive on their own timing, and the only intelligent response is to be ready when they do.

The best surfers I know are not the fittest. They are the ones who read the water. They know when to paddle, when to wait, when to give up on a set that looked promising and turn back for the next one. They are, in the end, students of timing.

Business is the same. Books are the same. Relationships are the same. Almost everything worth doing has a right moment, and the discipline is not effort. The discipline is attention.

Learn to read the tide. Sit with it long enough and it will teach you when to move.