What Surfing Teaches Us About the Future of Work

Taghazout has a way of simplifying you. The village sits on Morocco’s Atlantic edge like a weathered lookout post. Salt in the air, boards stacked against walls, and a horizon that doesn’t care about your résumé. When the swell arrives, everything else becomes background noise. Your calendar, your ambitions, your anxiety about what you should be doing, none of it matters when you’re paddling into moving energy and deciding, in a split second, whether you’re going. I pulled into the surf hotel just as the waves started to light up. A good run of surf has a gravitational field. People come from everywhere, and within an hour, a small society forms. It doesn’t take long before the roles appear, the archetypes that show up any time humans gather around something meaningful. There was the student, super stoked just to be in the water. Every wave was the wave. He didn’t know enough to be cynical, and it made him fearless. He improved fast, not because he was a prodigy, but because he was open. He asked questions. He listened. He tried again. He didn’t carry yesterday’s mistakes into today’s paddle out. Then there was the grumpy forty-something. “Been there, done that” energy. Always bummed about something: the crowd, the wind, the hotel breakfast, the localism, the boards, the guy on the inside. He had an impressive ability to take a beautiful moment and sand it down until it was dull. He wasn’t just dissatisfied—he was committed to dissatisfaction. And he had a talent for recruiting others into it. And then there was Al. Al was in his early fifties, and he had the kind of intensity you sometimes see in people who made one decision long ago and never reopened the file. He had foregone almost everything for the last 25 years to pursue his passion. No girlfriend. No real job in the traditional sense. Surf had been the center of his life for so long; it wasn’t just a hobby, it was his identity. Watching him, I couldn’t shake the feeling of “last tango.” Not tragic exactly. More like… narrow. The dream had become a corridor. But the most interesting contrast wasn’t between the stoked student and the cynical veteran. It was between two men in their mid-fifties—Jake and Bill—and what they revealed about time, money, and the mindset we’ll need for the next era of work. Jake: The Long Game, Lightly Held Jake had been chasing waves for a lifetime, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he carried himself. He wasn’t trying to prove anything. He wasn’t performing expertise. He wasn’t anxious about getting the best wave of the set. He was just happy. Especially when his 26-year-old girlfriend rolled into town. Jake was posted up in Taghazout for four months. Back in the U.S., he’d stripped everything away, moved into a friend’s basement apartment, taught surfing, lived simply. Not as an act of rebellion, but as a design choice. Jake had organized his life around the thing he loved, but he didn’t cling to it. He’d moved beyond needing any single surf session to validate the decision. That’s a rare achievement. In the water, Jake wasn’t scarce. He didn’t paddle like he was running out of oxygen. He didn’t treat each wave like a verdict on his worth. He took what came, laughed when he fell, and stayed in the flow. He’d built a life with enough margin to let waves be waves—something you enjoy, not something you need. Bill: Compressed Time and the Weight of Winning Bill rolled into town from New York City with one weekend to surf. He’s young, sharp, and on an upward trajectory in finance, the kind of person who knows exactly what a day is worth because the market prices it for him every morning. He had time scarcity baked into his posture. You could feel it in the way he looked at the forecast, the way he talked about sessions, the way he entered the lineup. Everything was measured. Everything was high stakes. He didn’t just want to surf; he wanted the surf trip to be “worth it.” And here’s the thing: Bill wasn’t wrong. When you’ve only got a narrow window, you should care. You should optimize. The danger is that optimization becomes a cage. You become unable to enjoy what you worked so hard to secure. You start living like every wave is a transaction: if you don’t get enough return, the whole investment fails. That’s not just a surfing problem. That’s a modern work problem. The Real Divide: Time-Rich vs. Time-Poor Watching Jake and Bill side by side, a simple truth surfaced: The people living the “best life," the ones who can show up in Morocco when the swell starts rolling, tend to have either a lot of money or a lot of time. Both are hard to get. Money takes discipline, skill, and often luck. Time takes intention, tradeoffs, and the courage to disappoint people. They’re different currencies, but in the end, they buy the same thing: access to experiences, to presence, to freedom of movement. This is where the future of work gets interesting, because AI is about to change the exchange rate between time and money. For the last century, most of us have lived inside a simple bargain: sell time for money. The better you got, the more you could charge per hour, or the more hours you could leverage through teams and hierarchy. But it was still fundamentally time converted into value. AI breaks that model. In the world I study and work in at Harvard, and in my work advising leaders, what’s becoming clear is that the relationship between time and output is loosening. A small team with the right tools can now do what previously required a large organization. Individuals can create leverage without waiting for permission or scale. Expertise is being unbundled from institutions and redistributed through platforms, networks, and agentic systems. This shift opens the door to something bigger than productivity: It opens the possibility of becoming time-rich. But it doesn’t guarantee it. “Be Careful What You Wish For” Here’s the second lesson Taghazout delivered: Be careful what you wish for, you’ll probably get it. Al and Jake both had time. They both made choices that gave them freedom from the traditional career treadmill. But they handled that freedom very differently. Al carried a scarce mindset. Even with all that time, he felt anxious. Protective. Tight. The dream had become fragile, something that could be threatened by crowds, conditions, age, or a wave he missed. When your identity is built on one thing, you can’t afford for that thing to be ordinary. Jake carried an abundant mindset. He had structured his life around what mattered to him, but he didn’t grip it. He was free enough to be playful. He could enjoy a bad session because it wasn’t evidence of failure. It was just the weather. That distinction, scarcity vs. abundance, is going to define who thrives in the future of work. Because as AI increases access (to tools, to output, to opportunity), it will also increase choice. And choice is not automatically liberating. For many people, choice creates anxiety. It forces you to confront what you actually want, and what you’re willing to trade for it. The future isn’t just a new set of tools. It’s a new psychological environment. The Wave Pattern Is the Point Waves come and go. Not just in surfing, but in business and life too. Markets surge and retreat. Technologies arrive, peak, normalize, and disappear. Careers rise, plateau, pivot. Companies hit product-market fit and then get disrupted. Every leader I meet wants certainty, but certainty is the one thing the ocean never provides. The real skill, whether you’re building an AI strategy or paddling out in Taghazout, is learning to read moving patterns without becoming emotionally hostage to them. That’s what I’m seeing in the strongest leaders right now: They don’t confuse a good quarter with a good company. They don’t confuse a bad week with a bad life. They don’t treat every outcome as identity. They build systems that create financial, time, and emotional margins, so they can stay adaptive. In Harvard classrooms and executive sessions, we talk a lot about strategy, operating models, talent systems, and transformation. But underneath all of it is a simpler question: Are you building a life and organization that can enjoy the ride? Because AI will bring bigger swells. More opportunity. More volatility. More “once-in-a-decade” moments that start happening every year. If you approach that world like Bill, trying to extract maximum return from every session, you’ll burn out, even if you win. If you approach it like Jake, disciplined enough to create freedom, light enough to stay in flow, you’ll not only perform better, you’ll live better. Designing for Abundance Taghazout didn’t give me a neat formula. It gave me a mirror. The surf crew at the hotel wasn’t just a cast of characters. It was a preview of the workforce we’re becoming: The fast learner who improves quickly because they stay open. The cynic who can’t enjoy the moment and wants everyone else to shrink with them. The passion-purist who built their entire identity on one pursuit and now has no room for anything else. The seasoned explorer who built a life around what matters and learned to hold it lightly. The high performer who can access great experiences, but struggles to be present because their time is always priced. AI won’t eliminate these archetypes. It will amplify them. So the question isn’t whether the future of work will give you more leverage. It will. The question is what you’ll do with it. Will you buy more status? More speed? More pressure? Or will you buy time and then learn how to inhabit it with an abundant mind? Because the swell will keep coming either way. And it’s your choice whether you enjoy the ride.