HOW TO STOP BEING A GROM AND BECOME A PRO:
A NO NONSENSE GUIDE FROM THE INDONESIAN GROM



1. Act your age not your shoe size. Establish goals and develop a code of honorable conduct.
2. Learn at least one thing per day about the surfing industry, surfboard building and design and how sponsorship works.
3. Honor your shaper. Loyalty pays off huge.
4. Show up and perform in the best sessions with the best surfers, even if it means missing a small contest.
5. Train hard, study technique of your favorite surfers, emulate. (Look it up).
6. Stay in school, learn English
7. Win contests. Lots of them.
8. Work with a filmer, even if it’s your Mom, but analyze with a good surfer, find out who you are.
9. Ask not what a sponsor can do for you but what you can do for your sponsor.
10. Prepare to be a global citizen.



If you want to go beyond daydreaming, get some scissors and cut out these reminders above and stick it in your backpack and read them every time you have lunch. Here are some more hard facts of pro life:

Win contests.
And not second place either. Win them. Then find a trustworthy person to help you consider offers and handle your sponsorships intelligently.

Work with a filmer:
Surfers and filmer’s live symbiotic lives, equally dependent on each other. This is where developing rock-solid relationships is vital. For pro’s, follow the Florence Brothers. If you plan on being a freesurfer, follow Mason Ho. Emulate.



Be yourself, but for heaven’s sake be interesting:
In the digital era you can do it. But it takes teamwork. A good example is Kanoa Igarashi, traveling with Tanner Carney and filming their “Chapters” series together, painting an intimate portrait of life on and beyond the Championship Tour. Take a good look at it.

Develop an open mind, do it now, and learn English.
Every surfer on the pro tour can speak English. Get to it. Open mind? At age 15, Caroline Marks qualified for the WSL Championship Tour. Have you? Get to work. Go spy on Rio Waida, you’ll get the idea.

Study your craft
Become well versed in the sport and obsessed with learning everything about it. Be interested far beyond your own Instagram and your little clips. As boring as it sounds, do your homework. Know your history, become actually interested in what you are doing past, present and future. Read books on surfing, go online and study all the career paths of your hero’s. Watch movies from long ago and the ones that just came out today. Talk to tribal elders, hear their stories. Be a surfer, dammit. Not just someone who surfs.



Become a global citizen
Italian surfer Leonardo Fioravanti spent most of his youth in France and now divides his time between there and Hawaii. Kanoa Igarashi grew up in California but surfs for Japan and lives in Portugal half the year. Along with their native languages, both speak English, Portuguese, French and Spanish. To be today’s pro surfer you need to travel the world, and you’ll never meet two humans better equipped for global pro surfing than Fioravanti and Igarashi. “Growing up in Huntington, I always stood out, because I was Japanese, I was different,” Igarashi says. “But surfing was the thing that put that racism aside and brought my world together.” So there it is. Where you are from or the color of your skin does not matter. Your character and abilities do. Indonesian groms live at the crossroads of the entire surfing world. The entire world comes to us. So you have no excuses not to become like these guys.

Make no excuses and grow the hell up:
One of the best things about surfing is the adventure that comes along with it. Get into it. What you give is what you get. So embrace the world around you and be blown away by the doors that open for you. Don’t complain, work hard, go win contests and watch your life come alive.

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